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Wednesday 22 January 2020

Lisa Nandy - Serious Challenger

While some in our free and fearless press were waiting for Birmingham Yardley MP Jess Phillips to confirm her departure from the Labour leadership contest, the more significant news was that the GMB Union had backed not Keir Starmer, or Rebecca Long Bailey, but Wigan’s MP Lisa Nandy. Now that Ms Phillips has also backed Ms Nandy, the thought is beginning to enter that she might give the other two more than a run for their money.
Evening all

With the GMB’s backing, she is almost certainly going to get on the final ballot. That fact alone will sway some CLPs; it might even prompt other Trades Unions to back her. So, assuming Ms Long Bailey also makes it through, it will be a three way contest. That is why some on the left are starting to look seriously at Lisa Nandy.

And there is much to admire about the MP whose only previous appearance on Zelo Street was back in 2012, when the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his rabble at the Guido Fawkes blog were attempting - unsuccessfully - to smear her over her rail travel expense claims. She had travelled in First Class; therefore something must, they deduced, be improper. It wasn’t: she was actually saving money on the full Standard Class fare.
But now the examinations are going to be more intensive. So how is she coping? Rather well, it seems, as Mark di Stefano, now at the FT, observed earlier today. “Nick Robinson: ‘Who is your favourite Labour leader?’ … Lisa Nandy: ‘I think there are different leaders who’ve done different things at different times…’ … Robinson: ‘Carefully avoided’ … Nandy: ‘Well it’s a daft question’”. That was not the only interviewer getting short shrift.

She also went on ITV breakfast offering Good Morning Britain and put self-publicist extraordinaire Piers Morgan back in his box. After Ms Nandy concluded that coverage of the Duchess of Sussex “has not shown the British media in its best light”, off went Morgan in his best rant-while-monopolising-the-attention manner. “The reality … [is] Meghan Markle's had exactly the same level of treatment as someone like Kate Middleton, for example. Good and bad in equal measures”. And he was just getting warmed up.
If you're a member of the royal family, you get acres of press coverage. I would say 70% of the Meghan coverage has been positive, 30% has been negative. And she just doesn't like the negative stuff. It's got nothing to do with her skin colour, nothing to do with her gender. It's just they've done stuff that the public, and the media reflect British public opinion most of the time, thought was wrong”. Then came a pause.

And then came the put-down. "If you don’t mind me saying, how on earth would you know? As someone who’s never had to deal with ingrained prejudice, you're not in a position to understand people who have … The way Meghan Markle was treated, I didn't like it at all”.
Now, those two exchanges do not make a conclusive case for Lisa Nandy to be elevated to the post of Labour leader. But they speak to an assurance, a confidence, that any leader needs in navigating their way through the media minefield. We have a media that is, overall, innately hostile to the Labour leadership right now. To have a leader prepared to take them on in a level-headed yet fair, but firm and decisive way, is always a bonus.

Lisa Nandy is proving to be a serious challenger. Do not take her candidacy lightly.
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12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, it isn't difficult to crush a no-mark gutless tory shitehawk like Robinson. Instead of, for instance, like Bliar-Brown, cringing at the feet of Murdoch and Rothermere M25 smear clerks.

I won't vote for Nandy. But by Christ that's the way to deal with lowlives like Boulton, Burley, Ridge, Kuenssberg, Neil, Maitlis, Smith, Peston, Bradby, Frei, Newman and all the other bought-and-paid-for junior media meffs.

If Jeremy Corbyn made one big mistake, it was to treat that corrupt mob fairly, instead of the contemptible propagandist ratbags they are.

Anonymous said...

Serious challenger
The woman who supported BrexitJohnson all the way and kept on voting with thetories.

You sure she is not in the wrong party?

Gammon Tester said...

@13:00
Lisa Nandy's voting record on EU matters: https://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/24831/lisa_nandy/wigan/divisions?policy=1065
Please copy & paste evidence of support for Johnson/Brexit and get back on here with details.

Anonymous said...

https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/brexit-deal-vote-boris-johnson-labour-mps-who-vote-for-withdrawal-agreement-818312

Labour MPs who voted for the deal
Kevin Barron (Rother Valley)
Sarah Champion (Rotherham)
Rosie Cooper (West Lancashire)
Jon Cruddas (Dagenham and Rainham)
Gloria De Piero (Ashfield)
Jim Fitzpatrick (Poplar and Limehouse)
Caroline Flint (Don Valley)
Mike Hill (Hartlepool)
Dan Jarvis (Barnsley)
Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields)
John Mann (Bassetlaw)
Grahame Morris (Easington)
********** Lisa Nandy (Wigan) ************
Melanie Onn (Great Grimsby)
Stephanie Peacock (Barnsley East)
Jo Platt (Leigh)
Ruth Smeeth (Stoke-on-Trent North)
Laura Smith (Crewe and Nantwich)
Gareth Snell (Stone-on-Trent Central)

Jonathan said...

No thanks, just another Blairite dressed up as a Socialist.

I will be voting for Rebecca Long Bailey a more serious candidate.

Osscat said...

I the GMB had had their way we would be eatin baked beans from 3/4 inch plate steel cans.

Nigel Stapley said...

Hmmm...

Is this the same Lisa Nandy who last week did rather more than merely suggest that the supporters of Scotland's inalienable (under international law) right to self-determination should be met by London with the same type of action as used by the Spanish régime against the Catalans?

You know: deny them the right to a referendum; trash the polling stations when they insist on holding it anyway (because holding one had widespread popular support); beat up elderly women and others who were trying to exercise their democratic rights; arrest the democratically-elected leaders of Catalunya, hold them without trial for well over a year, subject them to show trials and give them sentences of a decade or more?

You mean that Lisa Nandy (and I haven't seen any indication that she has resiled one inch from that position)?

If she isn't irredeemably ignorant about the issue, then all I see is yet another Jack-waving BritNat. Neither explanation would surprise me from the Labour Party, and it certainly explains why Labour - the self-described 'natural party of government' there scarcely more than a decade ago - is all but dead in Scotland.

I wonder what indy-dupporting members of the GMB make of their union's backing of this non-entity?

Burlington Bertie from Bow said...


Lisa Nandy voted for Brexit because 'the northern working-class' did and she said she should reflect that.
Now 'the northern working-class' have voted Tory in large numbers presumably she will reflect that by wholeheartedly supporting Johnson and his hard/no deal Brexit.

Didn't this used to be called 'ouvrierism'?

Gammon Tester said...

@15:15
From the url that I linked: "On 23 Oct 2019:-
Lisa Nandy voted against removing rights for EU, Swiss and Turkish nationals to pursue business activities in the UK following the UK's withdrawal from the EU."

Read the other entries and note that Lisa Nandy did not support "BrexitJohnson all the way and kept on voting with thetories"

grim northerner said...

Her forehead is too flat.

Anonymous said...

Just another right winger, whats the point, I will not vote for somebody who represents watered down Thatcherism

grim northerner said...

She's too Toby jug.