Lisa Nandy: a Labour leadership candidate who thinks for herself

If you ask people in the Labour Party for one word that defines Lisa Nandy, many of them would respond with “Towns”. She set up the Centre for Towns and has long advocated an economic rebalancing to support places like her constituency of Wigan, which she has represented since 2010. If this campaign were going to be won on the meme game alone, Nandy would triumph hands down, thanks to her presence across Twitter and Facebook.

The first time I met Nandy was at a fundraising dinner for herself and the MP for Stalybridge and Hyde, Jonathan Reynolds. I was seated next to her as a last-minute replacement for someone a lot more prominent. We hit it off immediately and she spent quite a lot of the event trying to introduce me to people who might be able to help me in my career. I had to gently suggested that perhaps she ought to be schmoozing rich people on her own behalf, which was what she was there to do. Reluctantly, she went off to do so. 

That self-effacing attitude may explain the disparity between Nandy’s fundraising numbers and her rivals’. Her campaign is being run on a shoestring. She recently released details of all donors over £1500, revealing a fighting fund of around £170,000 — less than a single donation of £200,000 that her rival Rebecca Long-Bailey received from Unite. 

However, that lack of money has not equated to a lack of energy. While she trails in the polling, she has already got further than others with higher profiles, such as Emily Thornberry and Clive Lewis. People getting on board the “Nandwagon” has injected some life into what was likely to be an otherwise dull campaign, while her political positioning has had a significant impact on the dynamics of the race. 

What might have ended up as a duel between Continuity Corbynistas and moderates (though both Starmer and Long-Bailey would reject those labels) has been given more nuance by Nandy’s candidacy. Having three competitors has stopped the race from becoming too polarising. It has forced all of them to emphasise vision, not faction. Nandy’s focus on a wealth tax and on the gig economy moves Labour away from a conversation centred on the nationalisation of utilities and towards a better articulation of the issues facing those at the sharp end of the UK and global economy. It even starts to move things towards actually offering solutions.  

Nandy herself has generally avoided most of the traps that her initial positioning might have found her in. Largely seen as a candidate of the soft Left — she has the backing of Open Labour as well as the GMB union — she was also seen as the candidate of Blue Labour, the socially conservative group within the party, largely because of her Brexit position, and her advocacy on behalf of the “left behind”. Her championing of towns is seen by some as a rejection of the metropolitan values that are associated in our populist and popular moment with cities. 

However, since launching her campaign, Nandy has made arguments in favour of immigration. It was also her stance on trans issues that led, in part, to weeks of the leadership campaign becoming largely defined by this debate, just as ballots started to drop. These are both issues that could be seen to encapsulate Left-wing metropolitan values that don’t really speak to the broader electorate. The trans issue is also hugely divisive within the membership of the Party. This emphatic stance was at odds with her previous positioning as the candidate who best understood the needs and wants of Labour Leave voters and those outside of metropolitan bubbles.

Nandy’s background may help explain her politics. Brought up in Manchester by her mother, herself the child of a Liberal MP, and her father, an Indian Marxist academic, she combines radical economics and social liberalism. Nandy is usually seen as thoughtful, but also willing to say things that people across the Labour Party don’t necessarily want to hear. 

For example, in 2016, she joined the chorus of voices asking Jeremy Corbyn to step down. She received a great deal of abuse for doing so. Having taken that painful decision, she could have chosen to stay on the sidelines, but instead acted as co-chair of Owen Smith’s ultimately doomed campaign. She is not afraid to position herself in opposition to people she has campaigned alongside for years. 

Nandy has also taken a firm stance on the party leadership’s mishandling of anti-Semitism, describing Labour’s approach as “fairly inexplicable”. At a recent leadership hustings event for the Jewish community, she called herself a Zionist, i.e. a supporter of Israel’s right to exist, and laid out a plan to tackle anti-Semitism. She sees no conflict between this and her strong support of Palestinian rights as Chair of Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East and her consistent criticism of the Netanyahu government. Nandy went on to secure the endorsement of the Jewish Labour Movement.

Over Brexit, Nandy made a choice that would not make her popular either with the Labour membership or many of her fellow MPs. In trying to take a middle tack towards supporting a softer Brexit she spoke out against the harder edges of both sides of that debate. A brave stance to take just before running for the leadership of a party whose membership was strongly Remain supporting. That approach won her an element of respect for sticking to her guns, even from those who vigorously disagreed with her — among whom I would count myself as one. 

It is this refusal to be led by faction over her own intellectual process that makes Nandy stand out. She’s very much the underdog in this fight and as such has had to bark louder to be heard. While she will have lost some votes over the stances she has taken, she has also raised her profile in the Labour Party immeasurably. 

Lisa Nandy was an unknown quantity coming into this race. That is no longer the case. She may not win — the latest polling has her at only 21 per cent — but her influence over the Labour conversation will be long-lasting.