Banged Up By Blunkett

Is the former home secretary (and former education secretary, too) really declaring mea culpa? David Blunkett is fronting Banged Up, a Channel Five reality series purporting to give a reality check to persistent young offenders. The blurb implies that he's really a softie who was only doing his job as a tough guy when he was home secretary.

David Blunkett was always an effective advocate of hardline New labor: approaching power from the left of the party, he gave voice to the project's visceral populism, its moral pieties and its social conservatism. His Sheffield socialism wasn't socially progressive. He didn't mind lefties, they didn't frighten him, he could see their point and recognize their place. But anyone who knows the man recognizes that he was never a liberal. Blunkett was unique among his contemporaries: even more than Tony Blair, he enunciated New Labor speak as if he really meant it.

The project was always simultaneously authoritarian and abject; it was in thrall to power and alienated from "the masses". Blunkett's success – in contrast to his failures of judgment – was to bend big-spending departments to the will of the project, and to appear simultaneously powerful and helpless.

Education and the Home Office were the crucibles. They, above all, articulated Labour's reorientation from a social justice party to a criminal justice party. Today's young offenders are their legacy. Their recidivism exposes the fundamental flaw behind Banged Up and Blunkett's own thinking: for them, the concept of the future – the theme of Blunkett's questions to them – doesn't mean much. (They're not alone; they share with their generation a sense that things can only get worse.)

And they are not afraid of prison. They are 18-year-olds with the reading age of eight-year-olds; they are boys for whom violence can be more compelling than love, or a job, or money, or liberty; for whom the alchemy of masculinity as mastery and martyrdom is often more alluring than life itself.

Of course, this is not addressed by Banged Up or Blunkett.

The young men crowding our young offenders institutions were about 10 years old when Labor was elected: their journey to jail was foretold. Labour's election pledge card promised to fast track them through the criminal justice system. The government's record is also is their criminal record – these are the Blunkett boys.