Transcript
RON HASKINS: According to his bio, Right Honorable David Blunkett grew up blind and poor and, as often happens in public schools, he was encouraged to become a laborer. Then he defied advice, not for the last time in his career, and he went to the University of Sheffield. Upon graduation from Sheffield, he ran for and was elected to the City Council in Sheffield the age of 22, the youngest member ever to be elected to that body.
And then in 1987, he was elected to Parliament. He quickly rose in Parliament and became a member of the Shadow Cabinet, first for health, and then as education as part of what we in the United States call the minority party. So as long as their status was minority, he was in the Shadow Cabinet. But, as luck would have it, Labor won a sweeping triumph in the elections of 1997, and, as a result of that the Right Honorable David Blunkett became the Secretary of Education and soon thereafter, he became the Home Secretary, a very distinguished position in Great Britain. And among other things there, he was in charge of immigration policy, and he said a number of things that I think many people in the United States would agree with that were nonetheless quite controversial and they certainly were ahead of their time. As many brilliant find, the longer they live, people come to see the things that they said were younger become truer and truer and truer. It's kind of like your parents grow smarter as you grow older.
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