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Lisa Nandy criticised this reality, saying: “I do not want to see power move from men in Whitehall to men in the town hall.”
All In: How we build a country that works – HarperCollins
I’ve been here before, Tom. I live in Wigan! You’re supposed to be helping with my PR – you’ve f***ed up with that one!”
Nandy never intended to become a politician. She wanted to study English literature at university, but her sister – a superior academic, she said – got a place to study English at Oxford. “And I thought, that is not a comparison I’m going to win.” Instead, she studied politics at Newcastle. Her years at university were, bar none, the best of her life, she said. 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.”
Lisa Nandy to An Yu: recent books reviewed in short From Lisa Nandy to An Yu: recent books reviewed in short
Suggested that Spain’s handling of the Catalan independence movement could be a model for dealing with Scottish independence. Lisa Nandy is such an impressive, articulate and clear politician to listen to, but this book is weighed down with convoluted sentences, repetition and no clear progression or structure. She repeats so many times near the end of the book, that life is complex, politics is complex, and we need to accept that, yet we look to our politicians to wade through the complexity and come up with genius, simple solutions to dilemmas. 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.” Their relationship cooled through the Corbyn years – “We were on different sides of the question about the leadership, and Brexit” – before warming during the leadership contest. Nandy revealed a slight superiority about Starmer’s late arrival to politics: “Many of us grew up in the Labour tradition – I was delivering party leaflets when I was seven. He’s not steeped in career politics. He’s come in a lot more recently, and he’s very challenging of why people hold the views they do. I think that has helped us – it’s one thing to feel the public mood, but another to turn that into a strategy. When we are together as a team, you can see how the strength of the people he has put around him makes him much more concrete.”Orange mushrooms appear and multiply as “ghosts” to taunt her at moments of emotional epiphany, from the horror she feels when she forgets how to play long-practised piano pieces to the pain she experiences on discovering her husband’s darkest secrets. Yu uses magic realism to infuse mystical elements into an otherwise ordinary Beijing city setting, and her symbolism is perplexing in places. Despite this, Ghost Music has beautiful prose and claustrophobic imagery that intensely evokes its protagonist’s alienation. Nandy dedicates an early chapter to cover the global issues at play over recent decades that have marked an end to certainty, which she then links to the situation more locally in the UK. Big issues like the response to Covid-19, the Climate Crisis, Brexit and the technological challenges which affect our work are all explored as factors which have all challenged our way of life in recent years and on a daily basis. 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? Nandy’s parents divorced when she was seven. In 1989 her father was one of several figures who supported Salman Rushdie against the fatwa issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini. His house was firebombed, and he, too, was issued with a fatwa. “We didn’t see him for several months because it wasn’t safe, and that’s a big deal when you’re nine.” Johnson, she said, had “trashed politics”. As for his successors, Nandy thought neither Liz Truss nor Sunak constituted bad news for the Labour Party. “Truss will drop the more bonkers tax cuts to the rich and focus relentlessly on trying to win the general election. She will reinvent herself again – which she is very good at – and I don’t think she is interested in levelling up. The issue is whether she can convince the public that she’s likeable, human and trustworthy.”
reasons not to back Lisa Nandy for Labour leader 3 big reasons not to back Lisa Nandy for Labour leader
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". You haven’t mentioned girls yet,” Nandy cut in. “And,” said Flower, taking a deep breath, “50 per cent of our workforce is female; 46 per cent of participants are female, 50 per cent of our management team are female.” 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.
Loved this. I wasn't really aware of Lisa Nandy or any of her political projects, so reading this felt like starting from scratch and discovering a side of the UK I had very little idea existed. Despite being a Labour MP (and serving during the Corbynite/Blairite split), Nandy clearly makes an effort to avoid stark positions and easy solutions. She focuses on the middleground, not just between political parties but also looking at getting the right balance between local, community-based efforts, national government and international collaboration. Lisa Nandy is known for her defence of community and local people. Indeed, she made it a key part of her pitch to be Labour leader in 2020. This is why it is so good to see her vision captured in written form in her book All In . This rally call highlights the challenges we face as a country through the prism of community and how, despite the odds, a real difference can be made if we work together. Community is something many people believe has diminished in recent decades. Nandy makes this point throughout the book. The Bee Network for her has gone a great way to promote connectivity across GM, and seeing the ‘smaller’ boroughs access it first will help stimulate their economies. She was resistant to talking about the influence of her father on her political career. Though she credits him with developing her sense of injustice, she insisted her mother had played a bigger part. The daughter of the Liberal MP Frank Byers, who later became a life peer, Luise Byers was a social worker who retrained and ended up in the current affairs department of Granada Television, working on shows such as World In Action. Does she get more done when she’s working in Wigan? “No. The combination of spending enough time in Wigan, then taking those issues to Westminster, is the right one. The fact that Westminster doesn’t work doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.
Lisa Nandy sets out her ideal vision of devolution Lisa Nandy sets out her ideal vision of devolution
Outside the fish and chip shop, Nandy was approached by TalkTV, which had come to Wigan to respond to the Mail’s hatchet job. “I think they stitched you up,” a slightly sweaty presenter told her. “I’m from South Shields – you should see the high street there. Or Corby, where my missus is from.” 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.” Why don’t you just call my mother and tell her how much I’m failing?” said Flower, beaten down. The NS Summer Special, out 29 July. Illustration by Cold War Steve She added that locals know what is best for them, and they do not need someone in the centre dictating solutions to their problems. She argued there was no time to waste prosecuting old arguments. “I think these moments only come around every 30, 40 years, where people feel that the old system has crumbled, it’s gone, and they’re looking for something to put in its place. I think it was Harold Wilson who said that the Labour Party is like a bird – it needs its left and its right wing to fly.” In fact it was the Labour MP Ian Mikardo, though Wilson liked to quote him.The trust is financially independent, Flower told me, employing 60 staff across 13 programmes that range from four-year-olds with school-readiness issues to a football team for the children of Afghan refugees. Was she afraid levelling up would now be entirely abandoned by the Conservatives? “I’m not remotely worried about the agenda disappearing,” she said. “If anything, the problem has become more acute. It’s widely accepted now that the only way to solve the problems we have is through creating growth in the economy. You can’t do that by writing off most people in most places.” When we spoke a few days after Johnson’s fall, Nandy said that levelling up should be an effort on the scale of Labour’s rebuilding of Britain after the Second World War. “It’s a moment like the post-1945 moment, where there was a recognition that rights and opportunities hadn’t kept pace with the expectations of the population. National reconstruction, national renewal, whatever you want to call it. New Labour would probably have called it ‘A Fresh Start for Britain’.” Percentage of men and women leading politics in the UK and Manchester | Source: Institute for Government and GMCA.
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