Frank Field: “I will be fighting until everybody sees that Labour has no authority to kick me out”
13 min read
Last month Frank Field resigned the Labour whip after almost 40 years as an MP with a swipe at Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. But the now independent veteran is determined to keep up his work on welfare, poverty and the gig economy – and warns his opponents he will stand at the next general election. He talks to Matt Foster
If Frank Field felt even the slightest twinge of sadness at missing Labour’s annual conference last month, he’s certainly not letting it show. “I got on with doing things in my constituency,” he says. “I was meeting the minister for schools. We were talking about how we protect some of the most vulnerable children in Birkenhead. I got on with very practical things – and I read in the newspapers what everybody else did.”
The newly-independent backbencher dramatically resigned the party whip in August with an attack on Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. Field, who has made a career out of challenging conventional wisdom on the Labour benches, has indeed got plenty on his plate besides his high-profile fight with the party’s top team – on which plenty more later.
In the meantime, the Work and Pensions Select Committee he chairs has a string of inquiries in the works, including a fresh look at the controversial Universal Credit welfare shake-up and a probe into the impact of benefit sanctions. But it’s his own work on the burgeoning gig economy – on which ministers “keep promising and failing to deliver action” – that he’s most keen to talk about, as well as a major review of the Modern Slavery Act he’s carrying out for No10.
Field describes his work as Birkenhead’s MP – a position he’s held for almost 40 years – in deeply moral terms. His mission, the 76-year-old says, is no less than to “protect and promote the interests of the poor” at a time when the “soft underbelly” of the lower end of the labour market has been exposed. “The largest area of cuts that have been made to bring the budget deficit down have been on families below retirement age,” he says. “That’s why people are hungry, bordering on destitution.”
As well as drawing attention to the reality of welfare cuts, Field sees his constituency as a kind of incubator for ideas that he believes deserve a national hearing. “We’re trying to create an alternative moral economy for poorer people with what we’ve done in Birkenhead,” he says, reeling off a string of local initiatives he’s been involved in, from bringing together churches and food banks to offer hot meals to children during the summer holidays, to setting up a ‘Citizen’s Supermarket’ so local families can do the weekly shop at a steep discount while getting advice on benefits, debt and budgeting.
His work on the so-called gig economy is also framed in those moral terms, freely speaking of good and evil in a way that hints at his own religious beliefs (a recent post on Field’s website quotes no less an authority than Pope Pius XI). The MP describes the bosses of taxi app Uber – valued at around $72bn – as “monstrous people” for fighting calls to ensure drivers are classed as workers rather than self-employed contractors under the law – a move that would entitle them to a host of protections.
“Just as they don’t like paying taxes, they don’t like paying the statutory minimum wage,” he says. “And because we have a proper view here of bringing wages up to a minimum level, with benefits, the cost of that falls on taxpayers. So, they’re double villains here. They neither contribute to the tax revenue or want their own workers to be paid well. They force them into major dependency on money from other taxpayers.”
Alongside his senior researcher Andrew Forsey – who Field says “knows so much more than me on everything” – he has produced a string of hard-hitting “reform manifestos” designed to draw attention to the reality of work in the gig economy. The reports are packed with quotes from workers at the sharp end, reflecting Field’s own preference for direct testimony rather than what he calls the “high-falutin’” sociology of academics. “People, if they’re on the end of all this, can use language in a way the best poet can’t use,” he says. “We think the authenticity of all of this is important – the people being oppressed being able to say what’s happening to them.”
The latest report draws attention to the plight of fast food drivers working for Deliveroo and makes a provocative comparison between the hordes of green-jacketed cyclists waiting at junctions and the desperate scrabble for work that faced 19th century dockers. “You know, living standards are higher than they were then. But you’ve got to have more money just to keep a roof over your head,” he says. “You couldn’t get a better example of the breakdown of the post-war consensus than these workers who are being treated just as were dock workers before Ernest Bevin decided, ‘enough of this’.”
The MP wants to see firms like Deliveroo commit to paying workers for all the time they spend logged into their apps waiting for work – not just when they land jobs. Forsey, his researcher, argues that such a move is the least a company that sells itself largely on its constant availability to consumers can do. “The biggest move they can make to balance security with flexibility is to say, by all means as a rider you’re free to log in when you want to work – but while you’re logged in and you’re available for work, we’ll guarantee you a living wage because you’re helping us fulfil our offer to customers,” he says.
But Field himself – who acknowledges that the gig economy can work well for students and those seeking to top up existing earnings – remains deeply frustrated at the way ministers have so far responded to his calls for change. Despite positive noises following the Theresa May-backed Taylor review of modern employment, he says the government has yet to produce any substantial legislation to put staff at the likes of Uber and Deliveroo on a more secure footing. “They’ve all been going around saying, we’re so busy with Brexit, it’s so important’,” he says.
He adds: “Literally, we’ve had 18 months with almost nothing. I mean, scraps of legislation have come before Parliament. But we could have had the most impressive social reform programme ever if Mrs May had trusted others to get on and do it.”
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The MP is also determined to hold the government’s feet to the fire over the under-reported and highly-emotive issue of modern slavery. Field was one of the most vocal cheerleaders for the 2015 Modern Slavery Act, which was taken up as a personal crusade by May as Home Secretary. The pioneering law aimed to strike a blow for the estimated 13,000 people, including children, who have fallen into the hands of traffickers, pimps and unscrupulous bosses, forced against their will to work for nothing or next-to-nothing in nail bars, car washes and construction sites all over Britain.
Three years on from the landmark legislation, Field is clearly concerned that the government is dragging its heels. “If you meet victims of slavery, it changes your life, really – it has mine,” he says. “And if you had met them you wouldn’t be offering the inadequate support that we’re offering. I don’t blame civil servants for protecting themselves, but it’s the most horrifying experience.”
Field is particularly concerned about a recent move to halve the weekly support payments offered to people identified as victims under the act. The Home Office says the fall in payments from £65 to just £37.75 a week – the same rate asylum seekers are entitled to – will make the system more “consistent and fair”. But it’s an argument Field has little time for. “It shows all the silliness of a tidy mind,” he says. “They said ‘we must equalise the payments between victims of slavery and refugees’. The generous thing would have been to up the refugee rate. Instead, they cut it.”
He’s equally scathing about the Home Office’s argument – slipped out in a response to one of his committee’s reports – that granting bona fide victims of slavery a 12-month right to remain might act as a “pull factor” to people considering coming to the UK. “I’m sure it was well meant by the people that drafted it,” he says. “But they’ve never, ever met a person’s whose been enslaved. It’s a wonderful, theoretical response from the department in charge of immigration.”
In a bid to address some of these concerns, Field was all set to carry out his own review of the act from the backbenches. “And then No10 said, ‘hold on, we’d like you to do it. We’d like to establish you as an independent review’,” he explains. The extra clout from Downing St means Field, alongside the Conservative chair of the women and equalities committee Maria Miller and former high court judge Baroness Butler-Sloss, can now press ahead with a no-holds-barred look at the law, bringing in legal experts, faith groups and victims themselves to see what’s working – and what isn’t.
The report is due to land on Theresa May’s desk next March. Field, who once described Margaret Thatcher as a “hero”, is adamant that the current PM really is personally committed to tackling modern slavery. “Put it this way – if the Prime Minister was satisfied with the Act she wouldn’t ask for us to be to reviewing it,” he says.
The MP is meanwhile determined to ensure that his review doesn’t join scores of other well-intentioned independent reports gathering dust on a Whitehall shelf. “We’ll just keep raising it,” he vows. “We’re not going to go away once our report is done.” He promises to couch the report “in a way which makes it easy for the Government to accept”, rather than “going in looking for a fight”. But, he adds with a chuckle: “I mean if we have to have a fight later we’ll have a fight!”
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To his critics, Field’s cross-party Modern Slavery review and his warm words for May will serve as just one more example of his willingness to break bread with the Conservatives to further his moral mission. Simmering tensions with the party boiled over this summer, when Field – a rare Brexiteer on the Labour benches – sided with the government during a crunch vote on the Trade Bill. Field joined just three other Brexit-backing Labour MPs to help ministers scrape through with a tiny majority of six.
Brian Parsons, branch secretary of the Bidston and St James branch of Field’s Constituency Labour party, described the move as “the final straw for many members”, arguing that anger at Field’s “maverick behaviour and Tory-lite policy views” had been growing prior to the knife-edge vote. A local motion to deselect Field was passed “not because of Brexit”, Parsons said in a piece for the Labour Briefing website, “but because his vote propped up this government when his priority, like that of any opposition MP, should have been to mortally wound this appalling government on behalf of his constituents”.
One MP on the left of the party meanwhile tells The House that Field’s record as an MP “has been chequered to say the least”, pointing to his previous call for Labour members to cast tactical votes for the breakaway SDP/Liberal Alliance as far back as 1987. They add: “I don’t think many people will be too upset at his departure, particularly after voting with the Tories just before the summer recess on a key vote that could potentially have brought down the government.”
It wasn’t the first time Field had come to blows with his own party, either. Back in the nineties, he was famously drafted in by Tony Blair to help “think the unthinkable” on welfare. But he soon came up against the might of Gordon Brown’s Treasury and quit when Blair tried to move him to a different brief. In his autobiography, Blair witheringly said of Field: “The problem was not so much that his thoughts were unthinkable as unfathomable.” He also raised eyebrows with a decision to accept a high-profile role as David Cameron’s poverty tsar in the early days of the coalition government, where his outspoken views on welfare frequently rubbed colleagues up the wrong way.
Still, it came as a shock to many in Westminster when Field decided to formally resign the Labour whip, with an excoriating letter to the chief whip accusing Corbyn of allowing the party to become a “force for anti-Semitism”. The move has only ramped up the tensions with party bosses, who have insisted he cannot stay on as a member or sit as an “independent” Labour MP as he wants to do. As the battle continues, Field tells The House he has already served Labour with “a whacking huge letter drafted by brilliant lawyers”, adding: “They have no grounds to terminate my party membership”.
“If they do so it’s because Madame Defarge wishes it,” he says, referring to the remorseless Dickensian villain defined by her unswerving devotion to rooting out opponents of the French Revolution. “We’re in a country that believes great organisations like political parties are governed by law. They’ve got to come back and, based on law – prove that they are within the law in kicking me out of membership of the Labour party.” He adds: “I will be fighting it until everybody in the country sees that they have no authority to kick me out." (Party sources dispute Field's account, saying Labour's Chief Whip Nick Brown made it clear in a meeting with the MP that quitting the Parliamentary Labour Party also meant resigning his membership. "There are therefore no grounds on which to mount a legal challenge," a source says.)
Field claims some local members have been “just appalled” at the breakdown in relations between him and his CLP, which he has described as being riven with “intolerance, nastiness, and intimidation”. Centrists in the party have meanwhile rallied around Field following his departure, with Ilford MP Wes Streeting warning nonplussed left-wingers that it would be “a terrible mistake to cheer” his departure and Deputy Leader Tom Watson saying Field’s exit should act as “major wake-up call” for Labour. Even Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell – a key ally of Corbyn – has said he would welcome his “old mate” Field “back into the fold”.
In the meantime, the Birkenhead MP – who enjoys a majority of 25,514 but has batted away calls to trigger a by-election – is adamant he’s going nowhere. He seems relaxed about the scramble to replace him as a local candidate. “The more the merrier,” he says. “They’re all going to tear one another apart, aren’t they? There’s a whole number of ferrets in the sack already deciding they’re going to challenge me.”
Whatever the CLP decides, Field says he is determined to “put up a good fight” at the next election. “The body that’s sovereign at elections are the electorate,” he says. “And I couldn’t be more happy that they are going to decide who’s going to be the member for Birkenhead.”
He adds: “You know, I might have resigned the whip. I’d like to regain the whip if they deal with this terrible intolerance. But otherwise, providence willing, I’m standing at the next election. And the people of Birkenhead will decide who they want – not 35 members of Momentum.”
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