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Not Dark Yet #282: A Frank Appraisal

31/8/2018

6 Comments

 
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We were introduced by a mutual friend. I was a naïve student journalist; he was the recently appointed director of the Child Poverty Action Group.
 
My friend and I had travelled down from Cambridge to the CPAG office so that I could interview Frank Field for a piece in The 1/- Paper. He was generous with his time. We discussed the importance of the work of Brian Abel Smith and the need to transform the CPAG into an effective pressure group, aimed at redressing the failures of the Labour Government of the time.
 
And then he took us for lunch.
 
He regaled us with stories of the left before my time, notably - I recall – the attempt by Gerry Healey (of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party) to run him down outside a meeting at which Frank had challenged Healey’s agenda. The story involved Frank taking cover behind a concrete bollard into which an irate Healey smashed his car. And then, long into the afternoon, he talked quietly and powerfully about his faith. And although I was familiar with the truism that the Labour Party owed more to Methodism than Marx, I wrote later that Frank must be one of the first to come to socialism via High Anglicanism.
 
That day Frank Field was committed, thoughtful, witty, charismatic. As he was also on subsequent occasions, addressing small groups of students at ill-attended meetings (a couple of which I organized), patiently explaining to us that there was much that could be achieved to eradicate poverty even before the revolution!
 
Forty years on, that Frank Field is no longer recognizable. And it’s a source of profound regret to those of us who believed that he was a progressive force.
 
Over the years, I have consistently given him the benefit of my doubt. I have read with detailed attentiveness each new paper, each new policy proposal, looking for evidence to justify my belief that he was a maverick but he was our maverick, that his Anglican social democratic instincts nevertheless made the Labour Party his natural home. I even sought to justify his relationship with Thatcher and his acceptance of an offer to work with Cameron as ploys to further a Labour agenda, to exploit every contradiction etc etc.
 
But today, I can no longer do so.
 
Frank is too intelligent a man to believe the stuff in his resignation note but he said it anyway. Just as an ex-Chief Rabbi must surely know the difference between Jewish and Zionist, so Frank must surely know that the party he has represented in parliament since 1979 is not racist or anti-semitic and nor is its leader. To argue that the the bizarre statement by Sachs is the reason he has resigned is the ‘last straw’ for me and, I suspect, for thousands of members and supporters who, regardless of their position on the political spectrum, acknowledged his right to independent thought and action.
 
Throughout his career, Frank has been a member of a legitimate tendency within the Labour Party. It is not a tendency to which I subscribe, but I also prefer to watch the parking meters and I recognize that it has a long and valid tradition.
 
Trouble is, it is this very tradition which Frank is undermining. Oy vey.

Today from the everysmith vaults: My birthday album, Highway 61 Revisited. (the mono recording obviously.) Probably my favourite of the extraordinary 60s triptych anyway. Released on 30 August 1965, it emerges from the vaults both regularly and frequently.

6 Comments
ChrisL
31/8/2018 11:44:36

Whatever he came to, and however he came to it, it sure as hell wasn't socialism. The Birkenhead CLP has been insanely patient over the years. And so have you by the sound of it.

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MattS
31/8/2018 12:02:49

Did you not quote someone saying that it is not power that corrupts but the potential or actual loss of power. That's what we are seeing - the last gasps of a tendency that ruled autocratically for a decade or more and now see that they are almost history. The anti-semitism farago is merely the most successful of all the recent attempts to denigrate a decent man and progressive politics.

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Drew
31/8/2018 19:08:07

You say you don’t recognise the current Field. I don’t recognise the one you befriended. A Tory begat of Tories, who only left the Conservatives because he at least couldn’t stand apartheid (he’s ok with it in Israel though). Too many of his ill in the party. He went because his CLP had run out of patience with his so-called independence.

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Allan
1/9/2018 07:45:07

Interesting piece, Max. But more interesting about your tolerance than Field's stubborn refusal to work within the party for the party's objectives. He used us. It's typical of the way in which New Labour parachuted the right into 'safe' seats where they remain. The whip should have been withdrawn after the Brexit vote. Let him resign as a member of parliament and see how he dos without the Labour membership he has vilified.

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Ellie
1/9/2018 08:24:27

Yes. It's been a very long time since he was a natural fit in the party. And to claim that he is leaving because of antisemitism rather than because he was about to be dumped is disingenuous at best.

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geoff
1/9/2018 09:39:25

probably the most generous-spirited comment on the Field situation, which makes the conclusion all the more regrettable.

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    Max Smith

    European writer, radical, restaurateur and Red Sox fan. 70-something husband, father, step-father, grandfather and son. Resident in Warwick, England.

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