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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now the Labour Party has a new leader of course and a new frontbench team and apparently, a new way of doing politics.  There are many people in the Shadow Cabinet who have very different beliefs from the leader Jeremy Corbyn but apparently that is okay, so will we therefore see senior party figures airing their differences in public.  Well Lisa Nandy is the new Shadow Energy Secretary and she joins me now, a very good morning to you.  Let me start with that question, how is it going to work?  Okay, all well and good that you are free to disagree with each other but ultimately you have to stop talking to each other and start talking to the public and try to win power and the public are going to say well, what does the party think, what is your policy?

LISA NANDY: Yes, I think that’s absolutely right.  The point of Jeremy Corbyn as leader is that he wants to have that conversation, he wants to have that debate with the public. There isn’t one view on some of these really complex, difficult issues amongst the wider public just as there isn’t one view in the shadow cabinet or in the Labour party either and …

DM: But it’s the majority view isn’t it?  That’s how you win power in this country.  Of course there are a range of views on the big significant fundamental issues but that’s the way our democracy works, we get a majority and that lot get on with it.  

LISA NANDY: Yes, well you seek to persuade people and you seek to make your case and win the argument and if you don’t win the argument then part of the collective responsibility of being in a political party and particularly in being on the frontbench demands that once you’ve had that debate and you’ve reached a decision, you get behind the leader and you get on with making the case to the public.   

DM: But you can disagree with the leader?

LISA NANDY: For the first time actually, certainly in my adult lifetime, possibly in my lifetime, we are now trying to have that conversation in an open way with the rest of the public and I think the public’s mood has changed very much in recent years. People want to see us having real debate, that clash of ideas, that clash of experiences that gets us to the right answers about some really complex problems and …

DM: Well let me ask you then, because listening to Jeremy Corbyn about the power of conference, I know you are going down to Brighton just after this interview, but you are going to find a very different conference  there aren’t you, a conference that is going to be told that it has real power over policy and beyond that it is not just conference, Jeremy Corbyn has been saying we’re going out on the road, we’re going out to listen to people and particularly people who voted in the recent elections for the Labour party, you are going to have a say, a fundamental say in policy.

LISA NANDY: I think so, yes.  That is certainly the direction of travel that he’s set out during the leadership conference.  I’ve just been on maternity leave, I’ve just come back so I’ve watched this process unfold like everybody else just through programmes like this and reading the newspapers and I think there is a general sense of excitement actually that for the first time we might have this open honest debate, we might be honest with people about our differences and we might find a better solution as a result.  That’s got to be quite exciting.  

DM: Okay, let’s then talk about your brief because there are some big, big issues there that divide people.  Let’s start with fracking, what do you believe, what does the party believe, is it the same thing and if it isn’t are there any issues over which you would resign?   

LISA NANDY: Well in a few hours we are about to find out whether we are going to have a debate on fracking at this conference, I hope that we are but the committee is just making the final arrangements for that and I am going to go along to that debate, two weeks into the job and I’m going to listen and I’m going to take part actually if we do manage to table that because there are two key issues for me with fracking.  One is that the public have real concerns about safety and I shared many of those concerns as a constituency MP who has fracking licences being potentially granted in my local area and those assurances have not been forthcoming so far from the government.  We tabled a series of amendments in the last parliament to try and get them, those must be written into law and the public …

DM: So you have got an open mind on this issue, whether we frack in this country?  

LISA NANDY: I do but not an open mind about safety.  There are concerns about water pollution, there are concerns about the impact on climate change, there are concerns about the impact on local traffic and disruption.  All of these things that the public are not getting a say about at the moment and one of the things that this government has done in relation to wind is that they have said we will allow local communities to determine whether they want to go ahead with wind farms in their local area.  In relation to fracking they have taken exactly the opposite approach and it seems to me that that is completely wrong.  

DM: Do you agree with that, I mean let’s move on to renewables, do you agree with that policy about when it comes to wind power?  

LISA NANDY: I think you have to take the public with you, you have to make the case, you have to win the argument and you have to give local communities a say because the future of energy generation, not just in this country but around the world, is not in allowing the market to ride roughshod over consumers and the environment, it’s not about bringing things back in house and renationalising the energy industry, the future if you look to countries as diverse as China, India, Germany, Finland, what you see is that we’re investing in community energy to give people real control over generating their own energy.  

DM: Well you say community energy and you mentioned China there as well, I don’t really think a new nuclear power station at Hinckley Point is community energy, that’s a big national infrastructure project taken by big government in cooperation, in partnership with the second biggest economic power on the planet.   How would Labour approach that, how would you approach that?  That’s going to be a difficult issue for you isn’t it?

LISA NANDY: Well I think it is fairly clear cut that we have been saddled with one of the worst deals that a government has ever negotiated.  Hinckley is on course now to become the most expensive nuclear power station ever built and it will saddle bill payers here with debts for generations. You say it’s …

DM: That’s the deal but what about your attitude to nuclear power overall? There are plenty of people within your party saying we shouldn’t build anymore nuclear power stations.

LISA NANDY: Well, Dermot, in a few months’ time we have got the Paris Climate Change negotiations, this is the most important, critical, historic moment that arguably the world had ever seen in relation to climate change, certainly since Kyoto in 1997 and in the run up to Paris we have to be thinking as a country how can we show real leadership around decarbonisation.  Now nuclear can have a role to play in that but not at any cost and what we’ve seen in the last few months is the government is determined to push ahead with this state backed project, backed by the way not by the British state but by the Chinese state, this state backed project which is hugely expensive and at the same time making enormous cuts to the renewable energy that we have in this country so we have got companies pulling out of investment at the very time we need to be investing and it is a tragedy that at that moment when we should be stepping up and acting as a force for higher ambition in the world, the UK is lagging behind and our strategy is unravelling.

DM: I just wanted to ask you about, we have been hearing this morning, we heard from Caroline Flint, we heard from Harriet Harman, we’ve heard from Yvette Cooper, concerns about the representation of women at the very top of your party.  You of course are in the Shadow Cabinet but the very highest jobs within the party structure, do you agree with Harriet Harman that Jeremy Corbyn has something to sort out?

LISA NANDY: I think we’ve got something to sort out as a party because we have got a situation now where there is our leader and our deputy leader are men and as a woman I feel very uncomfortable about that and I think we need to change the way that we do things.  Jeremy started by for the first time putting more than 50% of women into the shadow cabinet including me, into big jobs like energy and climate change ahead of Paris but it doesn’t mean that we can’t and shouldn’t do more.  Harriet made a suggestion that I thought was quite interesting about whether we change the rules to make sure that there is always a woman at the top of the party because the truth is that political parties have to reflect the public and at the moment what you see from major political parties, less so Labour but I’m not saying we haven’t got a mountain to climb, is that we don’t look as representative as we ought to and we do need to change that, there’s no question about it.

DM: Well it comes to you personally as well then, I’ve been reading about you, you must have been reading it and I’m sure treating it with a pinch of salt, but as a future leader yourself.  That’s not something you’d rule out presumably?

LISA NANDY: I do take it with a pinch of salt because I have been an MP for five years and I have literally seen almost every single of one of my colleagues singled out at one point or another as a future leader of the Labour party.  I will say this to you, I don’t want to be leader of the Labour party.  We have just been through a leadership contest where anyone who wanted to stand did, I didn’t, that should tell you everything that you need to know.

DM: But forever, do you rule it out forever?

LISA NANDY: I don’t want to be leader of the Labour party, I don't know how I can be any clearer about that.  We’ve got a leader.  

DM: Ah, with those kind of answers that just qualifies you to be.  Okay, Lisa, thank you very much indeed.  Lisa Nandy there on her way to the conference in Brighton, very good to see you.