A Labour grandee has warned the UK could “end up with Nigel Farage as prime minister” if the government fails to tangibly improve people’s lives.
Lord Blunkett, a former cabinet minister, said that the primary lesson of Donald Trump’s victory in the recent US presidential election is that government “tinkering” is not enough.
Blunkett, who served as home secretary, education secretary and work and pensions secretary during Tony Blair’s tenure as prime minister, spoke to an Institute for Government event on Tuesday evening, according to reporting by The Guardian.
He told attendees: “We’ve got to start thinking differently. We’ve got to be able to talk with people about the things that matter to them while you’re doing the big macro stuff. It’s not one or the other. You’ve got to do both.
“But if you don’t do the little things, you’ll end up with Farage as prime minister. It’s not beyond the bounds of possibility. Reform came second to Labour in 89 seats. Nevermind the ones they were close to in terms of Conservative seats.
“We’ve got to get real, basically. We’ve got time but not a lot of time to readjust to a different world.”
***Politics.co.uk is the UK’s leading digital-only political website. Subscribe to our daily newsletter for all the latest news and analysis.***
Blunkett added that No 10 and Whitehall had about six months to embark on reforms or the government may “run out of momentum”.
“I think they’ve probably got six months. I heard somebody rather stupidly in the spring … from a policy angle brief that Labour’s policies were all ready, they’d all been signed off. It was a load of baloney. They had signed off generalities and macro but not the details of what was going to happen.”
The former cabinet minister continued: “Bringing people in very quickly which Wes [Streeting] has been doing, the review of curriculum … those are important early moves that will have to lead to very rapid change because otherwise the government will run out of momentum. It just happens.”
Lord Blunkett became the UK’s first blind cabinet minister as Secretary of State for Education and Employment following Labour’s landslide victory in the 1997 general election.
At the start of the Labour government’s second term in 2001, Blunkett was promoted to home secretary. Following the 2005 general election, Blunkett was returned to the cabinet as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions.
He was awarded a life peerage in the 2015 Dissolution Honours.
Josh Self is Editor of Politics.co.uk, follow him on X/Twitter here.
Politics.co.uk is the UK’s leading digital-only political website. Subscribe to our daily newsletter for all the latest news and analysis.
