Lisa Nandy: Female MPs have become targets

Pic-Northern powerhouse: Lisa Nandy at Westminster (wp/es)
Political reporter(wp/es):::

Lisa Nandy was returning to her office in Portcullis House last Friday, weaving through the crowds of Leave protesters with their banners and flags, when she caught the attention of a group from The Red Lion pub.

“Oi!” they shouted, realising she was an MP. “Oi!” They moved unsteadily towards her, a picture of undisguised menace.

Close up, she could feel the heat of their anger. “‘F***ing traitor,’” they shouted in her face. She pauses. “There’s only one thing you do to traitors,” she says.

While she was being accosted, armed Westminster police at Derby Gate stood by. She doesn’t blame individual officers, who had “been given instructions not to intervene”, she says. “It’s the instructions that need to be reviewed.” 

She managed to punch in her pin code and squeeze through the security barriers and into Parliament, but she was shaken. “It was really aggressive and threatening,” she says. “A horrible experience.” Those in charge don’t understand the threat faced by female MPs. “It isn’t taken seriously enough.”

Nandy’s point is this: in the intensifying Brexit debate there is a deliberate  targeting of female MPs.  “Most female MPs will say they have been struggling for the past year or so to get anyone in authority to do much or take much notice of what’s happening.” 

The response to her complaint on Friday was typical. “They say they are logging it but it doesn’t meet the threshold for intervention. And move on.” What they are missing, she says, is the fact that “it’s part of a deliberate strategy to change the way we [women] vote. 

“The people who are standing outside shouting ‘traitor’ are trying to change the outcome of votes. It’s not working, but it is threatening.” 

Of course, the irony is that Nandy is trying to get Brexit across the line out of respect for her Leave-voting constituents in Wigan. She is one of a number of Labour MPs in Leave seats — including Caroline Flint and Gloria De Piero — whom Theresa May has been courting for support of her withdrawal agreement. As a result, Nandy is attacked by both extremes of the Brexit debate. She describes those running the People’s Vote campaign as “patronising and bullying”.

“The centre is shrinking. The longer this goes on, the more difficult it becomes to refind common ground. What’s happening in Parliament is a reflection of what’s happening in the country: attitudes hardening on both sides, the centre drowned out by extremes.”

Of particular concern are far-Right groups, which prey on the emotions bound up in the Brexit debate. Tommy Robinson’s army of Islamophobic nationalist thugs were out in force last Friday. But Nandy has noticed an uptick in support of groups such as the North West Infidels — a modern-day Combat 18. “This is the most active I’ve seen these groups since growing up in the Eighties. North West Infidels are trying to get a foothold in Wigan. They are having public meetings, recruiting, grooming people online. Their new strategy is threatening MPs.” 

This week Labour’s Rosie Cooper spoke for the first time about the plot to kill her by a neo-Nazi. Cooper’s constituency, West Lancashire, is next door to Nandy’s. “I am a target,” says Nandy. “All Northern female Labour MPs are targets.” They mention her ethnicity (her father was born in Calcutta) “but they don’t make that the focus. They say you want to block Brexit.” Threats arrive by email. There are messages on her social media and by post. It’s for this reason too that Nandy was so enraged by Theresa May’s speech two weeks ago in which she pitched Parliament against the people. “At a time when MPs are carrying panic buttons and afraid for their physical safety, that was such a dangerous and irresponsible thing to do. It has cost her any remaining trust and goodwill.” 

She says the public want politicians to take “collective blame” for the impasse. “At this moment of national fracture, the parties have become more tribal. [It] has left us paralysed, unable to see a way through.” 

MPs such as Nick Boles have her respect for trying to do the right thing, at the probable price of never being elected to Parliament again. “Frankly, if it’s the last thing we all do, we need to get it right. This is not about who gets to have a top career later, this is about whether the country breaks apart.”

The dilemma for Nandy is that although she wants to honour Brexit, she is passionately opposed to no deal. “I am opposed to a second referendum and I abstained on the Kyle/Wilson proposal... We don’t have the option of ruling out options at this stage and we have to vote for anything we can live with, really. Now that needs to be balanced against the economic harm of leaving with no deal. The damage of no deal is so serious that I would vote to revoke Article 50.

“I’ve always been clear with my constituents, a third of them voted Remain. I’m their MP too and they have to have a stake in the country. I won’t allow us to go off down a hard-Brexit route that completely ignores their views and concerns. A second referendum would continue this ongoing war.” 

Today we’re in Nandy’s bright office. There’s a pair of heels by her desk, ready to slip into, photos of her four-year-old son, a magnetic wall tacked with articles, a photograph of — naturally — Wigan pier. 

Chuka Umunna’s office is opposite. She’s right, it does feel like school: “Like a public school,” she clarifies. Nandy was state-educated in Manchester, although not quite “the good working- class lass” Len McCluskey once introduced at a Labour event. Her father was a Marxist academic who set up the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination and ended up writing the 1976 Race Relations Act with Roy Jenkins. Her mother was a producer at Granada who worked on World in Action, and her grandfather was a Liberal MP. 

She first came to Westminster as a researcher aged 21, working for a friend of Jeremy Corbyn. “Jeremy would amble into our office every now and again,” she says. He was always friendly to staff. “Which you notice about MPs when you’re not one. And he always had his own interests. He used to talk about his allotment, even then.” 

She laughs. “The thing about Jeremy is that if he’s set himself on a course of action, he will stick to it. If his course of action is that he’s going to his allotment for an hour in the afternoon, then that is what he’s doing. He won’t be talked out of it. It must drive John [McDonnell] mad sometimes.” 

She gets on with Corbyn, despite the fact that she helped run Owen Smith’s campaign when he challenged for the leadership. “I did it because he’s a friend.” She also wanted to end the infighting. Still, the Labour Party needs “hard work done on what we stand for, what sort of country we want to build”, she says. “There’s a view that somebody will come along and save us. It’s ideas and movements that change the world, not an individual with a bit of charisma.”

After her early stint in the Commons, Nandy spent 10 years in the voluntary sector (at Centrepoint). Returning to Parliament, she was chosen by Tessa Jowell to be her PPS. “There was absolutely no reason why she should have fished an awkward Left-winger off the back benches. But she gave me the chance to see how a major national project was built from the inside. She was generous and non-tribal.”

Jowell, who called her “darling”, echoed Nandy’s mother’s view that it was important to listen to “other traditions”. For instance: “I’m a socialist and a liberal. But there’s something to be learned from one-nation conservatism.” 

Nandy’s parents split when she was seven. She watched her mum battling to protect her from the prevailing prejudices of the day about “single mums”. “We were always the smartest turned-out at school. We had to demonstrate that we were a decent family. She discovered her mother would put her and her sister to bed before returning to work while they were left with a childminder. 

Nandy was shadow energy minister when her baby was three months old. “Jan Royall, who was our leader in the Lords, had a big office and at night she would turn it into a crèche so Catherine McKinnell and I could park our babies there to sleep.”

After the referendum she set up a think-tank to evaluate why towns like hers have remained relatively depressed compared to cities. She says it is possible for communities to heal. “I voted Remain,” she laughs. “Most of my street voted Leave. We are not trying to thump each other. My neighbour still puts my bins out when I’m down here.”

In the background, we notice Yvette Cooper on the telly. Nandy remarks: “The people who are still trying to find a way through this are important because a lot of people have just given up. This place is designed to prevent change and preserve the status quo. It’s not designed for consensus or negotiation or compromise. It’s designed, with social media and cameras in the chamber, for protest rather than politics. The Brexit impasse has brought to the fore how much it needs to change."