David Blunkett Quotes
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There are some really good experiments with the youth offending service, joining up youth offending teams with the youth justice board, and good local authority and primary care trusts working together.
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It is a mistake to separate learning for work and for community and personal development.
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Human nature is you get carried away, so we have to protect ourselves from ourselves.
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As education and employment secretary in 1997, I inherited hundreds of schools where the roofs leaked, the windows rattled, and they relied entirely on outside toilets.
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I said it's impossible to have an amnesty without ID cards and a clean database, because you firstly don't have any incentives for people to actually come up front and register, and make themselves available, and secondly you have no means of tracking them.
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My job as Labour Home Secretary is to ensure people are prepared to listen to us when we take on our opponents across the political spectrum.
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It's not just parliament that requires radical modernisation. It's our democratic processes.
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Strengthening our identity is one way of reinforcing people's confidence and sense of citizenship and well-being.
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We need to reaffirm that politics is not merely compatible with economic progress and development in the 21st century, but essential to it.
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I don't like prolonged, highly expensive commissions, especially if they are chaired by judges. We seem to have overwhelming faith in judges.
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I am nothing if not a loyalist. After 46 years in the Labour party, I've grown weary of the cry: 'If only we had a new, shining, revamped leader, all would be well.'
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I've had a guide dog since 1969. Not the same one, of course: I've had five.
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Judy, we think that since the 11th of September, 2001, we've faced a similar heightened threat level. And we've been enhancing both the exchange of intelligence and security information and the assessment of that information, because that's the crucial element.
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Speaking for the nation as a whole entails understanding and feeling the pain, as well as understanding the aspiration of the different cultural, social and political make-up of the nation.
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I have built my reputation on honesty, I have sometimes been too honest.
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As a former home secretary, I have access to and knowledge of the workings of the system in a way that individuals unfamiliar with the courts can never hope to have.
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At this very moment in time there will be people making, breaking relationships, regretting deeply what they've done, and causing hurt, but that is a fact of life, and if we weren't full of emotion, we'd be automatons, and I don't think people want us to be that.
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Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling, in hosting the G20 summit and in the budget, must display the same boldness in tackling the instability at home that they do in promoting a worldwide answer to the global meltdown.
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I should have been a Trappist monk.
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In the U.K., we have always been an open, trading nation, enriched by our global links. Contemporary patterns of migration extend this tradition.
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If, in the name of liberty, we allow individuals to act in a way that damages the wellbeing of the whole, it will inevitably mean the breakdown of mutuality, thereby changing the very nature of our society.
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I am not a parliamentarian. I am a politician. Some MPs leave and are itching to get back. I don't feel that. This is just a work environment.
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Despite being in public life, I value my own privacy immensely and would be as concerned as anyone else if I thought my mobile phone records could be easily available to officials across government.
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Being home secretary involves having to face some of the worst of human behaviour and challenges of modern society.