Frank Field has always been independent-minded, even more so than Corbyn – his resignation is Labour's loss

Threatened with deselection and demoralised by what he sees as 'racism' and 'bullying' within the party, Field has decided to go his own way. There's every reason to believe he'll be successful

Frank Field resigned the Labour whip today over the antisemitism scandal (Rex)

If nothing else, Frank Field’s decision to resign the Labour whip in the Commons (he remains a party member) and serve as an “Independent Labour” member of parliament suits him well.

Few politicians in any party have shown such a determinedly independent streak for as long as Mr Field – not even his leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Since his election in 1979, his parliamentary colleagues might agree, he has ploughed his own furrow on everything from welfare reform and Brexit to migration. Now he has done so in response to the wave of antisemitism that has overtaken parts of the party and the failure of the leadership to “knock it on the head”, to put it bluntly.

For that is the more important of the two grounds Mr Field cites for his disaffection. One of Labour’s legendary spin doctors, Alastair Campbell, once remarked that if a story is running for more than 11 days then it will not simply go away of its own accord, and requires some decisive action to make to go away. Well, the Labour antisemitism story has dominated the headlines for most of the summer, sometimes even eclipsing Brexit, Love Island and Donald Trump’s action-packed visit to see the Queen.

What Mr Field would like to see is Mr Corbyn make some sort of apology for his past remarks and actions, or at least one of the more egregious examples of what he may believe to be antisemitism. When, for example, he implied that a British-born “Zionist” was unable to appreciate “English irony” or understand history, he did two things. First he was rude, and needlessly. Second, more grievously, he implied that Jewish people could not also be British – and, thus, that they owed some higher allegiance to another state or movement: that, of course, being Israel and the Zionist cause. This is one of the oldest and most insidious of antisemitic tropes.

Mr Corbyn should also, once again, unconditionally condemn the use of violence by some of those buried at the Tunis cemetery that he visited, and their role in the planning or execution of terrorism, particularly against innocent Israeli athletes in the 1972 Olympics in Munich. It is not good enough to say that Israeli government forces have abused Palestinians’ human rights more recently. It is true, but it is beside the point.

Mr Field goes so far as to say that Labour is “increasingly seen as a racist party”. This may seem an outrageous claim about Labour when it has so many people of colour in its upper echelons – Diane Abbott, Dawn Butler, Baroness Chakrabarti and Keith Vaz, for example. Yet the specific complaints of the Jewish community have not been met with specific answers of late. The Chakrabarti Report was an astonishingly weak affair, a lamentable lost opportunity to pre-empt later trouble, and attempted to place every (feeble) recommendation about antisemitism into a wider anti-racist stance. This was inappropriate for the unique character of antisemitism.

The more recent solution to Labour’s problems was obvious: to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, complete with the examples. It should, and probably now will, form part of Labour’s rules, but way too late, and much less convincingly when it could have been done weeks ago.

What would be even more welcome, and is genuinely lacking, is an open statement by Jeremy Corbyn advocating the state of Israel’s right to exist and the desirability of the two-state solution as the only practicable way forwards for the region, remote though the possibility may now seem. If that makes Mr Corbyn some sort of “Zionist” then the same would be true of Ed Miliband, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, John Smith, Neil Kinnock and every other senior Labour figure since at least the 1980s.

Mr Field also raises a wider problem of the atmosphere of bullying and hostility that has developed across the Labour Party and politics more generally. In particular, he is threatened with deselection, presumably because of his views on Mr Corbyn’s leadership and now his stance on the antisemitism scandal.

Whatever else, it is certainly true that Momentum contains within it elements all too ready to use the rickety democratic structures of local parties for their own ends, ignoring the wishes of a wider Labour electorate – in Mr Field’s case, a majority at the last general election of 25,514, with 76.9 per cent of the voters opting for him.

Mr Field shows every desire “providence willing”, as he puts it, to serve his electors for another term. In a contest against an official Labour candidate, and with such profile and personal following, it is hard to see him losing such a battle. Tragically, persuading the very obstinate Mr Corbyn may prove more difficult.

Independent Frank it is, then, well on track to celebrate, after the prospective end of his next term in the Commons, his 85th birthday as the honourable independent member for Birkenhead.