Question: The think tank Reform has just produced a report saying the government has created a benefits nation which "actively dissuades millions from bettering their position". A view you sympathise with?

Frank Field: I hope it is a view I actively promote. The idea was to reform welfare in a way which turned the world upside down so that it became a floor on which people built and not a ceiling which made it impossible for them to pass through.

That was why Gordon Brown and I clashed. His was a means tested approach which led to disincentives in weaning people off benefits whilst mine was to try and support people so that they could spring to freedom.

Field on Brown

Question: Why was there such resistance to your approach? Was it just that Brown took such a different view from the beginning?

Frank Field: Given that we are experiencing the longest boom we've ever had - with two million additional jobs created since we came to power - we have had the most favourable economic circumstances ever for significantly reforming welfare.

Leaving aside whatever the welfare bill is, Gordon Brown has spent another £60bn and we have seen the numbers of working age claimants fall from 5.6 million to 5.4. There could never have been a more favourable time for welfare reform and the response has been modest - it's been a wasted opportunity.

As we approach a leadership contest and the party is thinking about renewal the challenge to Brown now is to look at his own policy and see that it has in no way lived up to the spin.

Question: That must lead you to question his judgement more widely?

Frank Field: One of the reasons I favour a leadership contest is that once you are in a contest a person's full qualities can be judged in a way that they never are in normal circumstances.

Question: But from your point of view did it make you question his judgement given the way he handled that issue?

Frank Field: A contest would enable us to judge people's competence not just as chancellor of the exchequer but as prime minister, which is a totally different position.

It is one in which you have to sometimes immediately respond to a crisis that is upon you and you don't have a week to think about what your response might be.

I would like to see at least two candidates in the ring for that contest.

Field on immigration

Question: With your background with the Low Pay Unit are you disappointed the government hasn't done more to tackle poverty?

Frank Field: I think it has been good on the minimum wage. I think it is timid in what it now does.

You cannot have the current level of immigration without having huge effects on the British economy, not just taking jobs but displacing British workers and pushing down their wages.

One way of countering that would be to significantly increase the minimum wage so employers value labour more carefully than they do. If you have an endless stream of people prepared to come over here and take jobs almost on any terms then you don't value labour.

The reforms I had hoped to see on welfare, which were not about 'thinking the unthinkable' but about finding what is workable.

I would have thought two million jobs later, £60bn extra spent on welfare reform and the number of working age claimants only going down from 5.6 to 5.4 million would make you think that the programme that was implemented isn't working that well.

Question: Could you solve both the welfare and level of immigration 'problems' through welfare reform by encouraging British welfare recipients to take up the jobs currently being filled by people from abroad?

Frank Field: There is clearly an issue on the numbers coming in. The government position has moved over the summer from unrestricted entry to managed entry - though quite what managed means we wait to be told.

We signed away our individual citizenship to have a European citizenship so that at a drop of a hat 430 million people could come here if they wanted.

You can't run a nation state on that basis. How do you set a budget as a chancellor when you have no idea people are going to be in the country in a year's time given that 430 million people could come here if they wanted?

We know that number won't but we have no idea how many will and we have no powers to stop them coming.

What we have experienced so far is only the beginning of the debate on restricting immigration and I am in favour of restricting it severely so that there is a quota system and employers have to show that they failed to fill local vacancies with people on the dole queues to get out of the quota.

Look in Liverpool where Asda opened a new store creating 230 new positions of which 200 were from the dole queues and they trained them whilst the local bus company wants 50 bus drivers and goes straight to Poland to get them.

There are job fairs in Eastern Europe all the time with British companies recruiting and I think that is disgraceful.

I hope the electorate will have a bigger say on the outcome of the debate.

Field on devolution

Question: Given that you introduced a bill that would have barred MPs representing Scottish constituencies from voting on English matters or being ministers for departments dealing with English matters, do you think that Gordon Brown should be able to become prime minister?

Frank Field: I think if you asked this question 10 years hence people would be amazed that the English put up with a situation whereby they were disadvantaged compared to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland for so long.

As those countries seek to assert their natural identities even more strongly it is obvious that the English identity will be similarly asserted and I hope to still be around when we see an English parliament established because that is what voters want and what justice demands.

Question: Is it that sense that led to the recent poll in the Sunday Telegraph that showed a majority of English people and Scots want the union to end?

Frank Field: What surprised me about that poll was not the number of Scots that wanted to be independent but that even more English wanted independence.

I have never seen a poll that came up with those findings before.

Question: Is that a result of devolution and the failure to devolve power in England in the same way as in Scotland and Wales?

Frank Field: I don't regard it as a debate about failure. As we have lived through an age where capital has been mobile, now we are in an age where labour is mobile and that has led to an increasing emphasis about how you assert local and national identities.

The whole business about Great Britain is a fiction which the English thought up as a polite way of binding in the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish. But those nations have their own identities and so do we and I think we are all stronger in asserting our primary identity.

That doesn't mean to say we don't have other identities as well but we will never get on to a proper debate about immigration and integration unless we accept we can have more than one identity.

If we want nations to survive one requirement is that a person's primary identity is of the county which you are in which you are - in this case England.

You can add another identity like a country of origin, say Bangladesh, or a religious identity like you are Muslim or Christian. It is the only way countries can try and maintain some semblance of normalcy in the face of huge worldwide movements of people.