To return to Frank Field:
Far from being a principled Labour politician, Frank Field is a political maverick, promoting his right-wing views on welfare reform, immigration and abortion rights, while on occasion expressing his admiration for Margaret Thatcher (“certainly a hero”) and Enoch Powell (“The ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech gave him a commanding position among voters, as Enoch was expressing their fears”). He was a paid Sun journalist.
Field has been one the most hostile critics of Jeremy Corbyn’s socialist politics. In May last year he threatened to split the Parliamentary Labour Party, by forming a “People’s Labour” bloc of right-wing MPs, if Corbyn refused to stand down as leader following the general election.
In the 1987 Field denounced the left-wing Labour candidate - in the neighbouring Wallasey constituency - Lol Duffy, in the press. He also strongly opposed the workers’ occupation of the Cammell Laird shipyard and was hostile to trade union activity. In the Commons he is a right-wing maverick, earning praise from Tories and the media but annoying many Labour MPs.
Back at his home constituency, members of Birkenhead Labour Party are not prepared to accept this sort of behaviour any longer. As one critic wrote recently: “Field’s views are so clearly inimical to Labour principles of justice, humanity and acceptance that in his case it’s reasonable to ask whether he should still be representing Labour voters in parliament.”
But it is probably his voting record that indicates what his politics are, and while he sometimes voted for a liberal agenda and with the Labour whip, he
consistently voted for the Iraq War and often voted against any investigation into that war.
He voted for a replacement nuclear weapon for Trident and he voted inconsistently on University tuition fees. Abstained (and didn't vote against) cuts which included child tax credits and the household benefit cap. The latter was consistent with his lack of real opposition to the Tories' austerity scenario with its consequent swingeing cuts to local services.
You guys can decide how much you like and admire him, but his policies don't really attack the problems of housing, the big corporations, welfare etc. There is no sense of a coherent policy to develop a more equal society through socialist policies such as those enshrined in Clause 4 part 4 (which he fought so hard to remove from Labour's manifestos): "to secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the of t he means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.”
