To follow the career and pronouncements of Frank Field is to guarantee a lifetime of banging your head against the nearest table in abject misery. Field, Birkenhead’s indefatigable representative for almost 40 years, was one of four Labour MPs who voted last month with the government to prevent Britain joining a post-EU customs union, on the grounds that working-class voters “gave politicians a clear instruction to take the country out of the EU”. Every last one of them, apparently, yelling, “The only Brexit is hard Brexit” as they left the polling station.

Now Field has been subject to a vote of no confidence by his constituency Labour members, it’s about time his obsessions – with immigration, with working-class respectability, and with meting out punishment to those on the margins of society – were held up to greater scrutiny. He has made a name for himself as an “independent thinker”, when the reality is his views and his party membership are essentially incompatible.

I’m hesitant about mandatory reselection of MPs, given that every time the party’s pendulum swings from left to right and back, everyone who doesn’t slot in neatly will be more likely to be slung out. But Field’s views are so clearly inimical to Labour principles of justice, humanity and acceptance that in his case it’s reasonable to ask whether he should still be representing Labour voters in parliament.

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Since the Blair era, Labour has suffered a lack of confidence in applying those principles, adhering rigidly to the belief that voters in working-class constituencies are socially conservative with authoritarian leanings, and preferring to tack to the right than to offer genuine alternatives.

Field does not lack confidence: he really does think there’s no alternative. He has campaigned to have constituents who engage in antisocial behaviour housed in metal containers under the M53 motorway. He has complained that “We still haven’t really taken the gloves off” to confront “neighbours from hell” and frequently makes distinctions in his own constituency between “toerags” and “decent hardworking taxpayers”, with only the latter deserving fair treatment.

This is in the context of Birkenhead – a Merseyside town that has lost nearly half of its population since the 1950s, and was recently classed as the fourth-worst place to earn a living in the UK in part because of low earnings and business closures. The idea that Birkenhead might be shorter than other places on “decent hardworking taxpayers” might have something to do with there not being enough jobs to work hard at and pay tax.

For a long time it was possible to see Field’s authoritarian worldview as part of a left-right continuum in Labour’s internal politics, with Field representing a strongly held “traditional” view of, for instance, working-class family and neighbourhood life (which wasn’t so much traditional as imposed by prevailing middle-class norms and, in any case, virtually impossible to achieve in conditions of extreme poverty).

When New Labour entered power in 1997, he was tasked with “thinking the unthinkable” on welfare reform because he had, according to his own website, “led the campaign to make the Labour party electable” after 1979. As well as that self-styled “campaign”, before entering parliament he headed the Child Poverty Action Group and the Low Pay Unit in the 1970s, during which time he developed a specific and obsessive image of who “real” working-class people were – revealing, by definition, who are not.

For Field, the line between respectability and its lack, and deserving and undeserving, is sacrosanct. The emphasis in his many statements on working-class respectability always comes down to self-reliance and mutual interdependence within strict local boundaries. He views the universal benefits offered by the postwar welfare state as having corrupted this ideal by offering assistance as a right rather than a conditional reward. Immigration he views solely through the prism of its perceived effects on “the white working class”.

As with many other Labour MPs who frame their obsession with immigration as simply representing the views of “real working-class people”, he happens to represent a constituency with little recent immigration (although, of course, it was built on generations of inward migration from Ireland). No matter what Field suggests, EU membership has not driven down living standards and pay rates in places such as Birkenhead, which is in the state it’s in because of actions taken – and not taken – by British governments, the current one of which he seems determined to support.

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His supporters in Merseyside and beyond will point to his tireless opposition to universal credit and the fact that, in places where the scheme was piloted (Birkenhead included), its introduction has made people destitute. He has set up the Feeding Britain charity with fellow Labour MP Emma Lewell-Buck to ensure children in constituencies such as theirs are fed all year round. Yet he campaigns against child poverty and family suffering while, with his other hand, brandishing a stick to anyone who, in his view, doesn’t come up to scratch.

That puts him not on the “sane left”, as I suspect he would put it, but on the hard right. Labour is within reach of winning an election not by pandering to social conservatism but by pointing out, calmly and optimistically, that we are not living in the past. Even Field himself thought, “God, what am I doing in this party?” in 2015, when he couldn’t get Ed Miliband to agree with him on immigration. My question exactly.

• Lynsey Hanley is an author and a visiting fellow in cultural studies at Liverpool John Moores University