BOOKBUSTER REVIEW – All In: How we Build a Country that Works
By Lisa Nandy
Published by Harper North, 2023 rrp £9.99
REVIEW BY TIM BARTON
Lisa Nandy is stuck in a party that is losing public confidence fast, no one appears to like Starmer much. The only saving grace is that the Tory party seem to be self-destructing even more wilfully. As MP for Wigan, the last decade has been challenging. Her party, at conference, had opted to take a ‘remain’ stance on the EU referendum, despite the leadership taking a different view. And, as the party, then, was trying to respect internal democracy and listen to members (and unions, not always for the best), the leadership fought a ‘remain’ campaign. After the massive deindustrialisation of the north-west, Wigan had, perhaps unsurprisingly, almost 64% backing for the ‘leave’ option at the ballot. As an MP in a party fighting to ‘remain’, this must have been very hard.
In December 2020, in a broadcast on ITV, Nandy said “when we got the result, it was obvious that all we’d done was managed to bring to the surface huge divisions that were not going to be easily resolved”.
Back in 2018 Nandy co-founded the Centre for Towns, ‘an independent, non-partisan organisation dedicated to improving the future of our towns’, motivated by the disaffection she has witnessed in places like Wigan, and the huge funding gap between the metropole and everywhere else. She wants to put power back in the hands of the people, and does not believe the narrative that those who voted for Brexit were knuckle-dragging idiots with an obsession with empire and a ‘Powell & Pressburger’ wartime nostalgia. To deny that element existed in the referendum campaign flies in the face of the evidence, but to see it as a particularly large, if loud, element is clearly correct.
LOCAL INPUT IN DECISIONS ARE WELCOME
In wanting to reorganise our political economy, she takes the time to critique our democratic deficit, and makes clear that she sees our ‘representative democracy’ as in peril. Her obsessions are healthier than some: she sees decentralised grassroots democratic involvement as a necessary plank in any meaningful reforms, rather than obsessing over Westminster. This position pits her against the drive to install ‘white old men’ into mayoral positions with limited devolved power and very little expansion of involvement in huge decisions affecting ordinary people’s lives. This makes her recipe for change healthier than most, as does her awareness that a ‘mixed economy’ is also a necessity, pitched between the free-market radicalism of the right and the cartoon idea that ‘the left’ want to nationalise everything. Here she supports John Maynard Keynes’ idea for ‘intermediary institutions, belonging neither to state nor market but to us all’.
Both these positions have their limitations. Despite her wish to see electoral reform, ‘proportional representation’ only gets one mention, quite near the end of the book, yet this is a necessary reform not just for central government but for decentralised representation as well. It would have been nice to see her engage properly with the idea. Her views on ‘economic democracy’ and local input in decisions are welcome. But some of the economic positions here are a little contradictory. She approvingly quotes RH Tawney’s vision of a society where “money and power to not serve economic ends”, then four pages later acknowledges Maurice Glasman’s claim that “capital is not democratic and has a tendency to centralise”. Thus, for all her talk of radical restructuring, she seems insufficiently interested in more anti-capitalist ideas than she’d need to be to succeed in her proposed projects.
A DIFFICULT BALANCING ACT
She does address the emergence of a more multi-polar world, which is good, although this appears to mean ‘China’, which is surprisingly limited on her part, especially as her father is Indian, and the largest share of the much touted 660,000 immigrants to last year were workers, students, and their families coming here on visas from India. Also peculiar, her potted history of the last century is very gentle on America’s role, to the point, I think, of naivety.
Nonetheless, she does address questions few in powerful positions in Labour ever articulate or acknowledge. As someone tied to a Starmer shadow government, it must be hard to push some of these ideas. I suspect a difficult balancing act here given her position in the party, a symptom of which is only once mentioning Corbyn and then not by name, but ‘the former leader’, which is jarring, hilarious, and a bit weird. I also suspect this book is her leadership run manifesto – overall, with the odd caveat, I think I’d support her.
DESERVES TO TOP THE BEST-SELLERS LIST
Her ideas for local autonomy include increasing funding for job-creating green initiatives, including building locally owned and controlled infrastructure. Despite recognising that we are now in a multi-polar world, I don’t get the impression that she fully understands the economic ecology of green technology, but she is well-meaning, and a great deal more can be done locally despite the globalised nature of both capital and industry than Sunak’s benighted government will ever pursue.
In the early chapters she, rightly, objects to the polarised nature of debate in contemporary media, and in Parliament. This includes being critical of an ‘us and them’ mentality. Ironically, her book then goes on to chronicle the terribly class-ridden minority-rule from above that we currently labour under (she appears to think this is something new, but it really and absolutely isn’t of course). Her last but one chapter is entitled ‘of the people, for the people, by the people, with the people’, and you know? I think she means it. All in all, All In deserves to top the best-sellers list, though it won’t.
All In: How we Build a Country that Works is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE
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