At a time when the public are fretting more than ever about identikit MPs spouting party lines and purchasing interior goods with their hard-earned taxes, Frank Field certainly bucks the trend. Simultaneously reviled and admired, one accusation which cannot be levelled at him is that he’s just like the rest of them. Determined to ‘think the unthinkable’ when appointed social security minister in 1997, Field is still doing so over a decade later, recently leading calls for the government to reverse the abolition of the 10p tax rate.
So what about his detractors, who said he was only pushing the issue in order to inflict damage on the leadership? He’s riled and says he dislikes ‘this whole business of putting sticky fingers in other people’s souls’ and that the reason for his intervention was because the government ‘probably cut the living standards of 9 million people, largely their voters’. Field is particularly dismissive of the chancellor’s claim that there was no alternative: ‘That’s the most shocking and irresponsible thing I’ve ever heard.’ Having laid into Alistair Darling, later on in the interview Field startles us by claiming that the chancellor was ‘the one to watch’, ‘one of the most underrated ministers in government’, and would be ‘the safest pair of hands in the government’ if Labour had another leadership crisis.
He’s just as blunt when asked about Labour’s poor polling figures, suggesting that it’s because the party keeps ‘pissing off the electorate’. ‘I don’t have a clear image of what the government’s new objectives are and I’m moderately interested in politics, so if I don’t, I’m not surprised the voters don’t.’ He carries on: ‘We all keep talking about reinventing ourselves. You don’t do it by talking, you do it by doing.’ The difference between government and opposition, he contends, is that in opposition ‘one can only issue press releases, in government you can do things’. In a characteristically curmudgeonly way, he concludes: ‘If we go on like this, we’re going to be annihilated.’
But Field isn’t totally resigned to defeat. He believes that Labour can still win, but only if it takes the initiative on policy solutions. So he suggests that instead of focusing on party conference, every cabinet minister must ‘work out one key objective for their department’. The party needs ‘one major policy which shows we’ve not run out of ideas and also shows that we’re seeking a mandate to continue changing Britain’. His own prescriptions would be to break the link between coming to the UK to work and ‘automatically becoming a citizen’, ‘abolish pensioner poverty’ and provide ‘actual jobs’ for young people. Controversially, he suggests that Labour should abandon its opposition to cuts in public services, stating that current dividing lines ‘clearly don’t have much credibility with the cabinet’ so they are unlikely to ‘have much credibility with the voters’.
Much of Field’s political concerns seem to be directly informed by his Birkenhead constituency. He says the link he has with constituents is his ‘tutorial’ ‘because people in Birkenhead know the buck stops at my desk’. He’s against proportional representation which results in multi-member seats for this reason: ‘Many MPs are the biggest link that the voters have with an unyielding bureaucracy.’ He’s also dismissive of David Cameron’s proposals to cut the number of MPs by 10%: ‘What we need to do is get the role of the House of Commons right, not make us more like social workers.’ His approach to welfare reform has left some urging him to cross the floor to the Tories, but it’s clear that Field is driven by his experience of deprivation on his doorstep, and that he certainly considers himself to be leftwing.
Describing how he’d recently talked to a young man who was unemployed, he remarks: ‘It’s terrible these kids who don’t work, there’s no structure to their day … my God, it’s a twilight world we’ve allowed them to get into.’ Field jokes that when one lad finally got out of bed to speak to him and the Sunday Times, he berated the chap for not accepting work for less than £300 a week, whereupon he was told to ‘take it or leave it’. ‘And if I’d been minister still, I said, you’d have to take it mate,’ he recounts with relish, continuing: ‘It’s terrible that we think somehow that it is leftwing allowing kids to go down the plug hole like this.’
This sense of despair at the state of society pervades much of Field’s analysis, though he denies that this is directly linked to his Christian faith: ‘I never consciously think about it. I don’t think, is this a Christian view? I don’t think it’s a more moral issue to be thinking about protecting vulnerable people as they die, or bringing justice to the 10p, or thinking about what is open to us to save the planet.’
Field is an odd mix of populist firebrand and sensitive soul. One moment he’s complaining about older people ‘who are beginning to lose their minds being cared for by people who can hardly speak English’ and the next he’s saying that he couldn’t ‘survive in the circumstances of some of the people in Birkenhead who do survive, to their great credit’, adding, ‘while I’m always going on about their behaviour to them, I’m incredibly sympathetic about what they achieve.’
What is clear, however, is that Field will not be put into a political box. He has no truck for a group of people who he believes have so many opportunities but ‘who do not wish to work and I don’t see why we should pay them benefits’. And yet, he also talks passionately about his charity Cool Earth and its idea of setting up the first world national park where international citizens could come together to donate to save the rainforest.
He’s also keen to embrace new media: ‘We’re aiming to have the best website in parliament’, and has supported primaries longer than most of the new kids on the block: ‘I think there is a new age for the party. We ain’t going to be able to go back 100 years.’ Asked about how he would respond to those in the party who are worried about primaries taking power away from the grassroots, he says: ‘I was the person who started one member one vote, and they said exactly the same thing. It’s an extension of that.’ ‘The true fact is the electorate are walking away from parties and they are not interested in the rigmarole and the structure which is the party membership. No other organisation they belong to resembles the Labour party.’
In our parting question to Field we ask what he’d recommend to Labour activists to read in the runup to the coming election. We expect something historical or politically instructive, but he surprises us by suggesting The Leopard, written by a Sicilian Prince, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa: ‘It’s one of the great books and I would say literally you won’t think about anything else, it will be the best tonic for you, you won’t be thinking about majorities, campaigns, leaflets or any of the mundane things.’ Field’s tonic may not be to every Labour member’s taste, but as he continues to think the unthinkable, he certainly makes you think too.