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Percentage of men and women leading politics in the UK and Manchester | Source: Institute for Government and GMCA. 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. 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.
Lisa Nandy books and biography | Waterstones Lisa Nandy books and biography | Waterstones
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. They should be given greater control over it, rather than having Whitehall approve all of its decisions.” 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. 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.”
She added that locals know what is best for them, and they do not need someone in the centre dictating solutions to their problems.
All In by Lisa Nandy | Waterstones
All In shows how, by handing power and resources with a stake in the outcome, Britain can draw on the talent, assets and potential in every part of the country and start firing on all cylinders again. Finding strength rather than fear in our differences, it reimagines the relationship between people and government so that all of us can play our part in meeting the challenges of our age and rebuilding Britain the only way that works – together. Greater representation of female politicians in the UK is a must, as without it Nandy believes people will not feel heard. This number sees a sharp rise when you look at the members of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority – which is made up of leaders of each GM council. 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.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. 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. 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!”
Alternative: Towards a New Progressive Politics The Alternative: Towards a New Progressive Politics
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. Nandy begins at Wigan Athletic’s DW football stadium, remembering the first match she attended as the town’s MP. Ten years later, she found herself part of a battle to save the club, after a new owner based in Hong Kong put it into administration at the first opportunity. Recalling the fire sale of assets that took place before weeping, baffled employees, she writes: “Fans and a community that should have been at the heart of the process were shut out, treated as a nuisance by wealthy and powerful people with no connection to the club… the wrong people held all the power.” During this criticism, she remained complimentary of Burnham’s decision to introduce the Bee Network to Wigan, Bolton and Bury first. See also: “I often spend my time sounding like a Lib Dem”: Rory Stewart on the fractured Tory party]
Book Review: All In by Lisa Nandy
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 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? 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.”
reasons not to back Lisa Nandy for Labour leader 3 big reasons not to back Lisa Nandy for Labour leader
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.” Wrote at university that “The LGB (lesbian, gay, bisexual) society for example doesn’t accept straight members, but we still have to pay for it, something many find unacceptable” (she now insists she “will always support” LGBTQ+ comrades). A Tannoy sounded. “Would Lisa Nandy please leave the building,” Flower told her. “Go and give someone else a hard time.”
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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.
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