David Blunkett Quotes
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I'm as keen as the next person to preserve the right to free speech.
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The Home Office culture was one of being just above the problem, of hovering just out of reach of knowing what was going on on the ground, whether it was crime or immigration.
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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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If you have a sense of irony or humour, you're usually cut down, as you're usually distorted or misinterpreted. So it does lead to us being slightly more dour and staid and predictable than would otherwise be the case, which I personally find quite frustrating - because if you don't laugh occasionally in my job, you cry most of the time.
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Businesses that fail to develop their staff are twice as likely to collapse. Firms seeking to reposition themselves for the economic upturn need to invest in their staff's flexibility, responsiveness and skills.
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Where asylum is used as a route to economic migration, it can cause deep resentment in the host community.
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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.
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What is it that unites, on the left of British politics, George Orwell, Billy Bragg, Gordon Brown and myself? An understanding that identity and a sense of belonging need to be linked to our commitment to nationhood and a modern form of patriotism.
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If I pleaded guilty to a mistake while I was home secretary, it wasn't that I didn't get tough - my God, I put immigration and security officials on French soil for the first time.
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If surveillance infiltrates our homes and personal relationships, that is a gross breach of our human and civil rights.
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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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To make sense of a world in which rapid change and globalisation create genuine insecurity, we need benchmarks by which we can judge our actions and their long-term impact.
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Parents don't believe that lifting life-chances in one school means reducing them in another.
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We must draw on our early roots and remind people why the Labour party was created and who it sought to represent. We have never been a sectional party promoting self-interest, but instead a force for engaging self-reliance and self-determination.
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Children whose parents return to study do much better at school. Offenders who persist with studies are much less likely to reoffend. The national mental health strategy recognises the important role adult learning can play for people recovering from mental illness.
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The government wants to be able to attack extremism and hatred wherever it occurs.
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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.
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History teaches us that, whatever we say, racists will always distort the words of mainstream politicians to make themselves sound more respectable.
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I'm in favour of a sensible development of response units and their deployment in any circumstance where there may be a risk to the officers themselves or the neighbourhood they're in. I'm not in favour of a blanket arming of the police.
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And we think that our citizens and yours would be very angry if they thought that we hadn't taken every possible step for prevention and then for joint action in the likelihood of those who threaten our lives and our well- being, taking action at the same time.
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Much extremist activity falls short of directly inciting people to violence or other crimes and so is not caught by laws on incitement. Neither does the Public Order Act, used to protect groups of people from harassment, deal with the problem.
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In primary schools, I set two main objectives - to cut infant class sizes and improve literacy and numeracy.
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If you don't create a sense of order and stability, if people do not feel secure, then progressive politics is dead. That is a fact of history. The right has always emerged supreme when destabilisation and insecurity prevail.
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It would be dangerous territory if I wasn't practising what I preach which is to always accept responsibility, always accept the consequences of your actions.