The Sketch: Unthinkable thoughts from an unlikely Scouser
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Your support makes all the difference.Because we're making an election visit to one of the failed neighbourhoods in Liverpool - boarded-up, grilled-up, wired-up, spiked, rotting, disintegrating and marked for evacuation and demolition (not always in that order) - I ask the candidate the obvious question: "What should I wear?" He says: "Running shoes."
Because we're making an election visit to one of the failed neighbourhoods in Liverpool - boarded-up, grilled-up, wired-up, spiked, rotting, disintegrating and marked for evacuation and demolition (not always in that order) - I ask the candidate the obvious question: "What should I wear?" He says: "Running shoes."
Frank Field - spare, clever, rather other-worldly - has always seemed to me an unlikely Liverpool MP. Not as unlikely as Boris Johnson, I agree, but not what people call "Scouse".
The man deserves an office next to the Prime Minister's to pump in his ideas. Talk about Third Way. We should try it sometime. He is Third Way cubed.
His ideas come out of these ghastly streets. To emphasise a point, a house falls down as we pass. I'm not sure some of his constituents are in much better shape. One man is five-foot high with a seven foot waistline. Others are two shakes from the DTs.
He is not "unremittingly New Labour" but New Labour should be unremittingly Frank Field. "They should be devouring your ideas with ferocious appetite, Frank," I say in my impartial observer way.
"Ye-e-esss," he says. "There may be a problem there." He was hired by Tony Blair in that glorious dawn of the first New Labour government. To "think the unthinkable". To reduce the welfare bill. He thought the unthinkable and was sacked. It was unspeakable.
He's still thinking the unthinkable and all the more impressive for doing so in these Shameless surroundings. "Where do we get the idea working class people like paying tax?" he asks. "Did you know that for the cost of Gordon Brown's tax credits we could have taken 5p off the rate of income tax? I know which proposition I'd rather be fighting the election on."
The man has more intellectual energy for these matters than the whole back room of the Tory party. Here's another one. Regeneration.
Liverpool regenerates neighbourhoods by flattening decrepit streets and building houses the original inhabitants can't afford to buy back. To build communities they destroy communities. John Prescott's behind it. But you guessed that.
Frank's idea: "Homesteading." You don't demolish these houses, you advertise for young couples on housing benefit to move in, and if they fulfil their part of the bargain over five years, you give them the house. How do you pay for it? "You capitalise their housing benefit." That's an opaque way of putting it. But let's say that it constitutes a radical way of reforming public services by aligning personal incentives with public money. It could have changed the world.
It puts the Prime Minister to shame. But there we are again. Shameless.
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