David Blunkett Quotes

The people of Britain want a Home Secretary who will give them back their streets. They want a Home Secretary who will speak up for the victim, not the criminal.

As home secretary, I gained a reputation for being 'tough'; less concerned with liberty than with public protection.

We took an approach, supported by the Prime Minister, the Home Secretary and the Mayor for London, that we had very real fears of violence and damage being caused across the streets of London.

If I pleaded guilty to a mistake while I was home secretary, it wasn't that I didn't get tough - my God, I put immigration and security officials on French soil for the first time.

I'm the British home secretary. My job is to protect the British public.

As one of the principal responsibilities of the government is to safeguard its citizens, it is entirely reasonable that it should look at what more might be done to improve security.

Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves. What is equally true is that every community gets the kind of law enforcement it insists on.

The whole duty of government is to prevent crime and to preserve contracts.

Well the first order of government is to preserve the public order and safety.

Of all the tasks of government, the most basic is to protect its citizens from violence.

The experience of being a prosecutor gives us a sort of proctologists view of our society.

We are much safer in the United States, but not yet safe.

Crime prevention has to become a first priority.

Crimes happen, but some are preventable.

Law and order is the responsibility of the state governments.

Law and order is a state responsibility. I can assure you peace will be maintained in Uttar Pradesh.

My job as Home Secretary is to keep families and communities across our country safe.

Safety and security are the most basic job of government. I understand that - both as a mayor who works every day to secure public safety and reduce crime, and also as someone who deployed in uniform to Afghanistan because I believed joining the military was part of my duty to help keep my country safe.

We need law and order in America.

Let me have my tax money go for my protection and not for my prosecution. Let my tax money go for the protection of me. Protect my home, protect my streets, protect my car, protect my life, protect my property...worry about becoming a human being and not about how you can prevent others from enjoying their lives because of your own inability to adjust to life.

Arresting a single drunk or a single vagrant who has harmed no identifiable person seems unjust, and in a sense it is. But failing to do anything about a score of drunks or a hundred vagrants may destroy an entire community.

The essential function of the State is to maintain peace, justice, law, and order, and to protect the individual citizen against aggression, violence, theft, and fraud.

Law and order is a social service. Crime and the fear which the threat of crime induces can paralyse whole communities, keep lonely and vulnerable elderly people shut up in their homes, scar young lives and raise to cult status the swaggering violent bully who achieves predatory control over the streets. I suspect that there would be more support and less criticism than today's political leaders imagine for a large shift of resources from Social Security benefits to law and order - as long as rhetoric about getting tough on crime was matched by practice.

I will work with local police and appoint the best prosecutors and federal investigators, whose mission will be to ensure every American is safe.

Those who heralded the decision not to give law enforcement the tools necessary to protect the American people just simply don't see the world the way we do.