A Sheffield lad's steely resolve

David Blunkett tells Simon Midgley of his 'long, hard haul' towards a place at Sheffield University in the 1960s, in the second of our series on the university life of politicians who pronounce on education. David Blunkett, the shadow education and employment spokesman, studied for his A levels to get into university at night school and on day release. During the day he worked as a typist/clerk for the East Midlands Gas Board. It would have been a steep mountain for anyone to climb but for Blunkett, being virtually blind, it was an Everest-like ascent.

He attended residential schools for the blind, first in Sheffield and then in Shropshire. The headmaster of the latter, a boys-only technical school, did not think blind children should be troubled with public examinations. So when Blunkett returned to Sheffield to work it was without any qualifications.

It "was a long, hard haul" to take first some O levels and then three A levels and a national certificate in business studies. Six years later, in 1969, the national certificate and the A levels in economic history (B), law (E) and economics (E) won him a place at Sheffield University to study for a BA in political theory and institutions in the politics department under Bernard Crick.

David Blunkett was brought up on a council estate in the north of Sheffield, living among families of craftsmen in the steel and engineering industries with high status but poorly paid jobs. His father, who had worked for the East Midlands Gas Board for 47 years, died in a tragic industrial accident that left Blunkett and his mother in acute poverty. "When someone lost their job, or they lost their breadwinner in the case of my mother, then you really did know what poverty was," Blunkett says. "People talk of poverty these days but they normally do not have a clue what it was really like."

Sheffield, he says, had an excellent politics department. Some effort was made to ease his passage through his studies despite his obvious handicap. A room was made available to him where he could listen to reel-to-reel study tapes and type in braille. A circle of students read books to him. Most lecturers would allow him to tape lectures and transcribe notes afterwards.

Just before he went to university he got his first guide dog. "She was quite a character around the university," Blunkett says. "She used to jump in the duck pond and had to be dried out on the window ledge which doubled as the radiator, so the smell of wet dog was a familiar odour around the place."

In his second year he married a teacher training student, Ruth, and moved into a terraced house near the university (he is now divorced with three teenage sons). In the same year, at the age of only 23, he was elected to Sheffield City Council, where most of his fellow councillors were over 50.

In the late 1960s the Vietnam war was rumbling on, students were learning to make love not war and youthful protest was de rigueur. "I was slightly older, slightly aloof," Blunkett says. "I did not enjoy a vigorous social life. I watched the swinging 1960s and early 1970s from a distance.

"I was seen as being very much establishment because I was a member of the Labour party and at the time that was seen to be extremely right wing. I have found out since that most of the people who were in the revolutionary parties, the Socialist Society, the International Marxist Group, soon drifted off into well-paid jobs in private industry and have not been heard of in politics since."

University, Blunkett says, was the only time "when I really had time to read and to think and it was cathartic in that I was able to blend what I was learning about history and political philosophy and theory with what I was experiencing in the very practical world of city council politics.

"I would not [otherwise] have had the opportunity to have read Marx, Mill, Hobbes or Rousseau. That was a valuable experience. You need to have read Machiavelli to survive in the Commons. You learn very practical lessons about power politics. You learn about duplicity, but you also learn it is indeed a very foolish person who does not think through where power lies and how best to use the forces that exist around us, to be able to distinguish between betrayal and sensible pragmatism."

One book has stayed with him - The Strange Death of Liberal England by George Dangerfield. "It was very interesting to look at what happened to the Labour party in the late 1970s and through the 1980s and to reflect on how close we came to destroying ourselves. George Dangerfield's book had lessons about what happened to the Liberal party and its detachment from its constituency, its inability to change with the changes that were taking place in society. What struck me very clearly - and it is why I am a leftwing moderniser - is that unless you do reflect the interests and the aspirations and the economic and social values of the time then you become an anachronism and an irrelevance and that is what he was spelling out really."

Looking back on his university days, Blunkett, who got a 2:1, says : "If I had my time again I probably would have had a bit more fun because I did work very hard. I treated being a student like being at work. I was fairly dour."

And what about the heady mix of student protest and hedonism that characterised the late 1960s? "I think many of the students were substantially, although not entirely, self-indulgent. It was as much entertainment as it was dedicated commitment to changing people's lives. There was a lot of well-meaning genuine fervour about injustice and I would not seek to denigrate it but for many students it was a passing phase.

"I am in a better position to say this because my commitment to politics has lasted, [while that of] many others was ephemeral. I don't blame them. They lived for the moment and it was a time of considerable upheaval internationally and of fervour and indignation. I am all in favour of indignation; I would just like it to last more than six months."