Former Labour minister and peer Frank Field dies aged 81

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Lord Frank Field, the independent-minded former Labour MP who devoted a lifetime to fighting poverty, has died at the age of 81.

Field briefly served as a minister in Sir Tony Blair’s government, charged with “thinking the unthinkable” on welfare reform, but was regarded as a maverick and lasted little more than a year in the job.

The highly respected MP for Birkenhead for 40 years quit the Labour whip in 2018 over “antisemitism” in the party and towards the end of his life, after years battling cancer, he became an advocate for assisted dying.

Field was always a free thinker and did not fit easily into the mould of party politics. He was one of the few Labour MPs to support Brexit, arguing that unlimited EU migration was bad for Britain’s working class.

Field’s family issued a statement on Wednesday that said: “Frank Field has died at the age of 81 following a period of illness. Frank is survived by two brothers.

“He will be mourned by admirers across politics but above all he will be greatly missed by those lucky enough to have enjoyed his laughter and friendship.”

Born in Edmonton, north London, the son of a factory worker, Field’s fervent belief was that the working class should be elevated through work and that a dependence on the welfare state was undesirable.

He once said that when a working-class child does well and goes away, the parents’ pride is “always doused by sadness, because in a working-class community you aren’t supposed to go away”.

A director of the Child Poverty Action Group, he became Labour MP for Birkenhead on Merseyside in 1979, establishing a reputation as a campaigner against poverty. Blair made him a welfare reform minister when the party entered power in 1997.

Field was critical of means testing, which he regarded as demeaning, and wanted to link benefit payments to obligations on the recipients. He wanted more people to take out private pensions rather than depend on the state and insisted on a crackdown on benefit fraud.

But Field’s proposals proved unacceptable to Blair and his ministerial career ended a year later. Blair later wrote about Field in his autobiography: “The problem was not so much that his thoughts were unthinkable as unfathomable.”

Blair said on Wednesday: “Frank had integrity, intelligence and deep commitment to the causes he believed in. He was an independent thinker never constrained by conventional wisdom, but always pushing at the frontier of new ideas.

“Even when we disagreed, I had the utmost respect for him as a colleague and a character.”

Field continued to campaign against poverty. After quitting the Labour whip in protest over antisemitism during Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership, he unsuccessfully contested Birkenhead as an Independent in 2019.

He became an unaffiliated crossbench peer in the House of Lords in 2020, and took part remotely in a debate on assisted dying in October 2021, when a colleague, Baroness Molly Meacher, read out a statement on his behalf.

“I changed my mind on assisted dying when an MP friend was dying of cancer and wanted to die early before the full horror effects set in but was denied this opportunity,” Field said.

In a January 2023 interview in the Guardian he said he had been suffering from cancer for 10 years. “It’s a strange experience taking so long to die,” he said.

Dame Angela Eagle, MP for neighbouring constituency Wallasey, said on Field’s death: “Very sad news. Always supportive of me as his parliamentary neighbour, brimming with ideas to make society better — a great champion of his Birkenhead constituents.”

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