Potential leadership candidate warns against talking ‘amongst ourselves’ in Westminster
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************************************(************************************************************************************************ Lisa Nandy: ‘We need to be listening to people, not sitting in meeting rooms in Westminster.’ Photograph: Christopher Thomond / The Guardian ()
An inquiry being co-led by Ed Miliband of Labour’s election campaign is in danger of drawing the wrong conclusions by failing to listen to the people who refused to vote for the party, the potential leadership candidate Lisa Nandy has said.
Nandy saidthe review set up by a group called Labor Togetherwas adopting a misguided approach by being based too much in Westminster.
Miliband, who lost to David Cameron in (*************************************************************************, is among those included in the review, which will include interviewing all 72 MPs who lost their seats during the crumbling of Labour’s “red wall” of constituencies in the north of England, the Midlands and Wales.
But Nandy said it was most important for the party to listen to the voters who had left the party over the years.
“I have to be honest, I didn’t know anything about this review until two days ago,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today program on Tuesday.
“And if the lesson drawn from this election is, a review can be drawn up in a meeting room in Westminster without any reference to the two parts of the Labormovement – our councillor base and trade union base – that were probably the reason we did not have a worse result, I just don’t think that people are drawing the right lessons at all.
“We need to be out in places like Ashfield, listening to people like the ex-miner I met yesterday, not sitting in meeting rooms in Westminster trying to debate this out amongst ourselves with the help of a few thinktanks.
“I just think the approach is wrong.”
The Wigan MP, who is conducting her own visits to constituencies that Labor lost, said a phrase that kept recurring was “Labor’s not for us any more”.
Nandy said she spent Monday knocking on doors in Ashfield, and found trust in Labor was the main issue.
The backbencher said: “There’s been a lot of talk about the role of Jeremy Corbyn in this election campaign.
“But there was just a general sense that at the top of the Labor party we don’t speak for people like them any more, a sense we don’t have skin in the game, that we’re not rooted in those communities, and we’re just not like them, and we don’t come very often to just ask people what they think and to listen to what they’ve got to say.
“We often come in and tell them that we’ve got all the answers and we can fix it, and what people told us loud and clear in this election campaign is: ‘You’re just not listening’.”
Nandy said crime was the “great unspoken issue” of the election campaign, with many communities facing problems with drugs and antisocial behavior, while police and council resources had been cut by the Tories in government.
Nandy is considered a potential candidateon the soft left of the party and last week she criticized the party’s shift to supporting a second referendum. She is likely to go up against Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary, and Emily Thornberry, the shadow foreign secretary, who both pushed for a position in favor of a second referendum.
Two other leading candidates are Rebecca Long-Bailey, who is supported by the Corbynite wing of the party, and Clive Lewis, a candidate on the pro-European left.
Jess Phillips, the backbencher and women’s rights campaigner, is also expected to stand.
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