Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
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. However, the book also highlights stories where the community came together to fight for a better area, from the local pub to the hospital porters, demonstrating that despite the negativity and doomsayers, the fabric of community is still there lying underneath the hot air of our divisions. While it is somewhat frayed, with a bit of work it can be repaired, Nandy believes. 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.
All In: How we build a country that works – HarperCollins
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. 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’.” In the presence of Flower, Nandy morphed into someone comically merciless, a precocious teenage daughter ribbing her dad. She pulled him up on a new sign. 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.”It is obvious from this article that the writer is a hard left only policy supporter. That is an unsustainable and wasteful attitude.
All In: How We Build a Country That Works – Signed Copy
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. Lisa Nandy MP talked about devolution, Manchester and the cities-town divide when introducing her new book at the Manchester Literature Festival. 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. 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.”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.” A Tannoy sounded. “Would Lisa Nandy please leave the building,” Flower told her. “Go and give someone else a hard time.” 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. 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. 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.”
All In: How We Build a Country That Works (Audio Download
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. Reportedly spoke at Blue Labour’s 2016 conference (though she has allegedly said its ideology isn’t the answer to Britain’s problems). 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. Lisa Nandy has served as Shadow Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities since 2021.All In is a well-written book. Too often, books by politicians are platitudinous, but this isn't the case with All In. It's strong on diagnosing the challenges that twenty-first century Britain faces, but also how to reverse our managed decline. It's also balanced and recognises that while the Conservative Party has created and exacerbated many of the challenges we now face, others have been longer in the making and therefore the Labour Party must bear some responsibility. Lisa also recognises that politicians have failed to meet the expectations of the public; they have been too slow, too timid, and in some instances taken the wrong course. 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. The shadow minister made it a point to say that both are great leaders, with differing personalities and ways of leading politics. 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.
Great Deal 
New Comment