Politics, Poverty and Belief: A Political Memoir

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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 the voters’ lives. This prophet was dishonoured in his own party, but thoughtful voters everywhere are grateful for his service.

He was born in Edmonton in 1942, son of working-class 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. No, he didn’t talk about [belief] to me. If I sent something I’d written to him, he would say, ‘Of course, I agree with a lot of this, Frank.’ But he wouldn’t be specific. I don’t suppose he bothered to read it.”From 1st July 2021, VAT will be applicable to those EU countries where VAT is applied to books - this additional charge will be collected by Fed Ex (or the Royal Mail) at the time of delivery. Shipments to the USA & Canada: Indeed, he would regularly pop into Downing Street during the Eighties and was one of the last people to see the PM the night before her resignation. He joined the Labour Party at the age of 16 and was expelled from it at the age of 78.' -Brian & Rachel Griffiths'Frank Field is one of the most important, iconoclastic and remarkable politicians of his generation.

He was appointed Minister for Welfare Reform by Tony Blair, and Chairman of the Work and Pensions Select Committee under John Major. With the Rowntree Trust, Field set up the Low Pay Unit (LPU). For the past half-century Frank Field has been an outstanding parliamentarian, social reformer and champion of the disadvantaged. He joined the Labour Party at the age of 16 and was expelled from it at the age of 78.' -Brian & Rachel GriffithsIn the end, Field's zeal for reform was too much for too many people, and, in 2015, he was deselected by his own local Labour party. Politics, Poverty and Belief is an implicit indictment of modern British politics - the world of cash for questions, Partygate and all the rest - in which the poor get poorer and the rich get richer. I call it low church Catholic; without any lace,” he smiles. “And without too much incense, as well.” But their encounters – goodness knows what his local constituents would have made of them – had a more personal impact, as well. “What I admired was her total command of the machine,” he says. Favouring books about economic theory and political history, each extra day remains a boon. Diagnosed with prostate cancer ten years ago, Baron Field of Birkenhead (he chooses not to use his title) is still going strong despite being transferred to a hospice two years ago. From the very word go, I’ve been conscious that we’ve been fallen, but from my mother I got this sense of the possibility of redemption,” he says. “One of the reasons why there has been tension between me and the Labour party is that in the 1970s and 80s, they developed a very highfalutin view of human nature. And a growing part of our electorate ceased to believe in the Labour cause because they knew damn well how people behaved. They could see it in people in their own street.”

I had to have at least 45 years paying national insurance, where the MODERN brood only pay 30yrs contributions (how does that redress national pension pots)? Frank Field during a lecture at Southwark College, London, following the cabinet leak row of 1976. Photograph: Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy I think it would be jolly nice if there was. My friend Barbara Wootton used to say the worst of it was that if you argued with bishops that this is all there is, and you were right, you would be denied the pleasure of ‘I told you so’. I feel a bit like that.” Frank Field looking out from his Birkenhead constituency in 2009. Photograph: Andrew Tomlinson/Alamy

The book argues that in all of this he was mostly following his Christian conscience. Did he ever think about the priesthood as a vocation rather than politics? The economic side has been, for areas like Birkenhead, a wasteland really. The Thatcherite revolution did not produce the new jobs one hoped for.” And New Labour too, he suggests, failed to equip workers and families for that changed social landscape. She was wrong because she didn’t balance it. There was too much of the Fallen and not enough of the Redeemed. But what she said [about self-reliance] spoke to the nation during much of that period.” He tells me that he spent most of his time trying to change the Labour Party and make it more electable, but, in fact, it was his commitment to the poor, coupled with his goodness and his integrity, that won allies across the political spectrum. It didn’t make explaining politics any easier. In my book I question how big Christianity was to me. People who observed me say that it’s very important to me. I say, I just got on without thinking about it.

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 his wife Rachel Griffiths, who, in a touching introduction, say that “to spend a day with Frank... meant being constantly interrupted by members of the public, of all shades of political opinion, thanking him for what he had done.” In this touching but also profound memoir, the veteran former Labour MP and social campaigner Frank Field reveals the poverty of his own childhood and the deep and lasting effect of his Christian socialism. It was jolly nice being in the Lords, but given my previous oath to Queen Elizabeth included her successor, I couldn’t understand it.”In this book, Field talk about his activism, his foundational work with the Child Poverty Action Group and his work passing legislation for the Minimum Living Wage. Yes,” he says. “Most of my life, I’ve been on the outside, although I often longed to be on the inside. But I mean, in cabinet subcommittees I would take on Gordon [Brown] and nobody else would. I remember on one occasion we were talking about pensions and I kept saying to Gordon: ‘Where’s your paper on this?’” He grunts a funny impression of Brown’s towering umbrage. “Nobody else spoke up. I realised that they knew Gordon would just do ’em later.” It is a faith based on the belief that human beings are both fallen and redeemed. Because we are fallen, we cannot rely on altruism alone. We have to take into account the basic self-interest that drives most of what we do. This self-interest is partly natural and good, and partly inordinate and at the expense of other people. But we have to work with it. Nevertheless, we do have a genuine capacity to take into account the wider good, and everything needs to be set within that framework and ideal. This approach Field calls “self-interested altruism”. Another part of that intransigence in the face of authority came, he suggests, from finally standing up to his father. In his book he recalls the day his old man came at him with a hammer when he was 15 and he wrestled it from him and told him: “‘Next time I’ll use this on you.’ It was a huge lesson about power.” He seems suddenly wearied by the complications of that debate. “I’m getting a bit tired,” he says, “perhaps a couple more questions.”