Yet I want to offer a more sympathetic hearing for a man who was eventually hounded out of office by the very media that had previously celebrated his populist stand. Not that I agreed with some of those positions, but Blunkett's initiatives invariably struck a chord. They made sense to vast tranches of the population who felt the education system was failing or whose lives appeared to be blighted by "yobs on the street". Many of the perspectives to which Blunkett was attentive and attuned were misplaced, misguided or wrong. But they reflected real feelings and, as the sociologist WI Thomas once famously said, "if things are perceived as real, they are real in their consequences".
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