Unlike the current state pensions system this would be independent of politicians and fully funded – that is you

Unlike the current state pensions system, this would be independent of politicians and fully funded – that is, you would pay for your own pension.There are many other aspects to the Field plans, including changing the income support system into an agency aggressively trying to get people back into work and tackling the “free market” housing benefit racket. Field wants employees and employers to be obliged to pay into private pensions, which would be regulated by a new corporation. This would allow our insurance to be tailored to the less secure working life of the Nineties. Redistribution would happen alongside this private provision, with the Treasury stepping in to pay insurance contributions on behalf of the sick, the unemployed and so on.As with insurance against unemployment and misfortune, so with insurance for old age. Because of his hostility to means-testing, Field goes in the opposite direction, calling for universality, but outside the tax structure.He proposes that we all take more responsibility about what we pay in What we get out would reflect our payments in.

These, he argues, ”penalise all those values which make strong, vibrant communities Those with savings above a certain level do not qualify. Those who try a part-time job lose almost pound for pound from their benefit. Those who do work can qualify, but only if they lie.”Yes, this sounds a lot like the anti-welfare agenda as it is emerging on the hard right. Field, I think, would make this distinction: that while the right blames the poor for fiddling, lying or refusing work (remember Peter Lilley’s ”little list” at Tory conference time), he doesn’t blame his constituents at all; he blames the system for making their behaviour rational.The kernel of Field’s proposal is the destruction of means-tested benefits and their replacement by compulsory private insurance For years the consensus has been for targeted benefits. This outrages some people, because they think it leads straight to blaming the poor for economic failure, witch-hunting single mothers and all the rest of it.

Yet in the end, this is an indefensible objection: if we think tobacco companies and manufacturers of late-night television programmes should confront the social consequences of their actions, we can hardly exempt the pounds 74bn social security budget from the same challenge.It has taken Field into a head-on assault on means-tested benefits, which now cover someone in nearly half the households of Britain. If that’s true, the implications are enormous – not merely for Labour, but for the rest of us, too.The first thing to say about Field’s agenda is that it is a consciously moral one, in that it focuses on how the benefits system affects people’s behaviour. Neither is a happy prospect.One Labour politician, however, has devoted himself to a revolutionary alternative. Frank Field has been seen as a moralising maverick, who is “brave” and “interesting” (those deadly epithets) but not a contender for power. He has become the Labour MP whom it is safe for Conservative MPs to admire Enough said?Well, as it happens, not enough.