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SOPHY RIDGE: It’s been a pretty terrible week for Jeremy Corbyn.  An historic by-election defeat, more criticism of his leadership and this morning he wakes up to some pretty disastrous polling in the papers.  First more on the story that just won’t go away, the Labour party is facing a crisis.  The party may have held onto its seat in Stoke but Copeland turned blue, the first time the opposition has lost a seat to the government in a by-election in decades, so I’ve been to Wigan to sit down with the local MP there, Lisa Nandy and I began by asking her what she made of those results.

LISA NANDY: Look, it was an incredibly difficult set of campaigns for us and obviously there are many people in the Labour party, including me, who are very relieved that we’ve prevented Paul Nuttall getting to parliament and spreading that divisive nasty politics even further but there is no question at all that these were very, very bad results for Labour and that they’ve been a long time coming.  In towns across this country there has been a growing frustrating with mainstream politics and its inability to speak for people about the things which really matter in their daily lives and that is something that the Labour party urgently needs to confront as a party that seeks to govern in the interests of people both in cities and towns around the country.

SR: Let’s talk about Copeland particularly.  To put it in context, the last time an opposition party lost a seat they held in a by-election to the government you were three years old, a pretty disastrous result.

LISA NANDY: Yes, that’s not that cheery a statistic but actually there shouldn’t be much cheering in the Labour party at the moment.  As Tawney said in the 1930s, what Labour needs now is a bit less self-commiseration and a bit of hard, cold realism.  The truth is when we were knocking on doors in Stoke and in Copeland, over and over again the same thing came up, it wasn’t just questions about leadership which were very present on the doorstep, it was a sense that Labour doesn’t really have the answers to the big challenges that people face in their lives.  

SR: Do you think though that people around Jeremy Corbyn really grasp how bad things are?  I mean Jeremy Corbyn seemed to be in celebration mode in Stoke, you had one Shadow Cabinet Minister say that losing Copeland by the amount you did was an incredible achievement.

LISA NANDY: I don't know how far people across the party grasp the extent of the problems that we’ve got, I’m not in the inner circle and so I don't know what the leader’s response is behind the scenes but I think the trouble with looking at every factor apart from Labour is that it’s just a thoroughly inadequate response.  If we really want to address what has been happening to the Labour party for a very long time then we as a party need to get out of our comfort zone and start confronting some of the very difficult issues that we face.  I can trace some of the problems that Labour has back ten, fifteen years to a time when we embraced globalisation which brought great economic benefits for Britain but failed to understand that there are a lot of people in towns around the country who feel very strongly wedded to their communities, to their family life, to that sense of rootedness and connectedness to their local areas and when you have an economic model that is based almost entirely around the cities as engines of economic growth, where towns like mine are just anchored along to be dragged along in their wake, what you get more and more in towns across the country is the sense that things that matter are disappearing and that people are determined to stand up and defend them and Labour has to give a voice to that. We have to stop ignoring it, we have to start understanding it and we have to start giving a voice to it.

SR: I am really keen to talk about some of the big challenges for Labour that are coming up but at the same time there is an imminent problem as well which is your leader.  According to the polls he is the most unpopular opposition leader at this point in the cycle in modern times, is it time for him to go?

LISA NANDY: Well it is no secret that last summer I resigned from the Shadow Cabinet and said at the time that I thought we needed a change of leadership and a change of direction but after the events of last summer I don't think there is a huge appetite across the Labour movement for another leadership contest.

SR: Is that because Jeremy Corbyn would just win again do you think?

LISA NANDY: I don't know whether he would win again or not but he asked at the time for enough time to succeed in his post and the membership were very clear that they wanted to give it to him.  He has made very clear that he’s not going anywhere and earlier this year he set out a series of steps in which he was determined to turn the situation around for Labour.  People very close to him, like the Shadow Chancellor, said that they would turn around the situation in the polls within a year and that was a very welcome recognition about the scale of the problem that we’ve got.

SR: So you’ll give him a year then really to turn things round?

LISA NANDY: Well that’s what his close team have said, that they are determined to do that within a year and I think that is absolutely critical.  We can’t obviously go into a general election in the state that we’re currently in but to do that will mean recognising that the problems that Labour has got pre-date Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and actually we need to go back a lot further and do some real soul-searching and start coming up with concrete answers if we are going to turn this situation around.

SR: And of course you’re at risk aren’t you, in places like this Labour Club for example, where for generations people have loyally voted for Labour, you are at risk of letting down those voters aren’t you?

LISA NANDY: Well there’s no question that people in towns like Wigan, especially in this area where we’re sitting now, cannot wait for Labour to change its course to turn things around, we have to do that now and we have to win the next general election and that means …

SR: But if you look at the polls that’s just not going to happen is it?

LISA NANDY: Well at the moment we are 18 points behind in the polls and actually as worrying for Labour is that we seem to be losing the argument on a whole host of areas that matter.  If you look at the way attitudes have changed over the last 10, 15 years, take the EU for example, hostility to the EU grew enormously in towns across the country between 1997 and 2015, there wasn’t always this great gulf in attitudes between towns and cities and that gives you a clue as to what Labour needs to do, we need to start listening to people in places like Wigan, we need to start giving them a voice.

SR: That’s a bit of a road map there for what Labour needs to do but are there really any signs that the party is grappling with those questions when the polls are still so bad, you’ve just lost Copeland, a seat that you’ve held for about 80 years, you have a leader who is really very unpopular if you look at any of the polling that’s done – do you think the existence of the Labour party is at stake here?  I mean no party has got a God-given right to exist.

LISA NANDY: I very much agree with that but what I’ve felt very much canvassing in Stoke and in Copeland over the last few weeks is that there is no real enthusiasm for UKIP or actually in both of those places I didn’t really feel any real enthusiasm for the Tory government either.

SR: Even though they took Copeland?

LISA NANDY: Even though they took Copeland it felt very much that people were saying, well this is the best of the options that are on offer and actually …

SR: So what does that say about Labour then?

LISA NANDY: I mean Labour is in real trouble and there is no point in pretending that that isn’t the case.  As you said before, there are lots of people who are questioning whether this is an existential crisis for Labour but actually there is a gap there in British politics, there is a vacuum that is being left by Labour’s failure to provide not just an opposition but an alternative to the Tory narrative about the future of this country and I think there is a real desire from people across the country for somebody, for Labour to come in and fil that gap.

SR: So clearly now is the time for people who have got big ideas to step up.  If things don’t get any better would you consider running for the leadership?

LISA NANDY: I have got no intention of running to be leader of the Labour party and actually I think this is one of the most damaging things that is happening in Labour at the moment is that we are casting around for a Messiah who is going to come in and fix this situation when actually what is needed is some hard thinking.  We’re a party that has only ever had major achievements when we’ve come together and drawn on talent from right across the party, not factions but actually from across all of those different strands and traditions and the tragedy of what’s happened to us in recent years is that the debate has become concentrated around one individual.  I saw it happen in the early 2000s around Tony Blair and it’s happened again recently around Jeremy Corbyn and the truth is that if we are going to provide a compelling alternative to this Tory government it is not going to come from one person alone.

SR: There’s a reason though that the debate has been cast around one person, who is clearly a controversial figure amongst many in your own party, voters have been showing in the polls and also of course in places like Copeland that he is not necessarily speaking to them – a recent poll this week said that you were the second most popular possible candidate for the leadership amongst Labour voters, the most popular is in City Hall, the London Mayor.  You are in a good place to do something about it aren’t you?

LISA NANDY: I think we’re all in a good place to do something about it.  I’m a Member of Parliament with a national platform, I’m sitting here now speaking to lots of people across the country about what I think that Labour should do but I am not the only one.  There are a lot of people within the Labour party who have the ability now to start changing this but it is only going to come if we work together and this constant talk about leadership ambitions actually is quite destructive to a party like ours, that is a collective, that does come about from a lot of people rising up and people like me, who have a platform to do so, giving voice to that and we’re all going to have to do it.  It’s not going to come from one person alone.

SR: That’s the Wigan MP, Lisa Nandy there.