“ANTI-poverty campaigner Frank Field has been one of my political heroes throughout his four decades in Parliament. His only mistake - which he wears like a hair shirt - was to back Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader.”
I wrote these words in 2018 when this most honourable of Honourable Members quit Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in disgust over its blatant anti-semitism.
He had nominated Corbyn in the hope he would be crushed in the contest. His principled resignation stood as a rebuke to those who continued to serve under Corbyn until his defeat in 2020, including the present Labour leader.
This was not the first time this rigorously honest Labour politician had fallen out with his own party.
Lord Field of Birkenhead, who has died aged 83 after a long battle with cancer, waged a lifelong crusade against low pay and child poverty.
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He blamed mass immigration for importing cheap labour and criticised the poverty traps created by the welfare state.
Field refused to see the poor as Labour “voting fodder”.
His aim as director of the Child Poverty Action Group was to untangle chaotic tax and welfare rules which left families at the mercy of the meddling “nanny state” rather than the dignity of work.
I witnessed him demolish three left-wing academics who insisted Britain would never eliminate unemployment .
Field pointed out that there were at the time five million adults on work-related benefits.
“Yet we have imported five million migrants to do the jobs they could do,” he said.
Tony Blair famously chose him in 1997 as social security minister to “think the unthinkable”, only to sack him a year later for upsetting Chancellor Gordon Brown.
The slightly-built MP for Birkenhead was fearless in battle. In the 1980s, he risked physical violence during Militant Tendency’s ruthless bid to take over the Labour Party on Merseyside.
Unusually among modern politicians, he always put principles above party, often in defiance of Labour policy.
The devout Christian also confronted the Church of England over its practice of selling treasures from deconsecrated churches and failing to support retired clergy.
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He was regarded with suspicion after hailing Labour hate figure Margaret Thatcher as “the first prime minister since Gladstone to address the big moral questions”.
Lady Thatcher frequently sought his views on welfare issues and he was one of the last people she spoke to before resigning in 1990.
Field was one one of the few Labour MPs who campaigned for Brexit in the 2016 referendum on the grounds that immigration impoverished British workers.
Having once opposed “assisted dying” he wrote to the House of Lords from his hospice to say he was now in favour.
"I changed my mind on assisted dying when an MP friend was dying of cancer and wanted to die early before the full horror effects set in, but was denied this opportunity,” he said.
Close friend and ex-Home Secretary David Blunkett spoke of the admiration of politicians of all parties for this “loveable maverick”.
“He had integrity and commitment to the causes he believed in,” he said. “I loved Frank.”
