Full text of a speech given by Tony Blair at Bristol University on "Our Nation's Future":

(Not checked against delivery)

For me in many ways, this is the culmination of a personal journey. I was brought up in a legal household, studied law, became a barrister with the traditional lawyer’s views of issues to do with civil liberties and crime.

I then became an M.P. and at the same time was living in London, in the inner city. I saw first hand in London and in Sedgefield through my constituents the changing nature of our society and of law and order. The first article I wrote on ASB was in the Times in 1988. I volunteered to be Shadow Home Secretary after the 1992 election. I always remember John Smith saying to me when I told him the portfolio I wanted: "are you sure?" with that John Smith look that translated as: "are you out of your mind?"

The reason I wanted it, was not just because I thought it would be politically interesting, as indeed it turned out to be; nor even because I wanted to change radically the Labour Party’s stance on it, though I certainly did; but because I had become, through personal experience in London, in my constituency – the inner city and rural England – convinced that we were witnessing profound social and cultural change and that the legal establishment I had been brought up in and the political establishment I had joined, were completely out of touch with this, didn’t understand it and certainly weren’t dealing with it.

Nine years on as P.M and many pieces of legislation later, I find myself in a curious and not entirely comfortable position: attacked both for failing to be tough enough; and for being authoritarian; and sometimes by the same people on both grounds simultaneously.

The situation is complicated still further by the fact that, in Government, it is true that crime has fallen. Indeed we are the first post-war British Government that has seen crime fall during its term of office. In addition, the asylum system that was in virtual chaos when we arrived in 1997, is on any objective basis, substantially better run now than then. But unsurprisingly, given the publicity, no-one would believe it. The truth is there have been improvements, there has been progress, but the gap between what the public expects and what the public sees is still there.

And the political and legal establishment is still in denial. I know what large numbers of such people believe. They believe we are on a populist bandwagon, the media whips everyone up into a frenzy, and if only everyone calmed down and behaved properly the issue would go away. It may well be true that politicians can be overly populist; it may be true that, as I know more than most, the media can distort; but actually neither reason is the reason why the public are anxious. The public are anxious for a perfectly good reason: they think they play fair and play by the rules and they see too many people who don’t, getting away with it. By the public I don’t mean the "hang ‘em and flog ‘em" brigade. I mean ordinary, decent law-abiding folk, who believe in rehabilitation as well as punishment, understand there are deep-rooted causes of crime and know that no Government can eliminate it. But they think the political and legal establishment are out of touch on the issue and they are right.

So when we introduced ASB legislation, it was ridiculed and in part watered down. Each piece of asylum and criminal justice legislation has been diluted, sometimes fundamentally in the Houses of Parliament. Each law on terrorism has been attacked, in one case as posing more threat to the country’s safety than the terrorism itself. Sometimes the very parts of the political system most vociferous in their demand that we act on the issues have been the most determined in their resistance to the measures taken.

So here we are today with the Home Office, understandably, under siege. And, of course, I don’t say, for a moment that mistakes haven’t been made, that competence or lack of it has not been a serious complaint. But I do say that it is a complete delusion to think that simply by changing Ministers, civil servants or practices, the gap I referred to earlier, is going to be bridged. It isn’t. I have learnt many things in 9 years of Government and that is one of them.

I have also learnt something else. I have come to the conclusion that part of the problem in this whole area has been the absence of a proper, considered intellectual and political debate about the nature of liberty in the modern world. In other words, crime, immigration, security – because of the emotions inevitably stirred, the headlines that naturally scream, the multiplicity of the problems raised - desperately, urgently need a rational debate, from first principles and preferably unrelated to the immediate convulsion of the moment.

What’s more, I believe we can get to a sensible, serious and effective answer to these issues and build a consensus in favour of them. But we can’t do it unless the argument is won at a far more fundamental level than hitherto.

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