Politics & Power Quote by Frank Field

Field’s line is less a lament about democracy than a warning about how democracies quietly rig themselves: not through laws on the books, but through habits of mind. By calling out politicians who treat the poor “as a separate race,” he’s reaching for a deliberately inflammatory analogy. Race is the modern marker of entrenched hierarchy - a category used to naturalize inequality, to turn circumstance into destiny. Field’s point is that class can be racialized: once poverty is framed as a kind of inherent difference, the poor stop being fellow citizens with claims and start being a managed population.

The intent is political, not poetic. Field spent years in British public life watching welfare debate slide from material questions (wages, housing, bargaining power) into moral anthropology: who is “deserving,” who is “feckless,” who needs “discipline.” When that shift happens, democracy doesn’t collapse in a dramatic coup. It just stops listening. Parties learn they can win by talking about the poor rather than to them - offering surveillance, sanctions, and symbolic toughness instead of representation.

The subtext also pricks at polite liberalism. Treating the poor as “other” isn’t only a right-wing caricature; it can show up as technocratic pity, where policy is designed for an imagined underclass rather than with real communities. Field’s rhetorical gambit forces a hard recognition: once you separate a group from the shared “we,” you make it easier to ignore their vote, discount their voice, and justify outcomes that would be scandalous if they happened to “people like us.”