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Nandy believes that Burnham’s position as mayor explains why this is the case, as he is able to talk more directly to the people who he represents. The Wigan MP was formerly the Shadow Secretary of State for Levelling Up for two years, and she talked about how Manchester has benefited from Levelling Up.
All In: How We Build a Country That Works – Signed Copy
The day before we met in Wigan, the Daily Mail had published a grim photo story, a sort of exercise in town-shaming, suggesting the place was dying on its feet. There were shots of deserted shopping centres, and an interview with a woman who said you could no longer buy a bra on the high street. The people we met were reeling. Howard Gallimore, a former miner who, in the Eighties, used his redundancy pay to set up a fish and chip shop, now owns one of the last restaurants in town. He elbowed Nandy in pantomime horror. “I threw the paper out!” he rasped. “Yes, it is a ghost town for a second. But we have to be positive!”Lisa is a serving Shadow Secretary of State, so I did not expect the book to announce new Labour policies - and it's always a risk that a position articulated in All In is mistaken for Labour policy, so I it should be expected that Lisa would err on the side of caution in their work. That may be why I think the solutions Lisa sets out fall short. They are all well-trodden paths: handing power to communities and so forth. That doesn't mean that Lisa is wrong, but I would have liked her to be bolder in her solutions - and I think looking further afield outside of the UK may have added value to this. We walked through the smell of fresh paint to the offices of Wigan Athletic Community Trust, an outreach programme run under the direction of Tom Flower.
All In: How We Build a Country That Works by Lisa Nandy
When we spoke on Zoom I asked her whether she would run for the leadership again. She flipped her iPad round and showed me a crawl space under her desk – which is leather-topped and once belonged to her grandfather, the life peer. “There is definitely a bit of me that, when I’m asked if I want to run again, really wants to climb into this little hole – and I could get into it, if I thought about it seriously,” she said, meaning the hole and not the question. When pressed, she said that she saw her 2020 bid as a valuable corrective to the pro-Corbyn consensus. “It was a long shot. I’d stood in opposition to the party line on both anti-Semitism – which is why I left the shadow cabinet – and on Brexit. So I could see it was an unlikely prospect.” Greater representation of female politicians in the UK is a must, as without it Nandy believes people will not feel heard.Maybe (probably!) I'm just irredeemably wonkish, but I just think that the electorate will spot the hole in "we need to be honest about what we can afford, instead of talking about halving or scrapping tuition fees" *five minutes later* "of course, I will scrap tuition fees". Down the corridor, a group of widows and widowers in their seventies were playing bingo. Nandy couldn’t resist, grabbing a chit and one for me, and taking a seat at the table. The eighty-something lady calling the numbers was a joker. “All alone: number ten.”
Lisa Nandy sets out her ideal vision of devolution Lisa Nandy sets out her ideal vision of devolution
The shadow minister made it a point to say that both are great leaders, with differing personalities and ways of leading politics. Two-thirds of the way through this timely book, Lisa Nandy relays a gem of a quote from Clement Attlee, Labour prime minister in the 1945-51 postwar government. “Socialists,” Attlee wrote, “are not concerned solely with material things. They do not think of human beings as a herd to be fed and watered… They think of them as individuals cooperating together to make a fine collective life.” The odds of Lisa Nandy becoming the next Labour Party leader currently seem low. But it’s still worth looking into her record, which should raise some big red flags for the Labour left. The right won in 2019. But will it win in 2020 too? There is also a great deal of focus on how things which make a community are now often commodities to be bought and sold by the super-rich, most notably football clubs and trains but also buses, the post office and the energy and water companies. Indeed, the introduction of the book goes into detail on how she and the community fought to save Wigan Athletic when they went into administration in 2019 after being taken over.The former Labour minister Margaret Hodge told me Nandy was “one of the great assets of the shadow front bench. With Yvette Cooper, Wes Streeting and Rachel Reeves, we finally have real depth and capability”. She praised Nandy’s “sensitive political judgement. When she was doing the foreign office job, she navigated the very difficult issue of Israel-Palestine. She managed, in a fringe meeting at Conference for the Labour Friends of Israel, to get tumultuous applause when she talked about the rights of Palestinians. That’s quite a feat.” On occasion the book is revealing. Politics sometimes “has the unreal feeling of a charade about it”, Nandy writes. “This is why, when the rush to attend Prime Minister’s Questions begins on a Wednesday morning, almost without exception, I’m found heading in the other direction.” These local vignettes capture a wider sense of civic and economic powerlessness in much of the the UK, one that, Nandy argues, a generation of politicians either ignored or failed to understand. Brewing in English towns for 40 years, it drove the “red wall” Brexit vote. Globalisation – and, in particular, the role of the Chinese economy as a source of cheap labour – saw 6m British manufacturing jobs disappear. The power of unions diminished accordingly and was further undermined by successive Thatcher governments. New Labour mitigated the economic impact of deindustrialisation, but its strategy for growth focused overwhelmingly on cities. Towns such as Wigan, ageing and neglected, were ripe for revolt and the 2016 referendum was the opportunity they needed.
Book Review: All In by Lisa Nandy - Young Fabians Book Review: All In by Lisa Nandy - Young Fabians
Being in a room with Rayner and Starmer used to feel, she said, “like two different conversations going on at the same time”. Now there is a better rhythm. “The leader of the party needs to look to the country – the deputy needs to look to the party itself.” She admires Rayner. “Ange has a great relationship with the unions.” Lisa Nandy MP talked about devolution, Manchester and the cities-town divide when introducing her new book at the Manchester Literature Festival. I go quite shy when my picture is taken,” she admitted. “When I started out, someone told me, you’ve got a really fun personality and it’s not coming through in your clothes. But I thought people wouldn’t listen. There’s a whole generation of women I’ve come up alongside, Stella Creasy and Jess Phillips, who have made it OK for you to express more of your personality through your clothes.” Levelling up was killed off a long time ago,” she added; it was only ever an attempt to keep Red Wall voters within the Conservatives’ electoral coalition. “There was never an enthusiasm for it within the Conservative Party as a whole. It was an agenda that was driven by Johnson and, to some extent, Gove, because they knew it was the key to holding that coalition, and nothing deeper. When the levelling up white paper came out [in February], it looked as if Gove might win the battle with the Treasury. But No 10 came down comprehensively on the Treasury’s side and that was the end.” Rishi Sunak did not want to stump up the cash. A source inside Labour joked that such short stints in Westminster are often viewed as lazy. “What people say about Lisa is they’re not sure what she actually wants to do,” he added. “She is very brilliant but a bit of a loner. Very talented and driven by ideas, but is she going to play ball with Keir? She needs to demonstrate that she has relationships around the shadow cabinet table. Would I want to do karaoke with her? Absolutely. What would she be like if she was your boss? There is a question mark over her.”
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Nandy recently stressed that one of Corbyn’s big achievements as leader was to make Labour “proud to wear our values on our sleeve” again. They should be given greater control over it, rather than having Whitehall approve all of its decisions.” The reason I don’t talk that much about being a woman in politics, or being a mum, or about my dad, is really simple: I didn’t come into politics to talk about myself. My mum’s from Surrey, my dad’s from Calcutta – he still calls it Calcutta – so I don’t know where I fit in terms of the race spectrum, and the privilege debate. I’m Manchester by birth, I’m a Wiganer by choice – so being northern is an important part of my identity. Reportedly spoke at Blue Labour’s 2016 conference (though she has allegedly said its ideology isn’t the answer to Britain’s problems).
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