David Blunkett
David Blunkett
David Blunkett, Baron Blunkett, PCis best known as a British politician and more recently as an academic, having represented the Sheffield Brightside and Hillsborough constituency for 28 years through to 7 May 2015 when he stepped down at the general election. Blind since birth, and coming from a poor family in one of Sheffield's most deprived districts, he rose to become Education and Employment Secretary, Home Secretary and Work and Pensions Secretary in Tony Blair's Cabinet following Labour's victory in...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth6 June 1947
With the commissioning of new schools undertaken by a local director of school standards, decisions will be fair and transparent, rooted in the needs of the local community. The admissions code and the role of the adjudicator will also be strengthened to provide fairness for all children.
We need to build on what we know works - local oversight of schools to keep a check on performance, timely interventions in schools to support those at risk of failing, and partnerships between schools to help each one to improve.
Tony asked me to stay. It could only have damaged the Prime Minister if I had stayed on.
We all accept that there is a compelling need for more effective powers to exclude and remove suspected terrorists from our country,
There is always an effort to link the public and the private.
There has been a real change, we've done a good job in the last two years on intelligence. There are 2,700 who will not be here who are often the ringleaders,
We rightly pride ourselves on the safe haven we offer to those genuinely fleeing terror. But our moral obligation and love of freedom does not extend to offering hospitality to terrorists.
The government wants to be able to attack extremism and hatred wherever it occurs.
To punish MPs because of the distance they live from London - those with fast train journeys quite close to London as well as those at some distance from both the capital or an appropriate airport - is perverse, but also dangerous to democracy.
We obviously have the right to go back to Parliament and to say 'We, the sovereign body who are elected, are the only ones in the end who are answerable for the protection of security and stability in our country,'
Without the political parties and the volunteering work of their members day in, day out, we would have a very different sort of politics and society.
Faith in technocrats over politicians is not a trend from which Britain is exempt.
The government must give men and women without power a real say over what happens to them, and the means of engaging in a participative, invigorated and living democracy.
It's not just parliament that requires radical modernisation. It's our democratic processes.