The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 78. David Blunkett: Education, policing immigration, and the future of the Labour Party (Part 2)

Episode Date: June 9, 2024

What challenges did David Blunkett face as Home Secretary following 9/11? Does he have any regrets relating to his crime and punishment policies? What does the future look like for Keir Starmer's Labour Party? Rory and Alastair discuss all these issues and more in the final instalment of our interview series with David Blunkett. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. TRIP FIRST 100 DAYS TOUR: To buy tickets for our October Election Tour, just head to www.therestispolitics.com Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [e-mail] Podcast Editor: Nathan Copelin Video Editor: Teo Ayodeji-Ansell Social Producer: Jess Kidson Assistant Producer: Fiona Douglas Producer: Nicole Maslen Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. Sign up to the Restis Politics Plus. To enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolities.com. That's the restispolities.com. Welcome back to the Restis Politics leading with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alecester Campbell. And David, we've now getting on to you entering government and cabinet. And I'd love to get a sense of that first week in office. you arrive, the Secretary of State for Education, you've got your new department, and you're suddenly managing this enormous government department.

Give us a sense of what it's like. And actually also, for me, as a former cabinet minister, give us also a sense of what it's like as somebody who's blind to read your initial briefing, to make it through your red boxes, to have your civil servants lay out their vision. I was fortunate because there were only two posts that Tony had pronounced on as definite. two individuals, Gordon Brown and myself. So I knew if we won, I'd be in education and employment.

So I'd been able to think about it, to read around it, to do the preparation, which we'd done anyway over the previous two years. Again, Gordon had done a lot of preparation and we had, which helped to be able to move very quickly indeed. I'd like to tell you I was really exhilarated and I was dancing on that 2nd of May morning, I was really, really chuffed and this was leavened by a feeling of how serious it was and how daunting it was going to be, because this wasn't campaigning, this wasn't eulogizing, this wasn't oratory anymore, this was the reality of trying to get things changed.

And going in to the department and being clapped, I mean, it was very funny because they all they clapped and then they introduced themselves and I said, and who is my secretary? And as one, they all said, we're all your secretary. I just doubled up with laughter. I say, well, you know, I'm sure you're all doing a fantastic job but there will have to be someone

who actually looks out for me, yeah. What was you? Because I, funny, on that day, I didn't enjoy it at all, partly because I felt, God, I'm absolutely exhausted and we've now got to go and start a new job. Did you feel confident that the things that you'd been promising in opposition could now be delivered? And did you feel that the government machine was there to help you?

I felt the government machine was warming to help us. I was blessed by the fact, and he's still my friend, that Michael Bischard, now Lord Bischar, was the head of the department. Yeah. And was very open for me to bring people in. I mean, again, staggering for the listeners. but there was no one in the higher echelons of the department who'd ever been near a school in recent years. In terms of their professional life.

Yes, yeah. There were no head teachers. There were no teachers. There were one or two people who a long time ago had been directors of education at local authority level, as it was in those days. And so we said straight away, we'll bring Michael Barber,

so Michael Barber in as head of a standards unit and we appointed him on the first day with Tony's absolute support. The civil service generally were really uneasy about this. I don't want to be disparaging because I still work alongside some of them in the House of Lords, but they were very, very skeptical

about what we were doing. And we set up the unit and we got 20 odd people in very clear quickly who were well known as being reformers, people who have got something to offer and above all recent experience. And we got that off the ground. We've got Michael in on the second day.

We got the team up and running. Tony was very generous in making sure that I got people who I could work with, which mattered. Special advisors who are often, aren't they? Alistair, rubbish when they shouldn't be. I was blessed with mine, but that was partly... Conor Ryan. Well, some of the people I've worked with.

Connor Ryan Rory Alistair remembers because he was my media guru who used to say to me, David, I don't think he should say that. Or when I came off a platform, would tell me off for not having said the crucial sentence. And I learned in the end to write the damn crucial sentence down in Braille because I didn't read my speeches. I used to make notes because it's foolish not to. But once I got going, I got going, and sometimes I missed the crucial press release sentence. So I used to have to learn to write them down. But really, really crucial people. Sophie Linden, who as we're recording, is the Deputy Mayor for Policing in London.

Nick Pierce, who became head of the IPPR and worked for Gordner's head of policy. And now is a professor of politics at Bath University. Hugh Evans later, who became head of the ABI, the Association of British Incheon. and he's now at KPMG, and many more Kath Hinton, who actually in the end married Les Hinton. You're now doing that thing that Gordon used to do in speeches where he feels he has to mention everything. I am.

I'm putting my hands up because I plead guilty. I thought, if I miss anybody, they'll kill me because they've all stayed friends. We'll take the blame for interrupting you before you've named them all. Well done, Rory. That's very good. But David, tell us a little bit about this problem of the civil service being a bit It's skeptical. Civil service resistance. What's it about? Is there something a little odd about the system? Because obviously the public's perception is that it's pretty difficult to get things done.

The public thinks the whole thing is a bit. And they're not quite sure, you know, when's it the politicians for, when's it civil servants for, whether it's systems for. Give us a sense of resistance in government and actually how managing a civil service department might be a little different to being the CEO of a company? I think later... Also, David, before you do that, is it fair to say that when you got to the home office, it was even worse?

Well, I mean, everybody knows historically that the home office has been a basket case. And the problem is, the more difficulty they get into, and I had the justice functions in the home office as well before they were split, the more you rubbish it, the more people say,

why would I want to go and work there? Or why would I want to stick it out when I can have a dam-sight easier job and be thought to be brilliant going into the Treasury or a job like being in the Foreign Office where you occasionally get blamed for bad advice, but you don't get blamed for non-delivery. And so the Home Office has been a challenge all the way down the last 200 years with occasional very bright people working out how to avoid it, like Roy Jenkins, who's virtually all the things that people remember about,

Roy Jenkins as being a great Liberal Home Secretary were private members bills, which he gave support to, but actually came at it from a different angle. They weren't invented within the Home Office or delivered in the Home Office. And Roy's point, do you think this is what Goven Cummings meant by the blob or whether they just bring? They do, but the more you insult people, the more they go into their shell. And talking of a shell, there are two bits of the civil service. There's a deep commitment, I'm absolutely certain, to service. And, to neutrality, and there's an egg in which it all operates where people know each other. They share advice before they give it to the cabinet minister or ministers, which I eventually found out and said, well, in that case, it's very important that I take outside advice so that I'm breaking the hegemony, as Grimsy would have called it, of the civil service. They're all agreeing with each other.

And basically they're pre-cooking the solution. So what you wanted, presumably, was to be presented with two competing ideas or two alternatives that you could get your head around, instead of which you tended to be presented with the conventional wisdom. What I tried to do, and I learned this from Michael Heselton, who has severe dyslexia, and because I couldn't see, I would, of course, spend weekends and nights and not being in the tea room or the bars, which actually probably was a good thing in the end, reading, reading, reading, that was always. put on to old-fashioned cassette for me. But actually, what I really enjoyed doing and what he did was to get people around a table

and persuade the permanent secretary that I would hear the objections and the interchange that had taken place before the paper was written. And that way, you could get people to start relaxing and to be honest about what the real challenges were and the options. I mean, you've got to know what it is you want to do. Tony Blair said in his last conference speech as Prime Minister, the worst ministers are those who will never make a decision. We all know them.

And you've got to have an idea of what you want to do and you've got to be able to make a decision, even if it's a difficult one, even if you get it wrong and people argue with you. And I made internal decisions and then a couple of the advisors would come into the room and I could tell what was going to happen because they'd sit right across the other side.

out of the room and say, David, we know you don't want to hear this, but would you rethink the decision you took yesterday because of this, this, this and this? And sometimes, sometimes I'd changed my mind. You said earlier that you had two of the five pledges. So that, I guess, was politically for you an advantage. You've got the prime minister saying education, education, education. It's the number one priority. And that helps you. But give listeners a feel for how you then operate in trying to make sure you get the right resources out of the Treasury, make sure that you've got the right space and the legislative program. This podcast is called leading, and you have to take on your own leadership role. I had several things going for me. I had the

support of the Prime Minister on the whole agenda of reform. I had previously had time to work it through, to think about it. I had, as I said, really excellent special advisors and a great ministerial team and we started to work as a team. And I had at least to begin with a civil service open to change and actually welcoming the energy, the drive, the beginning of something that they could relate to. And I used to go around the various sites across the UK and talk to the civil servants, address them in meetings as well as going around their desks and talking to them and trying to say, it doesn't, you know, whatever your job, You're part of this, you're part of this change, this making a difference.

Even the people who have the dreadful job of dealing with the correspondence these days, of course it's even worse with email, and saying let's work through what the answers to the regular questions are. And by the way, let us know when you get an avalanche, because that will indicate what's going on out there, what people are thinking and feeling. How did I deal with the difficult ones? again, that touch of arrogance has to be there because you've got to believe you're right when you're pushing through something that people are pushing against,

whether it was in education and teacher and reform of the schools or whether it was in the home office and reforming policing. I'll never forget having 13,000 uniformed police officers, some of whom should have actually been doing the job at the Palace of Westminster, frightening my colleagues to death in terms of lobbying them, but the education unions were difficult. And I chose, and with me Estelle Morris, who was my number two, to actually go to their conferences.

Nobody does that anymore. And it was suicidal, but it was also calculated. Two things. One, it gave me an enormous platform because they got covered in those days. I mean, well, might come to this, but education is not. now, top of the political agenda. And it's hard to get across to people that it was. So the teachers' conferences were widely covered on top line news television,

when 10, 15 million people used to watch the evening news. And when I was heckled, barrapped and abused, I could say, but parents out there know that I'm on their side and the side of their children. and so it was a calculated risk. David, what were they abusing you about? What didn't they like about the reforms? What were you doing that made them uncomfortable? Well, they didn't even like when I was actually offering them more money

because they didn't want the more money at the price of evaluating their performance. We had a threshold and you got onto the higher grades if you went through the threshold. But you had to demonstrate that you were still a good teacher. It seemed to me to be a no-brainer. as a trained teacher, by the way, we've not touched on this, but I do have a postgraduate certificate in teaching, albeit for adults.

We can't cover every aspect if you like it. No, no, no, but I do. And it was really important sometimes to say, I've been there, I've been in a group. Actually, bricklayers 2 comes back to mind, like a Tom Sharp book, where the kids didn't want to be taught. They were 17, 18.

They didn't want to be there. They want to be outlaying bricks. And if you can come through that, you do know a little bit about the real sharp end of teaching. Because in those days, I was teaching politics, but I was also enjoined to teach liberal studies. David, can I keep developing this? Because it's a continual theme, though, isn't it, in all public service reform? It doesn't matter whether we're talking about educational or health, which is that the people at the front line, the nurse, the doctor, the teacher, feels that there is a interference. Secretary of State who is unsympathetic to what it's really like at the front line, imposing

unrealistic standards and expectations, never understanding the context properly and measuring them on the wrong things. Yes, and you have to bear in mind that sometimes they might be right. I did a bad cop, good cop with Estelle Morris, who is also formerly a teacher. And I would do the tough bit, and then Estelle would go out and do the smoothing a bit. She had to do the tough bits as well. But the challenge was to say to people, yes, we've got a literacy and numeracy strategy. And you might not like being told that you've got to teach phonics for literacy. But actually, we've got such an appalling level of success at the age of 11 when they transfer to secondary,

that they're having to do the job all over again. And we're not going to put up with it. And of course, we're still in that struggle today. there's always a building on what came before, putting another brick in the wall. But in those days, it was saying, we are asking you to do this. Reflecting back, and I've talked to members of the team

and to civil servants about this since, we probably overdid it because we were in a hurry. We didn't let another cohort of youngsters go through rubbish education. And therefore, it was a continuing reform agenda. And, Alistair, you'll remember it very well, because the months before the 2001 general election, when I knew I'd done four years,

I'd probably done my time, but I was still looking, how could we move from the Sure Start program and early years we'd introduce the reforms to primary, which were beginning to really work, into secondary. And we had to break the cycle of schools

that were absolute rubbish. And at this point, I'm being phoned to say, be very careful, what it is that you're saying. Your special advisor is, calling you out to stop you. And I was just about

to remember when we produced a policy paper, they used to call them green papers, and it was about introducing academies and really shifting the education gender at secondary level. And Alistair,

you came out with a famous phrase bog standard comprehensive. I know. I apologize you then. I have a The other thing caused me was nobody's business. Well, I had a little look this morning, David. I went through my diaries and looking up all the blunt entries.

I've got a few to put you later, by the way. But that was a bad episode, especially, as you know, I'm one of the biggest defenders of comprehensive education. And I was trying to make a pro-comprehensive point. And wait until he got home. Oh, I know. Well, you know, Fiona, his partner, would have given him absolute help. She still does, as you just did.

Listen, can I ask you something about two things, really. Why has education gone down the agenda? And, you know, because we did put it there. We put it there in opposition at the top of the agenda. And to be sort of fair, I guess, David Cameron gave quite a lot of space to Michael Gove to make it a very big bit of what we were talking about, 2010-2014. Gove had a lot of space. And when Michael Gove wanted to embarrass me, he used to say in the house that he was following my agenda. And my second point.

is giving your experience of having gone into government in 1997 and some of the experience you've had with the civil service, which has now been hollowed out to some extent as well, what advice would you give to Labour politicians if they win the next election, most of whom have not been ministers, as to what they should do in those first few months? First question, why is education down the agenda?

I think people have lost the understanding that in this rapidly changing world of artificial intelligence of robotic, of enormous technological change. We're going to need people who are firstly well-educated in the sense that they know how to work in teams. They're open to ideas.

They can think laterally. They understand the digital era, which I don't, but they need to. And they need the opportunities post-16 right through life. So they'll come back into learning, whether it's in further education

or whether it's, online or whether it's at university. This is an agenda of economic change as well as equality and opportunity for the individual. And they all go together. So you can't do net zero or mass house building or social care reform if you don't skill people. And I still don't hear even my own side, who I get on very well and talk to. maybe I won't after this podcast. I still don't hear all of them saying this enough.

And so it's getting it up in lights and making the delivery of your wider program dependent on getting this aspect. Right, now I am a fanatic, I know that. My policy love is still education. I do other things, of course, but it still is. And I think if we could understand the enormity of what we've got to do.

People talk about closing our borders completely and all the rest of it and this anti-immigration moment we're in. You can't do that and not educate and continue educating the people you expect to take those jobs. Now, second question. Advice.

I'm very careful how I give advice now because I'm not going to hector anybody and they switch off if you do. But they should listen to people. Well, only to say we did make mistakes, so you've got to learn from where we got things wrong. For instance, on one of my pledges, which was lower class sizes per five, six, seven-year-olds, we ended up spending a lot more money than we ever thought it was going to cost. And so the corollary of doing away with what were vouchers for private education didn't pay for it.

And secondly, we had to build onto schools in the most leafy areas to make the pledge doable. And so we spent more money in the affluent areas that we did in the most deprived to achieve the commitment. So be very careful, not just what you wish for or what you say, because they're being cautious. So I can't advise them to be more cautious than they already are. Do you think they're being too cautious? I think on one of two things, yes. I get it. I understand entirely why.

But we can't be tracking the government on things through the general election. Because otherwise they'll put us in an impossible spot. So know what it is that is your bottom line. This and no further will we be pushed is the first piece of advice. Secondly, be very clear what you want to achieve and have to achieve in the first six months because you'll get six months leeway and then things will start closing down and the reactive agenda will kick in and all the energy will start to sap away. Be clear what you've got to do in the first six months. Thirdly, have really good advice around you and be prepared to take advice from outside.

And fourthly, occasionally call the oldies in and say, what do you think? Alistair David, let's take a quick break. Hi, everybody, it's Dominic Samarok here from The Rest is History. Now, some of you may have heard me on your show, The Rest is Politics when Rory was away and I was filling in and enjoying Alistair Campbell's tremendous banter. and I'm back to tell you about our new series on the rest of history, which is all about Britain in the 1970s, a period with a lot of uncanny resemblances to our own. So right now we're living through a moment when oil shocks generated by war in the Middle East are rippling through the

world economy, when Britain feels like it's sunk in a bit of a malaise, people are arguing about Europe, the government has got a few issues with the trade unions, and we have a kind of, I suppose you'd say governing elite, a kind of political class that is really struggling to come to terms with all of these issues. And people are asking if Britain is governable at all. So there are a lot of parallels between that Britain that I'm describing, which is our Britain, and the Britain of the mid-1970s. So in this series that's coming out on the rest is history, we'll be looking at these and other issues. We'll be talking about the rise of Margaret Thatcher, obviously a colossal figure in our political life even now, whether you love her or loathe her. We'll be talking about the very first Brexit referendum of 1975, a subject that I'm sure Rory and Alistair will have strong opinions about.

We'll be talking about the fall of the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson. And we'll be talking about one of the grimmest moments in Britain's economic history, the moment in 1976 when we had to go cap in hand, as people said at the time, to the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, for a then record bailout. Now, if that sounds good to you, how could it not sound good to you? Of course it sounds good to you. We have a clip for you to listen to at the end of this episode. And if you want to hear more, just search for The Rest is History wherever you get your podcasts. Moving forward then into your next role, which was as Home Secretary, I'm really enjoying this and I am coming through this with an enormous amount of admiration for you. But I felt without knowing you very well, that you were slightly too right wing for me as a Home Secretary. Secretary. And I was always a little bit troubled by what you did after 9-11 in terms of dealing with foreign nationals. When I went into what became the Department of Justice, I struggled

a lot with your IPP sentences, which is these indefinite detention for criminals. But it's a bit of your personality I don't quite understand. You're such a thoughtful, learned, reflexive person, but there were bits of that time in Home Secretary where I thought, oh, goodness gracious me, this man's really kind of playing a pretty kind of daily male right wing card here and appealing to bits of my party that I don't like at all. I used to know that I was being seen as right wing when I met lovely old ladies who said they were entirely on board with my agenda then told me there were lifelong Tories.

And I used to get this all the time. I'll tell you there were two elements to this. Firstly, my constituency. I learnt a lot by holding those advice surgeries as you must have done. I learnt a lot by going to community meetings where people would say, is anybody listening to us?

Is anybody taking any notice? What's the point in voting if all you all take notice of is the dinner tables you sit around back in London? And they wanted the crime and antisocial behaviour sorting. They wanted me to put right what was happening in their lives, not in my life, but in their lives.

And they wanted me to be able to show them, not just on policing and crime, which is why we increased the policing service dramatically and introduced community support officers and the like. But they wanted me on something as difficult as immigration to actually show that I understood that we had to have secure borders. Now, 9-11, the attack on the World Trade Center was interesting because the second bit of my time as Home Secretary

was having to deal with security of the nation and international security in a way that hadn't been the case since the Second World War. So this was at home. It wasn't a war somewhere else. And I had to, in three months from September to Christmas, work out how we were to legislate, what was proportionate in terms of protecting the nation

and holding on to us. liberties. And I may have occasionally got it wrong, but I had to do it. And it was very interesting in my last Prime Minister's questions in 2015 when I was standing down. David Cameron, I actually had the decency to say thank you for being there and securing the well-being of the nation, which I thought was pretty decent of him. Now, I got imprisonment for public protection wrong. And I've spent the last number of years, including at this moment, trying to put it right, trying to get out of prison and off licence, those who have been in prison or on licence for years and years and years. Why is it so hard, David? People find this so hard to

understand why it's so hard to sort out what everybody seems to realise was a mistake. It's called Big P and the worst. bit of politics. Ken Clark, who I get on with really well, and again in the Lords, has actually been very kind to me and said, back in 2012, when he was Justice Secretary and was attempting to abolish this, and they theoretically abolished that part of the act which gave indeterminate sentences and meant that the parole board, for your listeners, the parole board, had to be sure that someone was not a risk before letting them out. David, can I just for the listeners just so they understand what we're talking about.

This legislation brought in by David Blunkett meant that you could commit a pretty minor crime, which traditionally would have only involved you being in prison for a very short period. But under this new sentence, you could be detained almost indefinitely. And when you were released, if you broke your license conditions, you could then be recalled back to prison so that we have well over 2,000 people, 2,000 people still in prison today who were sentenced under this thing that hasn't existed since 2010. And the suicide rates are correspondingly very, very high, the depression very high. And even though these sentences can no longer be imposed, the people who were sentenced under the old staff brought in by David Blanket are still there.

And that's what we're talking about struggling to try to change. Yes. And I'd realize by 2008-9 that this was going wrong. It was supposed to be part of a menu, and it was supposed to be applied to those who were serious offenders, but hadn't committed murder or rape, and were seriously dangerous. And that menu turned from, for some judges, into an imperative that they thought they had to deliver it. In fact, in early May of this year, a case with a prisoner called Leighton Williams has been let out by the Court of Appeal on the grounds that the original. original judge had misunderstood the act and that he didn't have to apply it. So we're dealing with a really difficult set of areas. In 2012, I sat with Ken Clark and he said, I want to be able to wipe the slate clean, but the cabinet won't let me for straight political reasons

because it would be seen as being absolutely soft on what were potentially some serious risk prisoners. What was the original thinking behind the IP? original thinking was that we had indeterminate sentences. I'm trying to help a prisoner who's probably now too late to help, who's been in 34 years, by the way, on a previous sentence. The thinking was, we will put therapies and courses on and we will change the behaviour, we will rehabilitate these prisoners, and then the parole board will be able to nod them through and they'll come out, and it just didn't work. And being honest about it, I mean, I visit prisons and see these prisoners under indefinite sentence. And I am campaigning with the families

and the campaigners and moving amendments all the time when bills come through the House of Lords. And to do Alex Chalk, the present Justice Secretary Justice and his ministers of state, including Chris Bellamy and the Lords, they're trying to be helpful in circumstances where you're running up to a general election and it's the wrong time. Whereas previous if I might say so, incumbents in the job were deeply unsympathetic. And, Rory, you'll remember how difficult it is to bring about change of that sort. So, yes, it's 12 years gone since now, since the Act was abolished, but we've still got 1,200 prisoners who have never been released.

And David, just chipping one more time at this bigger issue, am I right to say that the kind of civil liberties, human rights, more liberal bit of your political philosophy, is less central to you than other things, such as bringing change, social justice, improving education, making the streets safer? Well, I've always said I'm not a libertarian, and I'm not in strict J.S. Mill terms, a liberal.

But I'd like to believe that I'm kind and that I wouldn't deliberately do something that would turn out in the way that this we've just been talking about turned out, which is why I'm spending so much time, energy and emotion, by the way, on trying to put it right. And I think when you've got something wrong in politics, it's very rare you get the chance to do something about it. And if being in the House of Lords is worth my time at all, it's been worth my time trying to put this right. So, David, just sticking with the Home Office brief, I can remember a time of your time at the Home Office when you seem to be spending most of your

time with Nicholas Sarkozy, who was in your opposite number, went on to be president, sorting out immigration at the time and particularly the Songgat camp. What was that relationship like then between us and the French, what do you make of where we are now and what do you make of Rewan-Awan-Polson. Let's quickly, remind us what the Song-Gat camp was. Song-Gat was this awful sort of camp where thousands of people were just

camped on the French soil. Trying to come here like they are now. So not a huge change, familiar stuff. Lots of people trying to cross the channel of getting on the bottom of trucks and trades. It was in trucks, under trucks, under the Eurostar, all kinds of things. And that relationship was very important

because I've said to colleagues, and I've tried to say the government as well. It's got to be in the interests of the French if they're really going to collaborate in stopping people leaving their country. It would have to be in our interest, would it not? If people were desperately trying to get from Dover to Calais to get out of Britain,

we'd have to have some very good reason to collaborate with the French. And I had to get to know Nicolas O'Cosey and to make him believe that it was in the French's interest as well as ours, to stop people coming to the French coast, this magnet of the camp and the smugglers and the organised criminals, which we still have today. For years, we managed to solve it with the agreement that I reached with him,

which was that we'd have our intelligence, our customs, our migration authorities on French soil for the first time, really, since Joan of Arc. And we would place them there and we would pay for all the security around it so that people couldn't get on to the Eurostar or under it or in the back of trucks. Now, of course, all these years later, the criminals have adapted their business model to small boats. And we will have to reach an agreement. I'm convinced with the French to license boats and to deal with the upstream of the boats. Because if you've not got a boat, you can't send people across the channel.

Now, we did it. And for years it worked. We reduced the number by two-thirds coming across, and it allowed us to have a broader, more sensible migration policy with proper visas for those who should be here, with resettlement from places in the world where there was catastrophe happening like Liberia, and to have a better debate, which stood us in good stead in the build-up to the 2005 general election. But David, there is a horrible sense, sadly, sometimes talking to you, that a lot of things don't see if it would change in 20 years. It's an awful sense that the government still struggling with people trying to get from France and to Britain. And again, this is one that Labor's going to have to pick up. Yeah, still struggling with educational standards and schools, still struggling with how to do skills and vocational training. I mean, what the earth goes on in Britain?

In prisons, you know, I was the prisons minister, somewhat of what you experienced. more than 20 years ago would still be true of presence today. What is wrong with us? Why are we completely unable to move on from these problems? Well, we should have had more continuity, given that we had 13 years, and your lot should have had more continuity over 14 years, and we've had nothing but upheaval and trauma and psychobabble

and all the rest of it. So the Scandinavians have done well, even when they've changed governments, by having a degree of continuity of policy and some agreement where the ideology it really doesn't clash about what works and how to continue it working. Secondly, when you've had continuity of ministers,

it actually helps a bit. I mean, there's been 16 housing ministers since 2010, so no wonder housing's in a mess. And also, the fact that people don't keep their foot on the accelerator long enough to make something actually, work. So you do something, take your foot off the accelerator, new priorities, the tide goes out, and when it comes back in, you start all over again. So what David's saying, Rory, is that under a

Labour government thing has got better, as we said they would, and then after a Tory government, for a long time, they're going back with. Can I just challenge to answer for me? I fear he's partly saying that, but I think he's also saying what my experience was in prison. So you talked about how you'd reduce the number of people coming over from Calais. I had a challenge. I had a boast when I was in prisons that after years of increasing violence, we managed to reduce violence by 17% a year, and I was very proud of all I'd done. Sure enough, I hand over and I leave, and the whole thing goes up again, that there is a sense, you talk about accelerators. I think sometimes that it's like pulling on an elastic band, and as soon as you release your muscles

for a second, the whole thing goes back again. And to develop David's idea, it's just one more step, Alastair, I think he's not just saying, wouldn't it be grace if we went back to New Labour, he's actually pointing to something quite radical with the Swedish system. So in the Swedish system, the head of the Swedish prison service has an enormous amount of independence from ministers, accountable to ministers, but they can push ahead with the 10-year program. Swedish is dealing with COVID,

the head of their public health, huge independence from the politicians, that really, even with a great incoming Labour government, there's still going to be a problem of ministers being in for a year or two being shuffled in and out there. We have a problem of not invented here as well as that, which runs alongside it,

so that you want to make your name, you do something new, and the system which is part of a democracy, by the way. So there's a paradox here, isn't there? Part of the system is that those working for us in those services take their signal from elected politicians. And if the elected politicians change and the signals change,

they change with it. So just to use an up-to-date example, they took the signals in the criminal justice system from Dominic Rob, and it's taking a hell of a brave man in Alex Chalk to touch the tiller to bring things back on streaming, you know. And he is trying to do it, but you've got these enormous swings. And democracy says that the officials should go with it, doesn't it? On the continuity, I'm assuming you wouldn't be recommending continuity vis-a-vis either Rwanda policy.

No, I wouldn't. It's not off anyway. It's not operating. It's not working, and it won't. I mean, you might send a couple of hundred there, but that's not a problem. policy working at 500 million quid. I think that what we've got to do is to not say everything that our opponents have done is rubbish, but the things that we know are wrong, we highlight, and we have very clear alternatives to do it. Now, an incoming government, along with all the other financial social issues that are going to have to be dealt with, and mistrust of politicians and skepticism and all that goes with it,

we're also going to have to deal with the impossible. And the impossible will be, and I'll come to what my solution would be in a minute, the impossible is that you've got all these people who under the Illegal Migration Act are said to be illegal. They weren't documented. They came over the channel.

They're not being processed. So whatever you do with Ruhanda or anything else, you've got tens of thousands of people, people, you're going to have to agree to process. And some of them will then go home or elsewhere. And some of them will have to be integrated here. Now, my solution, I'm sorry, you're not going to like this at all, Rory, because... ID cards. Yeah. I'm afraid you need some form of, it wouldn't be a card anymore. Most people would have it on their iPhone. But you need some form of identification. First raised on page 564 of the first volume of my diaries, Dave.

Very good. And with Bay You. It would be a very, it would be a very, it. It would be different. My big mistake was not to simply use the passport system and gradually bring it in. We've got over 80% of the population have a passport anyway. We could have given every 16-year-old. Do you disagree with that, Roy? Actually, you know, oddly, I'm in favour of ID cuts, which I probably, I wasn't when you were in favour of them. I was still on the civil liberties side, but I've come round to the ID cuts.

I was wrong about that. And that would stop just for the audience. That would at least give us a chance of stopping people being trafficked inside our country and exploited as being in the sub-economy, which is what's going to happen and is happening anyway at the moment. But it will also be a quid pro quo to get the French on board with other ideas and then to play our part in the global problem that exists. Because there's no point in saying anybody who arrives in Italy or Greece should simply stay in Italy.

I mean, that's why they've got a right-wing government in Italy. You end up playing to the far right who will do extremely well in the immediate European elections and will be a signal to all of us to get real. David, just two more questions from me. My penultimate one is, what the hell would you do, David, if you came in as an incoming Labour prime minister

with the state of things? I mean, our economy looks like it's bankrupt, our productivity has been flatlining since 2008. The NHS is completely creaking. No amount of expenditure seems to be able to keep up with the demand on the NHS. education seems to be underwhelming and flatten. What a earth do you do?

What would be your first 100 days in office? Well, firstly, to understand that we have enormous strengths as well as weaknesses, that we might appear to ourselves to be a basket case, but just take a look at the first half of the last century globally as well as domestically. We've got enormous strengths to re-energize the country and to use the combined resources of people, of business, of academia, of the civil service, yes, and those in public service roles, including in the health service and education,

to be part of a new renewal. And you need to eulogise about it in order to make it happen. And people say, oh, it's soft underbelly, this is all froth. Actually, mobilising people isn't froth. It's worth 10% of anybody's money if we can get, the productivity up again. We can get people believing that they themselves can make a difference. We can utilise the pension funds magnificently.

We could set up bonds that people would contribute to because they'd earn from them. When Osborne put up a pensioner's retirement bond, it was overwhelmed. In fact, they stopped it because they panicked and thought they were going to be paying out too much money. That was long before, of course, inflation hit double figures. And so there's a country out there that is longing to be led in a way that says you are part of the solution, not just the problem. and if, say, in the Health Service, if West Streeting could mobilize people to think they're going to play a part, they're going to be heard, they've got solutions rather than heads down, this is a rotten job, then there's a chance, just a chance, that we might start to look to the horizon rather than addressing our feet. Do you think here is that leader? He's got to be. He's got to be. He's got when he becomes prime minister, which I hope he will, and I hope it will be a majority government, but I think it will be very much narrower than the polls or the pundits believe. If it's a majority government, it makes it easier. But he's got to have the confidence when he's in to be much more challenging and ambitious that it's possible to be in circumstances where nobody thought back in 2020 that Labor would be.

stand a chance of pulling it round to win a general election in 2024. Nobody thought that, including me. So credit where credit has to be due. And you can be cautious now because you need to win, but you can't be cautious from Christmas onwards. David, a final one then for me. Why did she not become Prime Minister? Because Gordon Brown was intent on becoming Prime Minister and was able to create and to hold on to an internal, informal structure which I never even thought about putting together in terms of the future because that wasn't uppermost in my mind. And secondly, because I had a relationship which led to a child

when I wasn't married, but the person was. and my private life became the thing of the moment and that was the end of any chance that I had of doing it. I just have to say this, I never really wanted it because I thought I was working at the absolute zenith of what I could cope with without sight. Maybe I was wrong, but probably not. I can remember you saying long before the child came along

that you felt you were absolutely flat out and you sometimes said, I don't know how Tony does it. But I took the right decision, by the way, and my son is in his 20s now and he's a great guy, and it was the right decision. A lot of people said, why didn't you walk away? Because sometimes politicians do have a morality of their own, even if their lack of moral judgment

had got them in the mess in the first place. Well, David, it's been an absolute joy to talk to you. I'm not even going to read the bits of my diaries now, because it'll lower the tone at the end. I found a lot of references to you being fed up or grumpy. I was. I was. I was.

I was. I was much less grumpy now. Yes, you seem very sort of jovial. No, no. I've got a friend who was in the press for years. Paul Potchie knew him. Who bought me a plaque which said I ought to put on the bedroom wall, which was, I wake up feeling grumpy, but it doesn't make him any better. Well, listen, it's been lovely to talk to you.

And you are one of those rare politicians, I think who does have a legacy. And I think it is particularly in education. I think that's where you'll be remembered. I'll be remembered more kindly in education. I will have a legacy in the Home Office, but I don't think people will remember it. Like Rory, quite so benignly. I will remember this interview, though, with great respect. And thank you very much for coming to join us.

Thank you. Take care. Okay, Rory. What do you think of a little blanket? Well, I was really impressed. I mean, you know that I generally am pretty gloomy about politicians and tend to think they're pretty awful human beings. He came across as very impressive. I believe him as a manager that's something about his instincts about running a department that struck true.

I do believe that he genuinely regrets what he did in IPP. Oh, yeah, yeah, I mean, I know that. And I think there's something nice about his sort of boldness in saying, okay, yeah, I'm pretty right wing on immigration. I'm pretty right wing on crime. I'm pretty right wing on civil liberties, but that's what my voters in Sheffield want. But not in a brutal way. He's not actually, although he produced headlines that the Daily Mail likes. Actually, the context, I think, is one that I can respect more than I understood before.

The other thing we didn't really get into with the blindness. I mean, he slightly plays it down, but I think it must be fun. He talked about being an inconvenience. When you think about, you know this from when you were a minister, how much you have to read. And yet he talks the language of sight. You know, he'll say, did you see that program? Yeah.

I've just been to see a play. Yeah, yeah. He talks the language of science. And I had a lot of readings to do over the weekend. Yeah, exactly. And he's not actually reading. He's only listening to a cassette. He's listening.

I don't think he likes doing Braille very much, but he did have this amazing team. He used to overnight do the papers for him. Yeah. Tell him what was in the papers, what he needed to know. No, and I think also when he was sort of going through what he would give his advice,

I thought there's some very, very good advice there. Be cautious now, but don't be cautious when you get in. I mean, of course, one of the reasons maybe maybe that he really appeals to me is there I was. There I was grumbling about the gossip and the tearoms. And, of course, he says he never goes into the terooms. Doesn't get involved in any of that stuff. There's a bit of him...

I said to one, we just talked about the Quasi Quartet. I think this does seem to me to be more a thing for your generation. Yeah. I remember, even as a journalist with politicians back in the day, endlessly talking about policy and big positioning and that sort of stuff, I think it's a generation. It's become more and more. And I think it's the point that Quarting made about, you know,

Shaps, Trust, seeing it's all about TikTok, Twitter, Instagram. Yeah. David's not enjoying that. It's not on anything. But it's also, maybe it's a bit unfair, but you sort of get the impression that you're listening to Lord Reith. So you're like listening to the third program on the BBC that says somebody who's like totally grown up the late 40s, early 50s listening to the most kind of high-minded BBC programming and the way that he thinks and processes the world. You know, there's no arms.

There's no ours. No, he speaks so clear. He sounds like, is that unfair that he sort of sounds like a sort of. very grand third program presenter from the early 1960. Well I said no eyes because most of the ones who, when he was growing up, that have been unbelievably posh. Yes.

He's quite high-minded. I mean, there's quite a sort of high-minded thing. I think this goes back to his, he has absolute clarity about how he speaks. He's always had that. And so I even noticed a couple of times when he would be, we'd ask him a question. Then you see him sort of, he puts his fingers out and he He's going through, he then makes four points.

Yes. And he's got them in his head. And if we sort of take him off track, then he comes back. No, I think I can see why he sees the blindness as an enormous, I love the word of convenience. But I think part of his clarity comes from the fact that he's locked in this mind that is just so committed to addressing the problems that are running around there. He's always been like that. And then there's the bit which we didn't touch on, but the bits that he must miss out. on that the sort of body language that smiles the face.

I mean, so much of our communication is non-verbal, which he's not part of. Not part of. He didn't know what his kids look like. Yeah. Doesn't know what Tony Blair looked like. Doesn't know what the Queen looked like? Yeah.

You have a sense of them, but that's it. Yeah, or the broader landscape. Yeah. But in a way, that may also give a certain kind of clarity and courage that you're not sitting there in the House of Commons, endlessly looking at the kind of weird smirks and expressions and strangeness as your colleagues, but you're just focusing in on the ideas.

I'll tell you the other thing, he did. So if you take a cabinet meeting, so he'd be sitting there, and you'd be able to see, and as you say, lots of sort of body language, lots of people looking at each other, funny looks. He doesn't see any of that. But I'd say he got everybody's character.

Anyway, he's a great man. He's a really, really great man. And I think he's one of those politicians who has left a mark. Yeah, they're really impressed. Thank you, Hudson. See you soon.