Frank Field
Bloomsbury, 2023
Frank Field was Member of Parliament for Birkenhead for 40 years, He died this year, a few months after his book was published. He is often described as a ‘maverick’ in that although he was a Labour MP, he was free-thinking and often did not follow the party line.
The book is an easy read, and a sometimes touching memoir of his political thinking and its grounding in his Christian beliefs.
As a boy he attended a Church of England church in Chiswick:
“St Nicholas’s provided me with a sense of protection and belonging, and I cannot thank this church community enough for the protection it offered me […] Here I was safe from my father’s outbursts of rage and bullying.” (Page 23).
He lived his life with a sense of being under God’s care:
“Until recently, I’ve never been able to see this blessing being on a par with the experience of those Christians who talk of knowing Jesus. I have no such personal knowledge of the Godhead.” (Pages 27-28).
His interest in Christian Socialism began by reading “Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation” published in 1889, edited by Charles Gore.
“The Lux Mundi group held importance for me because of their insistence of God’s presence in the world, on the immanence of God in every aspect of our daily life. I could no longer hold the view of God being somewhere up there. […] If God was everywhere, politics was a crucial activity in our response to this wonderful fact.” (Page 47).
He was not often explicit that his Christian faith was the foundation for his politics. In the United States, politicians who refer to their Christian faith might gain votes, but in the UK you are more likely to be portrayed in the media as a religious nut, a vote loser:
“the Bible which has become one of the more important influences on my politics, giving greater coherence to my work. And yet I rarely mention it. Why? The answer is quite simply for political reasons: I wish the campaigns on which I work to be successful. The Christian language today has sadly become a barrier to, rather than a purveyor of meaning.” (Page 49).
Despite being a member of the Labour party, he has some appreciation of the much-hated Conservative Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher:
“My early years as an MP overlapped with the Thatcher years. The centre-left did continually cry that she ‘cultivated greed’. That cry had more than a ring of truth to it, but her ideas were more subtle than this assertion allowed […] self-interest and selfishness were not the same motive force […] self-interest […] is, a pure motive […] We are told in the New Testament to love others as ourselves” (Page 34).
One of his early campaigns was for the sale of council houses to their tenants.
“I had for a long time been thinking about the wealth tied up in council houses and about the bureaucratic use of this wealth to reduce tenants to little better than serfs – and serfs who looked to the Lord of the Manor at the Town Hall to direct all too many of their actions. […]
I was canvassing in a block of flats. ‘See that door, mate? It has kept me awake night after night for two years. Every time the bleeding wind blows, that door bangs and can bang all night. For years I have been complaining to your council but nothing bleeding happens.’ My constituent was referring to the door outside his home which led to the stairs.
‘Why don’t you mend it yourself?’ I hesitatingly inquired ‘and bill the council for the cost. I will register the bill if you want.’ ‘Blimey, what do you think I pay rent for?’ […] I wandered down those concrete stairs stained with urine […] If this gentleman owned his own home, surely his attitude would be different; he would not believe that it was up to somebody else to do what was obviously needed” (Pages 75-76).
Frank’s idea to sell council houses to their tenants was not taken up by his Labour Party. It was later taken up by the Conservatives, but in the wrong way:
“In 1975 I wrote a pamphlet entitled ‘Do We Need Council Houses?’ and argued for their sale. Two Labour Prime Ministers asked civil servants to investigate the feasibility […] Civil servants reported that it was impossible to implement. […] The idea was implemented by an incoming Tory government […] Mrs Thatcher sold cheaply, and there was no rebuilding of the stock sold; nor was any of the money used directly to repair stock and to build social housing.” (Pages 74-75).
He also campaigned for a National Minimum Wage – at first opposed by all political parties, but now supported by them all.
Frank reflects on the causes of poverty and its contribution to the break-up of society.
“Why are there such wicked extremes of hunger, on the one hand, and concentrations of wealth of mind-boggling proportions, on the other, in Britain today? […] The first cause comes in the wake of globalization. The immediate impact of globalization in this country was to give us cheaper goods. But this was at a huge cost of stripping out most manufacturing jobs in Britain. […] The loss of family wage jobs has, I believe, led to an unprecedented break-up of the traditional family of two parents nurturing and caring for children. […] We also had at this time a social security system that paid proportionately more for single-parent families than it did for two-parent families. […]
In the place of jobs paying family wages […] has come employment in the gig economy, characterized by low pay, zero-hours contracts and bogus self-employment […] Here we see the greed of some of the owners of the new platform companies defining their workers as self-employed so that they, as employers, do not incur the normal labour costs of national insurance and pension contributions” (Pages 94-96).
His campaign to address child poverty argues that more is needed than simply the redistribution of money:
“we should seek ways of teaching parenting life skills through the existing national curriculum […] Compare the current belief that parenting is taught by a process of osmosis with the education the state insists that those wishing to adopt children must undergo.” (Page 124).
He analyses how the ‘culture of respect’ has declined.
“Three forces have been seminal in Britain having a culture of respect. First, it is impossible to comprehend how British society functioned, particularly over the past 200 years, without appreciating the central importance of Christianity. […] Evangelical morality […] taught a simple, comprehensive public creed of what was expected of each and every one of us.” (Pages 135-136).
I know this from reading my church’s parish magazines of 100 years ago, the word “duty” is used constantly – ‘it is your duty to help others’. The word ‘duty’ is almost never used today, apart from when referring to the Royal Family doing their ‘duty’ to the nation. Where there is no underpinning agreed belief system, no one has a duty to anybody else.
Frank writes that, whilst we can’t turn the clock back, we need to address the consequences of the breakdown in our social order:
“I am in no way making a plea that our political efforts should go into trying to restore this old order. I do not believe for one moment that this option is open to us. […] Similar influential and favourable forces are required now if a counter-push against the growth of present-day nihilism is to be successful.” (Page 145).
August 2024
Adrian Vincent