It is, as they say, dÈj? vu all over again. Once more, Home Secretary David Blunkett has expressed views which are pure common sense but which have had the effect of driving the political correctness lobby mad. Mr Blunkett is rare amongst politicians today in being prepared to say what he thinks. And what he thinks is, more often than not, what the great majority of the country also think.
But there is a paradox. Consistently, while Mr Blunkett says one thing, his actions seem to have a very different effect.
Yesterday, for example, the Home Secretary pledged to halve the number of forms which the police have to fill out as part of his drive to free more up to patrol the streets. But in March he announced a new form which police have to fill out when they stop people in the street. As Marion Fitzgerald, a former Home Office adviser pointed out at the time: "it's going to generate an enormous amount of extra police paperwork. It makes no sense whatsoever."
Monday"s comments, which so antagonised the political correctness brigade, were pure Blunkett: "Citizenship should be about shared participation...one factor in this is the ability of new migrants to speak English - otherwise they cannot get good jobs, or share in wider social debate."
His words were published in a book called Reclaiming Britishness, and he went on to say that using English can prevent the "schizophrenia" which "bedevils" relationships between the generations, particularly in Asian families. "Speaking English enables parents to converse with their children in English, as well as in their historic mother tongue, at home and to participate in wider modern culture," he added.
To most people, such an argument reads as a perfectly sensible statement of fact - that, since English is our country's language, people who can't speak it are at a great disadvantage. To some commentators, however, they are among the most repellent, racist words ever to come from the lips of a British politician. One newspaper said yesterday that they were proof that Mr Blunkett is "one of the most reactionary occupants of his office in modern times".
Truly, it seems, some of us live in a looking glass world. But then all sorts of strange things happen when David Blunkett speaks. The likes of Andrew Smith, Alastair Darling, Harriet Harman and Tessa Jowell are so squeaky clean, and so utterly inoffensive in their every
public utterance, that one is left to wonder what, if anything, is happening beneath the surface.
David Blunkett has always been different. I am in the middle of writing his biography and have been studying his speeches and comments ever since he first entered politics as a local councillor in 1970.
Mr Blunkett has never been able to see a parapet without putting his head above it. Even as a boy he was prepared to tell the headmaster of his school, who did not think it appropriate for blind children to take exams in the same way as sighted children, that he was wrong, and then to act on his beliefs by undertaking extra night school lessons.
His reaction to this latest row is typical. Most politicians duck for cover at the merest hint of controversy. Mr Blunkett tackles it head on. As he told yesterday's BBC Radio Four Today programme: "I was making a very simple point, which is if as many as a third of those from Asian
backgrounds speak no English at home that has an impactÖI didn't say that we should dictate to anyone what they do in their own home. I actually said "as well as the mother tongue", so that we have the English culture and English spoken but we have alongside it the mother tongue and the mother culture. Now that seems to be eminently reasonable."
Indeed. But then while Mr Blunkett"s "eminently reasonable" words are always crystal clear, his actions are sometimes contradictory. Take for example take his drug law reforms. Speaking in the Commons in July, he was unambiguous: "The message is clear. Drugs are dangerous."
Tough, strong and sensible words. Yet at the very same time as making this statement, he was also announcing that he was to downgrade cannabis to a Class C drug: the ultimate in mixed messages. The Home Secretary, it seems, gets tough on drugs byÖmaking it easier to take dope. Indeed, it's pretty clear what message most children are now getting: the Government thinks cannabis is OK.
Of course, that isn"t accurate since cannabis is still, after all, Class C. And thus restricted. But, as the master of the political message, Mr Blunkett must know that impressions count.
Earlier this year, he became entangled in another controversy when he said that some schools and GPs were being 'swamped' by the sheer numbers of children of asylum seekers.
The then Chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, Gurbux Singh, and the former Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Lord Hattersley (who seems to have made it his life's mission now to attack Mr Blunkett) both weighed in against him for using the same word used by Baroness Thatcher in 1978, when she said that Britain was being 'swamped' by an alien culture.
But in the face of a torrent of criticism, the Home Secretary adopted his usual tactic: tackle his critics head on. They were, he said, being 'ridiculous and oversensitive'. What other word, he insisted, would do better to describe the situation? "I don't apologise. I didn't say that Britain was being swamped. I was talking about a school or a GP practice. The idea that a word becomes unusable even though the dictionary definition is straightforward because an ex-prime minister used it 24 years ago in an entirely different context and in an emotive way is ridiculous."
But then one looks at the other side of the picture. The Home Office has confirmed that asylum seekers who have managed to evade deportation for seven years are almost always then allowed to stay. Indeed, as evidence presented to the Commons Home Affairs Committee yesterday showed, nine out of 10 asylum seekers who have their applications rejected remain in the UK. Home Office statistics show that in 2001 there were about 97,500 who should have been removed but were not.
Because his critics attack him, more often than not, for things he hasn"t said, and because it"s so refreshing to have a senior politician who doesn"t hide behind grey soundbites or run away from awkward questions, Mr Blunkett is allowed to get away with things for which he really should be called to account. By making clear that he recognises the problem of too many asylum seekers, and the tensions of multiculturalism, the Home Secretary wins many brownie points from voters. But, as the Americans say, talking the talk is not enough. You must also walk the walk.
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