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UK: Editorial: Blunkett's stock rises
The Guardian
Saturday 14 Jul 2001 He is right to pursue radical policies We are not talking about a conversion on the scale of Nixon in China, but during the past few days there have been encouraging signs that David Blunkett may want to give home affairs a more modern and more attractive face than it ever had under Jack Straw. After the ice age, the mere hint of "debate" about cannabis sounds like a major melt. Mr Blunkett is shaping up as a police reformer too - while coming on strongly as the bobbies' friend. On asylum and prisons, the Blunkett Home Office has a chance of pulling back from the high-cost inefficiencies Mr Straw had presided over. Andrew Marr, in his guise as Daily Telegraph columnist, pronounces national conversation about drugs to be "boring". He misses the point that the contested land in modern society has shifted; there is a lively politics of leisure which interests some (younger) people a lot more than is implied by party political reports from College Green. Even cloth-eared Labour ministers have now realised that tolerance of a large-scale leisure pursuit - the consumption of cannabis - has become a touchstone issue: candidates in the Tories' leadership election acknowledge it. Mr Blunkett has, it is true, not gone very far, but even to admit - as he did in the Spectator this week - that there is no necessary relationship between cannabis and hard drugs is a step forward. He must realise his political future would be so much rosier if he were to take the next and obvious step. What a difference a month makes. Then, Mr Straw was barracked by the Police Federation. Now, in the margins of his summit with police chiefs, federation leaders seemed extraordinarily emollient - the home secretary was, after all, threatening to end all sorts of cosy arrangements from which their members have benefited over the years. Perhaps they realise that a police reformer must also present himself as a "hard man". Tough talk after the Bradford riots purchases room for manoeuvre on pay and conditions. His justified intervention in Sussex has raised questions about how the police are governed in England and Wales, but also made thoroughgoing reform of Spanish practices more likely. Sooner or later, a government committed to modernising public services will have to examine the deceit that police authorities are autonomous and the pretence that chief constables are accountable, except to the centre. It is too early to compile a Blunkett score card. But his Home Office looks like being a sleeker, more focused brief. Whitehall rejigging has robbed it of responsibility for freedom of information. If there is further foot-dragging on implementation of last year's half-a-loaf act, Derry Irvine carries the can. Meanwhile, Mr Blunkett has been given a chance to rationalise migration policy, work permits having transferred from employment. The private sector's failure to bid to run Brixton will force him to reappraise the management of prisons, but a home secretary who can be as tough with inefficiency among the police as Mr Blunkett promises to be should find it relatively easy to continue pushing prison officers in a progressive direction. With Robin Cook transferred, Jack Straw proving to be a slow learner at the Foreign Office and Gordon Brown beginning to see the folly of his dogmatism over public finances, David Blunkett's stock has inevitably risen. As one of the Blair cabinet's few heavyweights, he will go on attracting attention. If the price of his political ambition is making the Home Office a seat of reform and policy innovation, we would welcome his setting his sights high.
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