Frank Field (UK Labour politician)
TurquoiseTastic
Kerygmania Host
in Purgatory
Rather striking interview with Frank Field here. Field is nearing death and this is a brief but wide-ranging look back at his rather unusual political outlook and career.
Questions that arose in the Turquoise mind:
1. Clearly his Christian faith has been an important influence on his life and politics but I find it difficult to work out exactly what its nature is although the interview focuses quite strongly on it.
2. I feel it is quite unusual for a serious interview of this sort to be done with someone who knows they will very soon die. It gives it a rather stark quality: there are even one or two questions where it seems as though the interviewer has disturbed him, made him think about things he would rather not. I found it interesting but I wondered whether it was the right thing to do.
Other angles welcome. I am not sure whether this is Purgatorial, since I don't perhaps have a particular discussion point, but it didn't seem to quite fit anywhere else.
Questions that arose in the Turquoise mind:
1. Clearly his Christian faith has been an important influence on his life and politics but I find it difficult to work out exactly what its nature is although the interview focuses quite strongly on it.
2. I feel it is quite unusual for a serious interview of this sort to be done with someone who knows they will very soon die. It gives it a rather stark quality: there are even one or two questions where it seems as though the interviewer has disturbed him, made him think about things he would rather not. I found it interesting but I wondered whether it was the right thing to do.
Other angles welcome. I am not sure whether this is Purgatorial, since I don't perhaps have a particular discussion point, but it didn't seem to quite fit anywhere else.
Comments
Does his faith allow him a feeling for something afterwards?
“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.”
My italics.
I'm from very close to his old constituency. For years he could walk on water, was adored. Then as a mutual friend put it "he went bonkers."
Was that before or after he wanted to house 'antisocial families' under motorways?
Quite.
Mind you, judging from the photo in that Grauniad article he had a freaky taste in shirts, even for 1973.
As my father was inclined to say of him, Blair and Blunkett - "Him? I can remember when he was a socialist!"
Even the Tories don't call Labour that any more. Tempora mutantur...
Whether that tells us more about them than it does about Labour I leave others to decide.
My father's cynical comment was very much that he never had been, but had pretended to be. He was in the company of the likes of Blair and Blunkett.
Back when Lee Anderson was still office manager for Gloria de Piero, the Eye wrote him up as an example of the moderates being forced out of the party by the 'hard left' (he had actually been suspended for using boulders to block off a travelers encampment).
I see that Starmer is now saying that Corbyn won't be allowed to stand as a Labour candidate in the next election.
Although the opposite was never really true, at least not on any kind of systematic level. The only journalist to cover Starmer's Labour imposing candidates centrally has been Michael Crick, on his Tomorrow's MPs twitter account.
Ah, I see I misunderstood. What was it then that allowed him to "walk on water" and be "adored" for years as @Alan29 put it?
Effective pretence.
He was doggedly active in areas that directly affected his most disadvantaged constituents, intervening loudly with landlords, energy companies where there was perceived injustice. This was often very effective. And he was seen as straight talking and acting. Nationally he was loud for years about the imbalance in the tax/benefits systems and how they disadvantaged the poor.
We have a mutual friend, a retired probation officer/housing association chairman/school governor etc and committed Catholic Socialist who only had good things to say about him for many years. It was he who made the comment about him "going bonkers."
Yep - that's true. Another pseudo socialist until it meant a personal cost which he wasn't willing to pay.
The litmus test is not the ones talking about counting the cost but recognizing who is doing it without talking about it.
Erm, I'm sorry that last sentence is a bit too opaque for me to parse effectively... what do you mean?
Also what is the "personal cost" that you think Field wasn't willing to pay?
Did he have any further opinion on what might have caused the change? I mean, "going bonkers" doesn't really have much explanatory power. Presumably he didn't think Field a fraud in the way that's been expressed above?
No he certainly didn't think he was a fraud and he worked closely with him. I never asked him why he thought Field went bonkers - it was a bit of an aside to be honest.
Its interesting how people immediately go for the simple label "fraud," "phobic" etc. There's another thread on here about polarisation which is trying to explore it a bit.
My impression was that he always had an authoritarian streak, and that got worse as he got older and out of touch.