David Blunkett on the deep roots of New Labour – and the political dangers facing Rishi Sunak
David Blunkett, education secretary, home secretary and work and pensions secretary in Tony Blair’s government, started with “ancient history” in his talk to our students at King’s College London.
He said they needed to understand how the “third way” of New Labour emerged in response to the challenge from Margaret Thatcher. In other words, it wasn’t just Tony Blair. And it wasn’t just copying Thatcherism.
“The thing that irritates me most about the criticism of the New Labour period is the term neoliberal,” Lord Blunkett said. “We were never neoliberals in either intent or in delivery. It’s sloppy politics to use that term. Neoliberalism springs from [economist Friedrich] Hayek and from a particular view of the nature of the state. We believed that the state was a force for good.
“We should have done a lot more in decentralising and mobilising people in their own communities, but we were never in favour of a small hands-off state. Otherwise, we’d never have transformed health and education in the way we did.”
He was speaking last month to the “Blair Years” postgraduate class that I teach with Dr Michelle Clement and Professor Jon Davis. As most of the students were born after Blair became prime minister, he started with the prehistory: “What happened in the 1980s was that the Conservatives took the ideological high ground. This arose from people like Milton Friedman in the United States and the people around Ronald Reagan, who was president at the time; a swing to what
