Published: FT, 7 August 2010
David Blunkett, 63, former cabinet minister and current Labour MP for Sheffield Brightside and Hillsborough, is vice-president of the Alzheimer's Society.
What is the first charity you supported?
When I was 16, I visited an old lady called Mrs Plum every week for two years. When I left the area, I intended to say that I hoped I'd been some help. Before I could, she said she hoped she'd been a help to me. It was a two-way street.
Which cause do you feel most passionately about?
Generically, I think we need to build the confidence, leadership skills and the wherewithal for people to be self-determining and to shape the world around them. In the charitable sector, I feel most passionately about Alzheimer's. It has a huge impact. Someone is still alive, but they've effectively left the field. They are no longer the person who a wife or husband has married. Alzheimer's Society is the nominated charity for the Bupa Great Run Series. How have charity and exercise become so linked? It's a cry to others without having to beg. It's saying that I'm prepared to, literally in this case, go the extra mile if you're prepared to put up the money. That feels easier than saying to people I'm really in favour of this cause and I'm coming round with this hat.
How has being born blind affected your attitude to charity?
Initially, it made me antagonistic. In those days you could physically hear charity collectors rattling tins. I didn't want their charity. I worried that charities put the giver in a morally superior position, therefore inevitably putting the receiver in an inferior one. My position on that has not changed, but I think we can avoid a superior/inferior result by engaging the receiver in the process of shaping charitable policy. For the welfare state, for example, we need programmes that prevent people from being passive recipients.
Your beliefs seem to tally with David Cameron's idea of a Big Society.
I was brought up on a council estate where people helped each other with a sense of common purpose. Postwar we lost that reciprocity and mutuality in left-of-centre politics. I would be in favour of Big Society if we weren't destroying public services.
Should we put our own country's citizens first?
No. I think there's a seamless moral, ethical and personal issue here, not just the practical fact that what we do abroad has a long-term effect on ourselves, or even that a country that thrives becomes an economic trading partner.
Does charity cover areas that government should have covered?
Charity has filled gaps where public service has been unable to deliver, but I don't take the view that government has to do everything. I think that in the current frenzy of cuts in Britain, we need a debate about the role of government, and where charities and other third-sector bodies have a role.
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