Leadership Quote by David Blunkett

“Strengthening our identity” is politician-speak with a deliberate double edge: it sounds nurturing, almost therapeutic, while quietly asserting that identity is something the state can tighten like a belt. Blunkett is talking about confidence and well-being, but he’s also talking about control - about making belonging legible, teachable, and, by implication, enforceable.

The intent is to frame national identity as a public good, not a cultural preference. By linking “identity” to “citizenship,” he fuses emotion with obligation: feel secure, and you’ll behave civically; behave civically, and you’ll be accepted. It’s a neat rhetorical bridge between soft language (confidence, well-being) and hard policy (integration requirements, citizenship tests, expectations around language and “shared values”). The subtext: fragmentation is the threat, cohesion the cure, and cohesion can be administered from above.

Blunkett’s era matters. As a prominent UK minister in the early 2000s, he operated in a post-9/11 atmosphere thick with anxiety about social trust, immigration, and “parallel communities.” In that context, “identity” becomes a policy instrument aimed at preventing alienation and extremism, but also a way to reassure a nervous majority that the center still holds. The brilliance - and the risk - is in the coupling. If identity is positioned as the route to well-being, those who don’t mirror the favored identity can be cast not just as different, but as undermining collective health. The line sells unity as care, while keeping the power to define “us” safely in official hands.