Counterpoint

The recent poor showing for Labour in the British local government elections has caused some in the party to re-examine their policies and positions on a range of issues. One MP, Frank Field, believes it's possible for government to be less paternalistic, encourage greater personal responsibility and still maintain a civil society.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: First a look at British politics with our favourite UK Labour politician Frank Field, the member for Birkenhead.

Michael Duffy: Yes, Frank Field, he's the man who was appointed welfare minister by Tony Blair and told to think the unthinkable, but when he did just that it caused an uproar, so Blair sacked him. Paul spoke with him late last week.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: Frank Field, the recent local government elections resulted in the most devastating Labour losses for 40 years. Between now and 2010 will global economic forces dampen UK voters' desire for alternative visions about, say, freedom and civility?

Frank Field: I doubt it. I'm quite sure that the thirst the electorate has to improve their own position and the position of their families and friends and neighbourhoods and thereby their country will continue. But the election results, which you very kindly minimise, they are in fact the worst results the Labour Party has ever had since it became a national party in 1918. Our share of the poll now is lower than then. We've got some very serious thinking to do, but also governing to do. That's the great advantage of being in government; opposition can issue press releases, governments can do things.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: Governments can actually do things. Well, if you look at someone who will be doing things, the new mayor of London, Boris Johnson...what do you know about him, what do you think about him?

Frank Field: I don't know very much about him. He's been in the Commons for some time but he's always been busy doing other things as well as being a member of parliament, and he is a great showman, but I don't think we should underestimate that on the Labour side. My expectation is that over the next month he will put in place not only a very senior deputy mayor but an executive deputy mayor, and my guess is that the main departments that he's concerned with, like transport, he will have people with proven experience in running large organisations, and he will act very much as the chairman of that. So those people who somehow think this man is going to implode and all will be delivered back to us, that might happen, but I think it's a very foolish strategy for a governing party to think somehow the opposition will deliver you victory.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: You've got two years until another election, and in the UK at the moment you've been commenting that the Tory's David Cameron seems to be attempting to redefine the role of the state. What's he been talking about?

Frank Field: We've got two years and one month, and I say that because one of our previous prime minsters Harold Wilson said 'a week in politics is a long time', so I think we'll need every one of those days before we deliver ourselves up for judgment before the electorate. But I do think there's a sea change of which I wish to be part and have been trying to get for the last 11 years the Labour government to be part of that sea change, and that is the redrawing of the boundaries between what's traditionally been thought of the state and the outside civil society and the individual. And this is a process that, if you look historically, has gone on for considerable periods of time.

And the great post-war settlement which we're still renegotiating that Mr Atley brought in in 1945 which was after planning victory, and it was total planning for total victory, it was natural that in both the economy and home affairs the incoming government would, in a sense, extend the boundaries of the state, nationalise not just industries but public life. We've been for some time, whether we've realised it or not, disengaging from that total approach, and I believed that when I was for a brief time minister that my job was to not redefine so much but to capture back the best of what we had in the past whereby individuals and organisations delivered their own welfare but within a framework which had minimum flaws attached to it.

All that was rejected, and what Cameron is doing, very wisely in my mind, is beginning to talk about that. The trouble is the nationalisation by the '45 government went so far that the normal organisations which make up civil society which were trade unions, which were churches, which were voluntary bodies which delivered so much were wiped out in these functions. And therefore it's very hard, and I think wrong anyway, to just simply put the clock back. There's nothing to put it back to.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: So if we can't go back, do you see the main question in UK politics...it's almost like a post-Thatcherite one that both sides of politics are examining how can you extend individual freedom while maintaining civil society.

Frank Field: Yes, I do, and I tried to get our side to propose the sale of council houses way back in the 70s and it should be our policy, and civil servants told the then Labour government that this was impossible and Mrs T came in and just told them to do it, and they did it. But the aim that I had was for those sales, not to use the money to reduce taxes but to extend freedom to individuals over their own homes and their own households, but in return to get a good price which you'd then use to in a sense rebuild, because we're now facing this desperate shortage of housing that ordinary people can actually afford. Looking forward, what I see is that the state takes this huge chunk of tax payer's money, and I think the first stage in this renegotiation is to start to give individuals a say when they would like to draw down their share of public expenditure, rather than just accept when the politicians say you're going to have it.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: Specifically if we look at the tax credits and child benefits that are paid over, say, the first 19 years of a person's life in roughly equal amounts, how would you like to see that change?

Frank Field: The suggestion that I tried to get us to propose in the last general election was that we now have a very generous system, thank goodness, of child support which comes through universal child benefits and means tested tax credits. And if you tally that up over the life of a child on average it comes out at 100,000 pounds. My suggestion was why can't families say, 'We'd actually like a quarter of that money in the first two years of our child's life. We don't want to be forced back to work, we want actually to be able to enjoy and nurture and give our child the very best start in life that we can possibly do so.'

And of course 25,000 pounds tax free over two years is not fantastic sums for lots of people, for others it's a very substantial sum of course, but I would I think given the totality of family household income, it could make the difference with people saying we could manage and we could make this as a real choice. And therefore people would feel it's not the state putting their hand in our pockets and purses and taking money out and then telling us kindly when we can draw some back, but we'd have a real say on when we actually want that money back. It just seems absurd to me that we the state, us politicians or however you want to define the state, that we somehow think we know better than the people themselves when they want help.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: This would revolutionise the idea of welfare. Is it an idea popular with your Labour Party colleagues?

Frank Field: No. But if we come back to your first question, we're looking over the abyss now, and unless we start to think differently and for people to feel that this government is not just listening...I mean, goodness gracious, anyone can go around munching, 'I'm listening,' but whether they learn of course is another matter...but that everything that we do, our breathing, our walking, our very existence, people just know that they're part of us. That's the challenge that we've actually got to surmount in this coming two years and one month, and we can't do that by talking. We can do it by acting. My suggestion is that instead of holding grand seminars we get on and do some of these as pilots and see what the response is.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: Of course one area that's always politically important is education. You've suggested why doesn't the Labour Party look at families accessing their share of education expenditure. You proposed this way back in 1978. Can you tell us about your original proposal?

Frank Field: Yes, I was organising a conference for the Gulbenkian Foundation and one of the ideas put forward was the idea of the little Danish school whereby in Denmark if 300 parents want to club together and form their own school that they can draw down the money that their children would have if they were in the state system. And it spread like wildfire in Denmark, and at the time the chief education officer in London expressed a horror that I was proposing a similar idea for this country. He said all these reactionary working class parents would have their children sitting in rows learning their tables, learning how to spell, and I said I thought that was quite a good objective to aim at.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: Why did he think that that was a bad idea?

Frank Field: Because we were...all societies get caught in these nonsenses and he had all this trendy old stuff that children should be playing together, facing one another, making it almost impossible for the teacher to gain their attention and teach them. We've had to wait decades for people to catch up with the obvious.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: You note that in the UK the education budget for a 14 to 18-year-old is 22,000 pounds, and you've got some radical proposals about how that money can be spent, but first can I ask you, how in your view is the money being misspent at the moment?

Frank Field: It's being misspent because we've got large numbers of children who, in really ordinary terms, can neither read nor write, and we've got this absurd system whereby they're promoted by age, so that if children from reception going to class one haven't got the skills of reception class they still go into class one, and of course the story is that generally speaking they fall further and further behind. So we're now faced with a situation where some children in primary school don't go to school and those numbers gain apace once they're in secondary school.

And the government has got some really good and very valuable ideas with the new education secretary Ed Balls who's the Prime Minister's right-hand person, and he's going to reshape education from 14 to 18 along technical lines for young people that have that bent, which is a very large number of them. I'm very supportive of that. My point is that by 14 lots of them have actually in effect left school, and wouldn't it be better while we look fundamentally at how we produce a society where so many can neither read nor write, that we try and engage with that group that is disaffected and say, look, we failed but we do require you to gain a leaving certificate which gives you basic skills in IT and English and maths and so on, and as soon as you pass that, if you get a job you can leave.

And instead of us pretending you're going to school when we all know you're not, the 22,000 pounds which is allocated by all of us, the community, for your education, will become your endowment, your own investment fund, your own pool of money which you can draw down when you realise life out there is pretty tough and you get some idea of what you want to do to become a proper person, to achieve your full potential. So you'd have your own training budget, but you'd be in control of it. And of course we'd have people making suggestions and so on who would be some of the right people you might go to, but you wouldn't be paying over your money when you're getting crap, and that's what many of them get when they're on the government's welfare to work project.

They turn up for these training sessions which are mass produced and they are simply appalling. None of the young people that I've spoken to, and I've spoken to many of them around the country, that if they were actually charged with their own little budgets for welfare to work, whether they pay money over to these shysters...a look of amazement comes over people's face that you'd ever think that one penny piece would leave their hands to these people who are providing...it's a sort of farming system of keeping these kids in a room out of the way.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: Just summarising your position here, you're proposing a basic schools certificate for 14-year-olds, and after that if they choose they can leave schools, but then 22,000 pounds could be spent by young people themselves on training that they choose. It's very appealing but it radically redefines the notion of a young adult, doesn't it?

Frank Field: It does. The government gets very annoyed with me because I say they're proposing to lock up children until they're 18. We are in a period where children are maturing physically earlier but we don't allow them adult status until ever later stages in their life. We can't be amazed that we get physical trouble on the streets where this conflict in this blind way is fought out where young people are trying to assert their adulthood. Fifty years ago in my constituency they would have all left school and gone into the docks or into the steel works or into [unclear] and immediately they would have been in an adult society with people who would act as good role models to them, there would be very strict discipline because in all three areas if you messed around you endangered other people's lives, so you'd get your head punched pretty quickly if you didn't know how to behave.

There wasn't this huge twilight zone between childhood and adulthood, which we now call the teenage years, and in which we impose education on all children, irrespective of what they want. It's just in this area. I'm not trying to undermine the government's long-term reforms because I rejoice that they've been thinking about this and acting on it, but I just do think for a very significant number of young people it's too late. We've got to meet them where they are rather than saying our policies are where we think you should be.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: Frank Field, it's been good talking to you and it's going to be interesting watching the next two years and one month. Thanks very much for talking to Counterpoint.

Frank Field: Pleasure. Bye bye.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: Frank Field is the Labour member for Birkenhead in the UK.

Guests

Frank Field
Member for Birkenhead (Labour) UK

Presenter

Paul Comrie- Thomson

Producer

Ian Coombe

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