Lisa Nandy on levelling up: ‘It’s my town, it’s my family, it’s our future at stake’

She tells The Yorkshire Post: “I grew up in Manchester in a really political time.

“It was the 1980s.

“I was really struck when I got elected here in 2010, lots of MPs had gone because of the expenses scandal.

“And so there were huge, huge numbers, hundreds of new MPs on all sides of the House, and nearly every MP of my age and in my generation talks about Thatcher being a major influence on them on their side for good and on our side for bad.”

The Shadow Levelling Up Secretary is proud of her roots.

Raised around Manchester and Wigan in a single-parent household, she calls her own family a “fairly diverse bunch, really” when it comes to ideology, with views “spanning sort of Marxism to liberalism”.

“Christmas dinners have always been interesting in our house,” she adds.

In her early childhood era, she says she “grew up in a time when single mums were being vilified”.

She added: “I’ve got two parents, two loving parents, but I was growing up in a one lone parent household and so we were very much a target of that from the Government.

“I grew up at a time when people were losing their jobs, when all of the surrounding towns were seeing industry ripped out of them, a lack of investment in public services, which we saw as kids, you know. The school was collapsing and had buckets in the corridors and not enough textbooks to go around.

“You felt it was really a government that was at war with its own people. And it really made me quite passionate about politics and the power of politics to make change.”

Shadowing Cabinet heavyweight Michael Gove is not Ms Nandy’s first frontbench job.

However, following on from her times working in the Energy and Foreign briefs, it is arguably the most high profile so far.

The job, she says feels like “coming home” after her “metaphorical” time globe-trotting, having held the Shadow Foreign Secretary job at a time when borders were closed and jumbo jets grounded.

“There is an awful lot to do,” she says in relation to levelling up.

“And I’m acutely aware that although this agenda is now at the centre of the political debate, and will be the key battleground for the next General Election – which is good from my point of view – for me, it’s personal.

“I’ve got skin in the game. It’s my town. It’s my family. It’s our future that is at stake.”

But what does it actually mean? Having been coined in the lead-up to the 2019 General Election, ‘levelling up’ went from being a campaign trail buzzword to a cornerstone of this Government’s domestic policy.

When Mr Gove unveiled the long-awaited White Paper last week, more than two years on from the Conservative’s landslide election victory, he promised to overhaul the nation’s opportunities and “allow overlooked and undervalued communities to take back control of their destiny”.

Ms Nandy is sceptical, however. After 12 years of Tory administrations, she thinks “here we have again a Secretary of State who’s making those big promises.

“But it’s not backed by the key people in Government and it can’t deliver them,” she adds, pointing the finger at Chancellor and Richmond MP Rishi Sunak.

The change the country needs, she believes, lies in putting “power back in favour of the people”, forcing influence out of the major cities and “into all of those towns across Britain whose communities deserve a better future”.

But Labour can only deliver on policy ideas if they get to Number 10, and to do that means winning back millions of voters across Yorkshire and the rest of the country they have lost in recent years, as well as convincing long-term Conservative backers that they offer the best package.

The Wigan MP understands the risk the party faces, with her own majority having reduced dramatically between 2017 and 2019, while neighbouring colleagues found themselves out of a job.

“Those votes did not belong to Labour,” she says. “They’re something we have to earn and we have to fight

for.

“I’m under no illusions about how hard we’re going to have to fight for them not just to win back people that we lost, but also to convince people who kept the faith with us, who gave us a chance in the last few years that we have not just an ambition to match theirs and a plan to achieve it, but also that they can trust us to deliver.

“That has been a problem for Labour for at least the 12 years that I’ve been in Parliament, and possibly longer.

“I’ve heard you. And I’ve seen it, and I will make it my mission to bring Labour home to you”.