14 May LISA NANDY believes the Labour Party will one day have a female leader
LISA NANDY believes the Labour Party will one day have a female leader – thanks to young women in the party who are finally “changing the game”.
In an exclusive interview with GB News, the Shadow Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, also admitted her party came close “to dying” under Jeremy Corbyn.
Speaking to Gloria De Piero, Ms Nandy, the MP for Wigan, also criticised the “pantomime” nature of politics in Westminster saying it was creating disillusionment among voters.
Commenting on the fact Labour has never had a female leader, Ms Nandy, who stood for the job herself in 2020, said: “It’s pretty existential for us. I joined the Labour Party because I believe in equality and because I want to fight poverty and because I believe and know this country can be better. So it’s a huge deal for us. I think there will be a leader, at some point who’s a woman but I think there’s a problem, and I’ve got a bit of an insight into it, having been through that experience.
“The problem is when people look for the next leader of the Labour Party, they’ve got in their mind a view about what that is based on what it’s always been. I felt that very much when I went for selection in Wigan in 2010. We’d never had a woman MP here in the whole history of parliamentary democracy. People were looking for the next MP, they were looking for the next guy, the next older guy who could do it and I think that was the problem actually. There were a lot of members who said to me ‘you don’t look like a Prime Minister, you don’t look like a leader of the Labour Party’ and I know exactly what they meant and it’s depressing.”
Explaining what’s different now she said: “The young women in particular won’t have it and there are lots of young women in our party now who are starting to change the game. So I think it’s shifting. But we have got to vote for more women.”
Discussing the reasons behind why she stood for the job herself three years ago she said: “We’d become completely disconnected from the people who built and founded the Labour Party. People felt really disrespected by what happened during Brexit. And we’d gone through a period where we moved to the extremes in the party. We were promising the earth to people who are incredibly grounded and realistic and could see that we had no ability to pay for it. They were worried about whether they could trust us with their money.”
A big turning point for her, Ms Nandy said, was the novichok attack.
“When we had the attack on the streets of Salisbury from the Putin Government, people really thought that we were siding with Putin over the British people,” she said. “It was horrendous. I thought if we go into the leadership contest saying we got it all right, Corbyn 10 out of 10, Brexit 10 out of 10, and that we just need to plough on and do more of the same, then I thought that would be the end of the Labour Party. I thought we’d die and we would deserve to.
“So I stood to give those people a voice, so that when they looked at that contest they would know there was somebody who was prepared to stand up and fight for them. And stand up for their right to have the party that they built and founded back representing them again in British politics.
“I didn’t win. But actually, in a lot of ways I feel that the job was done because when we started that contest, I was the only person on that stage saying those things. And by the end of that contest I stood with Keir and Becky, who I came to like a lot and became good friends with.”
Describing the frustration she finds with political life in Westminster, compared to her constituency role she added: “The people of Wigan are the most incredible people. They work hard. They have no time for some of the nonsense that goes on in Westminster. This is what matters, not the pantomime that goes on in Westminster. The mission of my 13 years in politics is to try and take what is happening to people in places like Wigan and drag it into the Westminster bubble and force people to confront it.
“After those Brexit years when there were all these calls for a second referendum, people here just thought we’d gone absolutely mad. All of us. Well we had. I mean you walk around the House of Commons and you couldn’t shake the feeling that people had completely lost the plot.”
Meanwhile Ms Nandy, whose father is Indian, also told GB News about the pride she had in her heritage.
“I’m half Indian and very proud of it,” she said. “I’ve been to India a few times. I don’t claim to be an expert on the culture, but I’m really, I’m proud of it. Being mixed race, growing up, mixed race in the 1980s did shape me a lot. I see some of these young England footballers and stuff they have to put up with. But look how amazing they are and how they look like the Britain that I know and understand. I think this country could be so amazing…if we had a government that was as good as the people in it.”
