Frank Field, the former Labour MP and minister, has died at the age of 81.
A statement from his family said: “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.”
Lord Field of Birkenhead was asked to “think the unthinkable” to reform welfare by Sir Tony Blair in 1997, but he only lasted a year in the role before clashes with other ministers – including Gordon Brown – saw him return to the backbenches.
Having left the Commons in 2019, Lord Field was later diagnosed with terminal cancer and briefly admitted to hospice care in 2021.
His health had continued to decline, and he swore his oath to the King last year in the House of Lords from a wheelchair.
Tributes poured in from across the political spectrum following his death.
Shadow health secretary Wes Streeting said the late MP was a “great parliamentarian, crusader for social justice and source of wise counsel”. while former home secretary Priti Patel praised his “unwavering moral compass, commitment to working cross-party and unshakable principles”.
Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Commons speaker, said Lord Field was “neither cowed by the establishment or whips – which made his campaigns against hunger and food poverty, for climate change and the Church, even more effective”.
“Suffice to say, he was one of a kind and he will be sorely missed.”
Early life and becoming an MP
Image: Frank field in 1976, when he was a director of the Child Poverty Action Group
Lord Field was born on 16 July 1942.
He was first elected as the Labour MP for Birkenhead in Merseyside in 1979.
He grew up in London in a working class family, and was a supporter of the Conservative Party in his teenage years, but was thrown out after he opposed apartheid in South Africa.
Lord Field went on to join the Labour Party as a teenager.
After attending grammar school and Hull University, he returned to London and was a councillor in west London in the 1960s.
After losing his seat in 1968, he was director of the charity Child Poverty Action Group until 1979, when he entered parliament.
The Labour Party was in the political wilderness for his first years in parliament, and Margaret Thatcher maintained a firm grip on power. But oddly enough Lord Field still became a regular visitor to Downing Street.
Long before Sir Tony’s new dawn broke with his 1997 election win, the Labour MP was entering Number 10 as he and Mrs Thatcher struck up an unusual friendship.
Lord Field visited her in 1990 to tell her that she was finished and needed to stand down – and they stayed friends afterwards.
‘Think the unthinkable’
Image: Lord Field (back row, fourth from left) with a cabinet committee in 1997
By the time New Labour swept to power, Lord Field was known for his campaigning on welfare and helping the poorest in society.
His Christian faith led him down the path of believing that humans need to be saved from base instincts – and the government should help them do this.
This included believing that too generous a benefits system would no doubt trap people who saw it as a simpler and more lucrative alternative to the labour market.
Ultimately, the rows with the then chancellor Mr Brown – and social security secretary Harriet Harman – saw Lord Field leave the government in 1998.
Return to the backbenches
Despite losing his role in government, Lord Field continued to intervene and voice his opinions on how he believed the welfare system should work.
By the tail end of Labour’s time in office he was dissatisfied with the leadership of Mr Brown, who had succeeded Sir Tony as PM in 2007.
Come 2015, he nominated Jeremy Corbyn to be the party’s leader as he believed there needed to be a plurality of voices heard. But he was not a natural ally of the Corbyn regime when it did take over.
Lord Field was a supporter of Brexit, as he believed freedom of movement was having a negative impact on the UK’s Labour market, among other reasons.
He voted against Labour on pieces of Brexit legislation, and lost a vote of confidence in his Birkenhead constituency party in 2018.
He continued to support Brexit in the House of Commons, and in the 2019 election stood as an independent but lost to the Labour candidate.
Illness and death
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Baroness reads assisted dying statement for colleague
In 2021, Lord Field announced he was terminally ill and revealed he backed assisted dying.
He spent time in a hospice, and a speech in support of assisted dying was read out in the House of Lords on his behalf, having joined the upper chamber in 2020 as a crossbench peer.
Former Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao will begin advising the Kyrgyz Republic on blockchain and crypto-related regulation and tech after signing a memorandum of understanding with the country’s foreign investment agency.
“I officially and unofficially advise a few governments on their crypto regulatory frameworks and blockchain solutions for gov efficiency, expanding blockchain to more than trading,” the crypto entrepreneur said in an April 3 X post, adding that he finds this work “extremely meaningful.”
His comments came in response to an earlier X post from Kyrgyzstan President Sadyr Zhaparov announcing that Kyrgyzstan’s National Investment Agency (NIA) had signed a memorandum with CZ to provide technical expertise and consulting services for the Central Asian country.
The NIA is responsible for promoting foreign investments and assisting international companies in identifying business opportunities within the country.
“This cooperation marks an important step towards strengthening technological infrastructure, implementing innovative solutions, and preparing highly qualified specialists in blockchain technologies, virtual asset management, and cybersecurity,” Zhaparov said.
The Kyrgyzstan president added: “such initiatives are crucial for the sustainable growth of the economy and the security of virtual assets, ultimately generating new opportunities for businesses and society as a whole.”
Kyrgyzstan, which officially changed its name from the Republic of Kyrgyzstan to the Kyrgyz Republic in 1993, is a mountainous, land-locked country.
Over 30% of Kyrgyzstan’s total energy supply comes from hydroelectric power plants, but only 10% of the country’s potential hydropower has been developed, according to a report by the International Energy Agency.
CZ has met with several other state officials in Asia
Malaysia also recently tapped CZ for guidance on crypto-related matters, with Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim meeting him personally in January.
CZ has also met with officials in the UAE and Bitcoin-stacking country Bhutan — however, it isn’t clear what those meetings entailed.
Since being released, CZ has made investments in blockchain tech, artificial intelligence and biotechnology companies.
CZ also recently donated 1,000 BNB (BNB) — worth almost $600,000 — to support earthquake relief efforts in Thailand and Myanmar after the natural disaster in late April.
Donald Trump has acted for his country and I will act in Britain’s interests, Sir Keir Starmer has said after the US president imposed 10% tariffs on UK goods.
The prime minister told business chiefs at an early morning meeting in Downing Street: “Last night the president of the United States acted for his country, and that is his mandate.
“Today, I will act in Britain’s interests with mine.”
Mr Trump announced sweeping tariffs on countries around the world, with the UK getting off relatively lightly with 10% tariffs – branded “kind reciprocal” by the president – compared with China, which will have to pay 54% tariffs and 20% for the EU.
A previously announced 25% tariff on British car imports to the US came into effect at 5am on Thursday.
Sir Keir said the government is moving “to the next stage of our plan” after negotiations failed to fend off any tariffs ahead of Wednesday’s announcement.
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He promised any decisions “will be guided only by our national interest, in the interests of our economy, in the interests of businesses around this table, in the interests of putting money in the pockets of working people”.
Image: Sir Keir Starmer hosted business leaders in Downing Street on Thursday morning. Pic: Simon Dawson/No 10 Downing Street
“Clearly, there will be an economic impact from the decisions the US has taken, both here and globally,” he told the business leaders.
“But I want to be crystal clear: we are prepared, indeed one of the great strengths of this nation is our ability to keep a cool head.”
Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds told the Commons on Thursday the government is considering retaliatory measures and requested British businesses let him know what the tariff implications will be for them.
An “indicative list of potential products” that could be targeted was later published, with 8,364 categories covering about 27% of UK imports from the US.
Earlier, Mr Reynolds told Wilfred Frost on Sky News Breakfast his “job is not done” when it comes to negotiating a trade deal
Mr Reynolds refused to say if the tariffs might cause a global recession and said the UK has safeguards in place to ensure it is not flooded with goods that would have gone to other countries.
“We’ll take any powers we need to protect the British people and the British economy from that,” he said.
“What we have directly within our power, alongside that is, of course, the ability to negotiate a better deal in the national interest for the UK. That’s been our approach to date and we’ll continue with that.”
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Moment Trump unveils tariffs chart
UK will be template for other nations’ deals
The business secretary also suggested if the UK is successful in negotiating a deal with the US “there’ll be a template there” for other countries to “resolve some of these issues”.
He reiterated statements he and the PM have made over the past few days as he said: “America is a friend, America’s our principal ally.
“Our relationship is an incredibly strong economic one, but also a security one, a political one as well.”
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Sky’s Ed Conway examines how economies across the world are impacted by tariffs
Government ‘very slow’ to start talks
Conservative shadow home secretary Chris Philp told Sky News the government had been “very slow” to start negotiating a free trade agreement with the US, and they should have started when Mr Trump was elected in November, even though he did not get sworn in until the end of January.
He said the UK being hit by a lower tariff than the EU was “one of the benefits of Brexit”.
However, he said the 25% tariff on car exports to the US is “very, very serious” and the global impact is “bad news for our economy”.
Relief in Westminster – but concessions to Trump to come
It has been quite a rollercoaster for the government, where they went from the hope that they could avoid tariffs, that they could get that economic deal, to the realisation that was not going to happen, and then the anticipation of how hard would the UK be hit.
In Westminster tonight, there is actual relief because the UK is going to have a 10% baseline tariff – but that is the least onerous of all the tariffs we saw President Trump announce.
He held up a chart of the worst offenders, and the UK was well at the bottom of that list.
No 10 sources were telling me as President Trump was in the Rose Garden that while no tariffs are good, and it’s not what they want, the fact the UK has tariffs that are lower than others vindicates their approach.
They say it’s important because the difference between a 20% tariff and a 10% tariff is thousands of jobs.
Where to next? No 10 says it will “keep negotiating, keep cool and calm”, and reiterated Sir Keir Starmer’s desire to “negotiate a sustainable trade deal”.
“Of course want to get tariffs lowered. Tomorrow we will continue with that work,” a source added.
Another source said the 10% tariff shows that “the UK is in the friendlies club, as much as that is worth anything”.
Overnight, people will be number-crunching, trying to work out what it means for the UK. There is a 25% tariff on cars which could hit billions in UK exports, in addition to the blanket 10% tariff.
But despite this being lower than many other countries, GDP will take a hit, with forecasts being downgraded probably as we speak.
I think the government’s approach will be to not retaliate and try to speed up that economic deal in the hope that they can lower the tariffs even further.
There will be concessions. For example, the UK could lower the Digital Services Tax, which is imposed on the UK profits of tech giants. Will they loosen regulation on social media companies or agricultural products?
But for now, there is relief the UK has not been hit as hard as many others.
More than 400 pages of thousands of goods that could be affected by reciprocal tariffs against the US.
Everything from fresh domestic ducks to sea-going dredgers makes the cut; most symbolic, however, are iconic American items like jeans, motorcycles and whiskey.
Would Donald Trump stand for a levy on Levi’s? It’s not the first time this battle has played out.
At the time, the UK, then an EU member, followed suit.
But as the UK tries to carve its own path outside the bloc, vindicated by the baseline 10% tariffs imposed instead of the EU’s rate of 20%, the aim is to avoid retaliation.
The government want us to know “all options are on the table” – but that is not how they want this to play out.
“This is not a short-term tactical exercise,” the prime minister said this morning.
Despite the business secretary’s best efforts during his recent trip to Washington to try to secure a UK tariffs carveout, no deal was reached in time.
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How will tariffs hit working people?
Mr Trump wanted his big bang, board brandishing moment; carveouts for certain countries would have softened the impact of his speech.
But with 90-plus countries on the tariff billboard, how far along the queue is any UK deal?
And how much are we willing to give? Will the sensitive subject of chlorinated chicken be on the table? What of the agreement to cut taxes on big tech companies that Mr Trump wants?
Lots of questions. The day after the surreal night before is too soon to know all the answers, but this is about politics as much as it is about economics.
As the prime minister launched Labour’s local election campaign in Derbyshire today, he talked about potholes, high streets and school meals. Every question I heard was about tariffs.
Decisions made across the Atlantic are looming large. Tariffs may not directly sway many votes in the local elections, but the consequences for Rachel Reeves’s fiscal headroom and the amount of money she has to spend, or save, will have an impact before too long.