Politics, Poverty and Belief: A Political Memoir

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Despite me hanging on now, it doesn’t look likely I’m going to see it,” he says drily. “Thank God, I don’t think about it. It would only make me depressed. For now, I’m having a really nice time doing a lot of reading.” Field has spent his adult life fighting against poverty in Britain, through parliament and through his strong personal influence. Poverty for him has injustice at its root and as he explains in this book, he has found allies on all sides of the political spectrum. He was appointed by Tony Blair to be the Secretary of State for Pensions, but the reforms he advocated were so radical and essentially just, that Tony Blair could not contemplate them and Field stood down. Previously he had been Chairman of the Work and Pensions Select Committee under John Major.

He seems suddenly wearied by the complications of that debate. “I’m getting a bit tired,” he says, “perhaps a couple more questions.” 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.” 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. His right against the hard left momentum tribe took some guts, as did his fight against anti-semitism.

Church Times/Sarum College:

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. 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.”

I admire his collusion with Ian Duncan Smith when he tried to modernise the benefit system, and no doubt if Mr Smith had taken his advice we may have had a short painful period that would eventually bring forth the required gains. 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.” 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)? 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.” 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.I’m in doubt now,” he says. “I’ve been thrown into doubt talking to you about that. But I imagine at some stage I will resume my happy equilibrium that [Christianity] is the best argument in town.” Although I’m viewed as a Christian in politics, I think Christianity has done a real disservice in trying to be an effective politician,” he explains. In the increasingly dirty world of British politics, one man has stood out for unimpeachable integrity - the former Labour Member of Parliament for Birkenhead, Frank Field.