I don't see another thread going on Blunkett's resignation, so I'll start one here. In this a.m.'s Globe and Mail there's a not-bad history of the revelations that have come out over the last several weeks.
Even better, there is a cluster of stories on the Guardian site that will fill in all the background and people's diverse and complex reactions to one of Blair's favourite ministers.
I found this column by Roy Hattersley to be clearest in terms of political principle while still personally generous:
quote:
For people like me, it is hideously difficult to disentangle our regrets at the circumstances of his going from the long-held belief that he should go - go, not because he mishandled a visa but because of the sort of home secretary he had become. It was not just his policies with which we disagreed. We loathed the philosophy behind them.Mr Blunkett despised the "liberal intelligentsia". That is a reasonable enough position if it amounts to contempt for people who support social democracy as long as they are not required to pay for it in their taxes. But Mr Blunkett went further. When I joined the Labour party, I believed that it represented the best instincts of the working class. Too often Mr Blunkett reflected and articulated its worst emotions.
That made him careless about liberty and cavalier about the rule of law, suspicious of foreigners and willing to use the authority of the state to create the sort of society - rigid and regimented - he wanted to see. His resignation will reduce Labour's appeal to the men and women who, like him, rejoiced at the news that Harold Shipman had committed suicide. Let us hope that his successor attracts a different constituency.
The main strike against him to me was political -- his enthusiastic support for Blair's anti-terrorist legislation (Blunkett has famously sneered at "airy-fairy civil liberties"), his law'n'order stance, his plans to institute ID cards (anyone have more detail about those?).
Without knowing much about his failed affair, I am bothered by the paternity claims that he has insisted on making so publicly. At the very least, he has sounded rash and selfish. The affair itself, with the married publisher of a right-wing high-society mag (the Spectator), looks, as Hattersley says, like hubris.
Still, he was an affecting character. He is the only blind member of Parliament, I believe. I remember noticing him years ago on a television broadcast from Westminster, sitting on the front bench of the opposition in those days, with his guide dog nestled at his feet, in the centre aisle of the Commons.
But I think that Hattersley's gentle class analysis above rings true: in its conservatism, New Labour has a cultural attraction to some varieties of very traditional Old Labour, and a bootstraps boy from the Midlands like Blunkett epitomizes that paradox.
The interplay of class factors in this story is immensely complicated and subtle -- but that's England, eh?
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posted 16 December 2004 08:53 AM
