The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Not Left or Right, but right
Ousted by Corbyn’s Labour, Frank Field is that rare thing: a politician who puts the common good before tribal party divides
POLITICS, POVERTY
AND BELIEF by Frank Field
208pp, Bloomsbury, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP£20, ebook £10.99
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Frank Field, former Labour minister and now a crossbench peer, has always defied labels. A frequent rebel, he campaigned for child benefit and the minimum wage (years ahead of its time), yet he also supported council-house sales and was friendly with Margaret Thatcher. It epitomised his career that he nominated Jeremy Corbyn for Labour leader to give the far-Left a fair hearing, only to be driven out of his party in 2018 in a far-Left purge.
Today, he is terminally ill. This book, a blend of memoir and political philosophy, was completed with the help of two friends, Brian Griffiths (once Thatcher’s chief policy adviser) and Griffiths’s wife, Rachel, who, in a touching introduction, say that “to spend a day with Frank... meant being constantly interrupted by members of the public thanking him for what he had done”.
He was born in Edmonton, London, in 1942, the son of workingclass Tories. At the age of 15, his father, a violent bully, threatened him with a hammer. Frank took it away from him and said that if he tried that again, “I would use the hammer on him.”
He found “protection and belonging” in church. Field shouldn’t be understood as dogmatically Left or Right, but as a Christian, a detail he tended to omit from speeches. He studied and admired idealism, the school of thought that worried Britain was losing its moral compass – so it sought new, more popular ways to transmit religious teaching via social activism. For Field, this meant joining the Labour Party.
He quickly discovered that the Left, though noble in theory, often puts ideology and tribe before practical steps to reduce poverty. As a councillor in the 1970s, Field saw how council housing could reduce tenants to the status of serf: let them buy their homes, he argued, and they’d have an asset of their own. But the
Left ruled it out. Their politics was flawed because it worked against the grain of human nature. Selfishness might be wrong, but self-interest is natural and can serve the common good.
Elected to Parliament for Birkenhead in 1979, Field paid particular attention to the question of why, in such a rich country, some people seem permanently left behind. Money is one answer: the Conservatives under Cameron cut and froze benefits, depriving a family with children of about £1,800 a year. According to Field, one branch of Tesco reported that children had switched from stealing sweets to stealing sandwiches, “to assuage their hunger”.
But they were also stealing “clean underwear” – presumably because their parents didn’t wash their clothes. Field once asked a headmaster to list the skills that children came to his primary school without – “to be pottytrained”, he replied, “to recognise their own name… to talk in sentences”. A group of 15-year-olds told Field that they wanted to learn from their school how to get a job, obviously, but also how to make friends and to be good parents. These were lessons they were not getting at home.
The Right says poverty is a personal failure, yet it’s also about societal injustice; the Left says the problem is economic, but it is also shaped by culture. Field concludes that we’ve undergone a rupture between the “tough love” of the Victorian era and the permissiveness of today, with the result that self-discipline is no longer transmitted between generations and many young Britons don’t know how to be good citizens. The job of the state, as per the Christian idealist tradition, must be to teach them, not for the sake of making them dependent on the government, but to empower them to be free from hunger and dependency.
The breadth and seriousness of this short, easy-to-read book is almost embarrassing. Other politicians’ memoirs are purely biographic, because they have no philosophy; Field’s is stuffed with theology and a variety of compassion that is actually useful. Few MPs have done so much to improve voters’ lives. This prophet was dishonoured in his own party, but thoughtful voters everywhere are grateful for his service.