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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. Her vision shows how by empowering communities, a better society will build itself. This includes a focus on the climate crisis and how the transition to greener power offers an opportunity to rebuild communities. For example, she mentions how in Grimsby wind power is bringing in high paid, skilled jobs which is sparking a revival for a town which voted heavily to Leave in the EU Referendum.
All In: How we build a country that works – HarperCollins
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. Rapid global changes, political division and economic crisis have left Britain reeling. For decades, large swathes of the country have been shut out, condemned to low productivity, underinvestment and managed decline, and stripped of their voice. With most major cities now beset with high housing costs, air pollution and congestion, even the ‘winners’ are losing. 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.”
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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. 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.” I asked Nandy how she felt about the rehabilitation of New Labour; Angela Rayner and Keir Starmer are both unembarrassed to praise Tony Blair. “I’ve always hated cults,” she said, “so I disliked the cult around Blair just as much as I disliked the cult around Corbyn. I think it’s unhelpful for us as a party. One man doesn’t change things: movements do. So I feel very uncomfortable with the resurrection of the cults. I also think that those debates are very little to do with Blair the person and Corbyn the person – they’re much more about the Seventies fighting the Nineties, to see which vision of the past will win the day.”
reasons not to back Lisa Nandy for Labour leader 3 big reasons not to back Lisa Nandy for Labour leader
As we drove down Wallgate towards Wigan Athletic Football Club, the shadow secretary of state for levelling up, housing and communities admitted that she was writing a book. “I thought it was a great idea,” she said. “I had an image of myself in an oak-panelled room on a green leather chair. Turns out it was the worst idea I’d had since running for Labour leader.” In June 2016 Nandy was part of the mass walkout of the soft left from Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet before contesting the leadership in 2020, coming third after Keir Starmer and Rebecca Long Bailey. Nandy agreed to film with them, but returned looking disarranged: the crew wanted her to stand in front of the one boarded-up shop they could find. She refused until they re-angled the camera.Greater representation of female politicians in the UK is a must, as without it Nandy believes people will not feel heard.
Lisa Nandy MP announces book talk and signing in Neston Lisa Nandy MP announces book talk and signing in Neston
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.” Most interesting was Nandy pointing out how, typically, our western discourse focuses on the 1980s when the US and the UK shifted to the right which signalled the end of the Post-War Consensus and the beginning of the current capitalist system. However, throughout the book, Nandy also includes the opening up of the Chinese economy at this time as a factor which has shaped recent decades. This inclusion helps us understand these changes in a more global context and is welcome. 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.”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. 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. No one denied that Wigan was in trouble. “We had a cost-of-living crisis before it was fashionable,” said Nandy. Over fish and chips, Gary Ingram, the union representative from the sorting office, admitted: “The centre wasn’t great – there were no supermarkets…” A state-owned Chinese construction firm has moved in to redevelop the Galleries Shopping Centre, one of two malls that were opened in 1991 but now lie empty. This, for Nandy, is the good kind of globalisation, because the money is staying in Wigan. She has campaigned to open Britain’s land registry to public view.
Lisa Nandy to An Yu: recent books reviewed in short From Lisa Nandy to An Yu: recent books reviewed in short
Rebecca Long-Bailey is the progressive frontrunner, with numerous promising policies. But she’s already alienated many left-wingers by capitulating to some of her opponents’ demands. 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. Nandy has dimples; she is generally laughing. In front of a camera, she loses her natural ease. Appearances matter, she said – but by that she seemed to mean looking smart. “You have to be well turned-out as an MP. Corbyn didn’t go down well round here – they said he couldn’t even cut his hedge. Do you remember that picture of him in front of his hedge?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. Beard’s life amounts to an unwritten Hemingway novel. He attended bull fights with Picasso and was a friend of both Andy Warhol and Salvador Dalí; he was painted by Francis Bacon and was a neighbour of Karen Blixen; his innumerable lovers included Lee Radziwill and his later wife Cheryl Tiegs; and his equally innumerable scrapes included being whipped for mistreating a poacher and being gored by an elephant. It is all a gift to a biographer, and Beard’s long-time friend Graham Boynton, a journalist raised in Zimbabwe, does justice to his preposterously full life. Reportedly spoke at Blue Labour’s 2016 conference (though she has allegedly said its ideology isn’t the answer to Britain’s problems). A Tannoy sounded. “Would Lisa Nandy please leave the building,” Flower told her. “Go and give someone else a hard time.” 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
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