‘Our survival is at stake’: Lisa Nandy issues warning as Labour leadership race intensifies
Outsider in race to succeed Jeremy Corbyn says party must listen to voters who deserted Labour at election
“Labour’s survival is at stake if we choose the wrong path. This is really existential for us now.”
Lisa Nandy is in no doubt about the seriousness of the crisis facing her party when I meet her on the campaign trail for the Labour leadership, and she is equally ready to set out in stark terms the choice facing those voting for a successor to Jeremy Corbyn.
We meet in the former mining town of Worksop in north Nottinghamshire, a location typical of the areas that she believes are behind Labour’s electoral decline and which must be won back for the party to have a chance of power.
Nandy has come in for mockery on social media for her championing of “towns” during the leadership contest, but the unfashionable analysis she pushed through the Centre for Towns think tank was borne out in December, when Labour strongholds crumbled in constituencies like Bassetlaw, which includes Worksop, across the north of England and the Midlands.
The seeds of Labour’s demise were sown not by Brexit or by Corbyn’s election but by the neglect of small market towns, such as Worksop, through the boom years of the early 2000s as well as the austerity of the past decade, she says.
“The trends that have led to here started four decades ago, with the decline of industry,” Nandy says. “Under the last Labour government, enormous amounts of investment were put in, but the economic investment that regenerated areas and created jobs went almost exclusively into cities.
“While a city like Newcastle got the investment for white-collar jobs, in many of those surrounding areas where we’ve just lost a lot of seats, it was Sure Start centres and health centres and new schools. And that was great, but where are the jobs? You just have to walk down the high street to see that the trickle-down effects just aren’t there.”
Young people in small towns now have to leave home to find opportunities, creating a nation that is “geographically polarised” in terms of both life chances and political opinions, she says.
It’s an argument that is bolstered as we walk through the centre of Worksop, where virtually every resident who stops to talk is a former Labour voter who switched to the Tories in December.
All speak approvingly of Boris Johnson’s determination to “get Brexit done” and one says that Corbyn’s nationalisation programme smacked too much of communism, but most say they were also motivated by concern about the lack of jobs, the empty shops on the high street, and the deterioration of services and the NHS.
Where other Labour politicians might have been quick to blame Tory austerity, Nandy nods patiently and agrees that things are not how they should be and says she wants to give power to local communities so they can sort these problems out.
And she says that this is why she chose to fight for the leadership as an outsider rather than taking “the easy option” of sitting out a contest few expected her to win.
”The reason I stood was to win, but to win in order to change the party.
“The public are looking at us at the moment. There’s a small window where they still are. If we’re not careful, they will stop paying attention altogether.
“We have got to show in this leadership contest that we’ve understood the scale of the crisis facing Labour and the scale of that rejection that’s just happened to us. Our Labour base has collapsed in Scotland, north Wales, the north, the south and the Midlands. This is really existential for us now.”
She has little time for those seeking to frame the leadership contest as a choice between “Corbynite” Rebecca Long-Bailey and “centrist” Keir Starmer, which threatens to squeeze her out for representing neither side.
“We’ve spent a lot of time in the Labour Party in the last few years arguing about competing versions of our past, with the 1970s fighting the 1990s over and over again,” says Nandy. “People want to know what we’re going to do for them in 2024, and at the moment we haven’t got a forward-looking story about the sort of country that we can be.
“People only vote Labour when we give a sense of hope and they want to hear not just dreams but a plan about how life is going to be made better in places like Worksop.”
Her message seems to chime with party activists who gather in the town hall to hear her speak, although some wonder how her low-key presentational style would fare when pitched against a showman – such as Boris Johnson – in the House of Commons.
“She lights my fire,” says councillor Josie Potts. “I was thinking about voting for Keir, but I like what she’s saying about what needs to be done in places like this.”
Another activist hails her as “knowledgeable”, but says that she is also “downbeat”, adding: “I’d rather have downbeat but knowledgeable than someone with charisma who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
Nandy herself shrugs off any suggestion she would have to brighten up her act as party leader, insisting she has an “optimistic” vision to offer.
She says that of the three Conservative PMs she has seen in the Commons, Johnson is “not the hardest one to deal with”: David Cameron was the most difficult to take on, as he was unflappable at the dispatch box, while Theresa May would get bogged down in detail and could be knocked off her stride by difficult questions.
Tackling Johnson requires not forensic dismantling of his arguments but a “moral case” of the kind presented by Sikh MP Tan Dhesi when he took on the PM in the Commons over his comparison of Muslim women to letterboxes.
“With Boris, I think his great weakness is that he wants to be liked,” she says. “We’re going to have to go out and expose the Tories for what they’ve become, and I think I can do that.”
She dismisses suggestions that she lacks the experience and ability to take big decisions as party leader, pointing to her five years on the front bench and her readiness as an MP to stand up for unpopular causes.
“At every moment over that time, when I’ve had to make a judgement call, I think I’ve judged it right,” she says.
“I think that is leadership. It’s lonely. It’s hard. When I was battling against free schools and academies as a newly elected MP, it was not a pleasant place to be, going up against my own party hierarchy.
“But when I’ve had to make those decisions, I’ve called it right and that comes from 20 years of fighting hard battles and not shying away from them, and going towards trouble.”
Despite polls putting her a distance behind Starmer and Long-Bailey, Nandy believes she can still win a contest that has already seen her build considerable momentum from a low base.
“My sense is actually that the party members are really open to thinking about who they’re supporting,” she says.
“I think a lot of them didn’t know who I was at the beginning of this contest but we’ve really felt it start to shift over recent weeks.
“And the reason that I think it’s shifting is because I get a very strong sense that this is a party that wants to win again.”
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