Bookshelfie: Women’s Prize Podcast - S5 Ep23: Bookshelfie: Lisa Nandy MP

Episode Date: February 16, 2023

Labour MP Lisa Nandy gives her advice on how we can all stay hopeful and keep progressing even in dark political times. Lisa was first elected as the Labour MP for Wigan in 2010. During her time in Parliament, she has served on the front bench in a number of roles and is currently serving as Shadow Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. She is also the co-founder of the think tank Centre for Towns which was set up to ensure priority is given to the viability and prosperity of Britain’s towns. Before entering Parliament, Lisa worked for the youth homelessness charity Centrepoint and The Children’s Society. She has also written a book -  All In: How We Build a Country That Works . Lisa’s book choices are:  ** Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell  ** The March of Folly by Barbara Tuchman ** Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ** GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History by Diane Coyle  ** The Hill We Climb by Amanda Gorman Vick Hope, multi-award winning TV and BBC Radio 1 presenter, author and journalist, is the host of season five of the Women’s Prize for Fiction Podcast. Every week, Vick will be joined by another inspirational woman to discuss the work of incredible female authors. The Women’s Prize is one of the most prestigious literary awards in the world, and they continue to champion the very best books written by women. Don’t want to miss the rest of Season Five? Listen and subscribe now! This podcast is sponsored by Baileys and produced by Bird Lime Media.

A friend of mine who's an academic said to me, just really don't, don't do it. Write an article. Don't write a book. And I never stopped thinking about it all the way through from beginning to end. It was really hard. I think I'll leave it at one. With thanks to Bailey's, this is the Women's Prize for Fiction Podcast. Celebrating women's writing, sharing our creativity, our voices and our perspectives,

all while championing the very best fiction written by women around the world. I'm Vic Hope and I'm your host for Season 5. of the Women's Prize for Fiction Podcast. The podcasts that asks women with lives as inspiring as any fiction to share the five books by women that have shaped them. We have a phenomenal lineup of guests and I guarantee you'll be taken away plenty of reading recommendations. Well, I'm so excited to welcome Lisa Nandi to the podcast today.

Lisa was first elected as the Labour MP for Wiggin in 2010. During her time in Parliament, Lisa served on the front bench in a number of roles and is currently serving a shadow secretary of state for levelling up, housing and communities. She's also the co-founder of the think tank Centre for Towns, which was set up to ensure priority is given to the viability and prosperity of Britain's towns. Before entering Parliament, Lisa worked for the Youth Homelessness Charity Centrepoint and the Children's Society. In addition to all of this, she's also written a book, All In How We Build a Country That Works.

And I am delighted that she is joining me on the podcast today to talk about the books. that have inspired her. Lisa, welcome. Oh, thank you so much for having me. And it's great to be here. We've had to cancel the first time. And it's been an epic journey across the country today. So I am really pleased to be here on every level. You've driven down from Wigan today.

So I appreciate that. I think that's the furthest anyone has travelled, especially by car, to get here. Yeah. So there's a rail strike on later in the week, which is why I'm normally found on public transport, but not this time, unfortunately. I know that journey well. I take the train from London to Manchester and back again every Sunday, pretty much every Sunday for radio. And it can, you know what, it can really vary between two to seven hours each way, depending on what you're going to get. Well, I did think quite a lot about the theme of the book that I've just done, how we build a country that works, sat in traffic, staring at a completely broken public transport system and wondering when things are going to get any better.

It's something I think a lot about. Well, if you're travelling quite a lot, is that a good opportunity for you to get stuck into reading? Do you have time to read? Because you're so busy. I make a real effort, particularly to read fiction. I've always read a lot since I was a kid. But I found when I got elected, it was 13 years ago now,

that your world shrinks, if you're not careful. You become very, very sucked into the parliamentary system, the Westminster bubble. you know this minutiae of kind of who's in, who's out, who's up, who's down, and the gossip and the rumour mills and the best way that I've found to break out of that and remind myself that there's a whole wide world out there is spending a lot of time at home in my constituency and reading.

So I'm often found very late at night wandering around the division lobbies clutching a copy of whatever book I happen to be reading at the time. You love fiction. What kind of books do you gravitate towards? All sorts. It depends a lot on my mood. When I was growing up, I read a lot of the classics. Recently, I've been reading a lot more modern fiction. I realised, in fact, for this podcast is probably quite relevant. I realised a few years ago that I wasn't reading half as much

fiction by women as I was by men. And I think that matters because it colours the view that you have of the world if the stories are all told by men. And so I made a real effort to start reading far more women a few years ago and discovered some great writers like, well, one of them that we're going to talk about today. And an amazing woman called Elif Shavak as well. Yeah, who was nominated last year

on the short list. Oh, she's, and then, you know, because of the line of work that I'm in, then had the privilege of meeting at an event a few years ago where we were discussing populism. And they say never meet your heroes, but actually she's a good exception to that rule. You know, she's

as lovely and articulate and thoughtful in person as she comes across in her books. So, yeah, all sorts, all sorts, anything goes. Something so special about meeting an author whose work you have loved because these worlds have been born of their minds and you're right, you sort of don't want to because how can they ever be like these worlds that they've given to you? But it's also a real honour and a privilege to get to understand the mind that it came from.

It was a few years ago, one of the best things I ever did was, a sit down with John McGregor, who's one of my favourite authors. And it was during the Labour Party leadership contest. I was standing as a candidate. And I wanted to shine a bit of a spotlight on arts and culture. And I did a sit down, an interview with him where we talked about the importance of arts, culture, literature. And it was genuinely fascinating just to spend a bit of time with, you know, such a creative mind. I think my mind doesn't work quite like that.

and I'm not particularly creative. I used to say that I have a creative bone in my body but I love spending time around people who do. It's just brilliant and eye-opening. Yeah, and there's something to be said as well for how inspiring those meetings can be. I know you work a lot with young people who might be in more disadvantaged situations.

And the first way that actually got involved with the women's prize for fiction was through their young adults reading this. And we did a project where we went around, youth centres mainly girls around the country and we did workshops with them and they were introduced to authors and they were shown that there are possibilities to put your story on paper there are possibilities to become a writer to work in publishing to get a job that can that can give you a escape but also make your

mark on the world and it it's amazing what can what can happen when you meet a writer I remember I grew up in Newcastle and I think it was David Armand came to our school and did a little talk and I was like oh my gosh people from Newcastle can have a story to tell it it's such an it's such an invigorating and liberating thing we get that with politics as well you know i've been an MP now for 13 years and i complain a lot about parliament i find it a really deadening difficult place but sometimes you forget what a privilege it is to have that megaphone and to be able to use it to shout very very loudly on behalf of people who otherwise wouldn't be heard And the thing that always reminds me is when young people come down to shadow me from my constituency.

And you know, you look at the look on their faces. They walk into the building. You know, they walk into debates and see people talking about the issues that matter to them. And you can see that sense of confidence growing that, you know what, politics is about and for people like me at its best. And I could do this. And it's the most amazing thing. It's such a lovely thing to be able to do is to open up that world to people. that's what a lot of authors have done for me as well,

is to open up a completely different world. Although I have to say it did give me a bit of false confidence this idea that anyone can write a book. And I did joke the other day that it was probably the single worst professional decision I've ever made in my life. I cried my way through it. Oh no.

At some math say level. I just, I mean, you know, partly it was time pressures. Yeah, of course. I spent a lot of it writing it on my phone at crew railway station in between changing trains in the middle of the night. But it was also just that it's really hard to write a book. You know, to organise your thoughts properly,

to make a coherent argument over that length of a sort of medium, it's so difficult. A friend of mine who's an academic said to me, just really don't do it. Write an article. Don't write a book. And I never stopped thinking about it all the way through from beginning to end. it was really hard. I think I'll leave it at one.

Right. Well, you never know. We might get into these books that have shaped you and you'll feel really motivated and inspired by the end having chatted about these authors that you love. So hold that thought. I think my family would probably move out if I said us. I was going to write another one. It's a deal that we're not doing it. But one thing that did help actually during that time is I carried on reading, read a lot of fiction. And one thing I've noticed about politics is that people tend to lap. into the same way of speaking and writing. You know, we have these horribly technocratic phrases that we use, you know, hardworking families, a step change for working people. And you lapse into it really quickly.

And the thing that always pulls me out of it is reading really good writing by people who write fiction, poetry. It just, it's a game changer, really. Well, let's talk about some of that really good writing. Your first book, Shelfy book, is Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gassett. This is Gaskell's first novel and it follows Mary Barton, the pretty daughter of a factory worker who dreams of a better life with the mill owner's charming son, Henry. She rejects her childhood friend Gem's affections in the hope of marrying Henry, but when Henry is found shot dead, Gem becomes the prime suspect and Mary finds her loyalties tested to the limit. Gaskell's novel paints a powerful and moving picture of working class life in Victorian Manchester.

when did you first read this book? I was a teenager. I'm actually from Manchester originally, so I was born and brought up there until my mum moved to Berry when I was in my mid-teens. So I read it when I was in Manchester and I just loved it.

I mean, it's a great book. It's really well written, but more than that, that I was reading a lot of, I was reading a lot of literature from that era at the time most of it written by men and about men and often very sort of obsessed with aristocratic life and it was really like a bolt out of the blue

to see the history of that time told through the ordinary extraordinary people that really have made up the history of Britain and particularly through a working class woman from Manchester is the main character. It was just a whole new take on that era. And I love Elizabeth Gaskell. I think she's a great writer. But it's the fact that she was writing about something,

someone from a very different background than you traditionally read about that I really loved about that book. And it's part of the reason that I've put it in my top five selection for this podcast. as a book that resonated with you. Yeah, I mean, I'm, you know, I didn't grow up in Victorian times in the slums and none of that resonated. Just that it was probably one of the earliest moments

where I started to really think about who gets to tell stories and why that matters. This is long before you had the movement to have lots more public monuments to women in Britain. But it was, and you know, for my generation, I think that there was genuinely a bit of a sense that those battles for equality that they'd been fought

and to a large extent won which as we've seen in recent years with things like the Me Too movement is just completely not the case in fact of anything I think we're rolling the clock back and having stories about ordinary working class women and told by women that really matters

and so it was the first time really that I started to see and understand that. And so thank you, Elizabeth Gaskell, for opening my eyes. What was your upbringing in Manchester like? Obviously, it wasn't Victorian times. No, so I was born in 79. And it was a very political upbringing in the sense that my dad's an academic.

He's a Marxist. He comes from India. Politics is very different in India. And he, you know, because he's an academic, he was always very interested in sort of debate in the house and my mum was a TV producer at Granada TV a very male world and broke a few glass ceilings

and it was at a time when the Thatcher government had just come to power. Lots of my friends' parents were losing their jobs we'd had the race relations, the race riots in Moss Side when I was a toddler. I don't remember them but my parents were very involved in standing up for the community and getting the real story of what was happening and police brutality out there

into the public domain. So it was very sort of political time. You kind of had to pick aside. You couldn't not get involved. But it was also part of the inspiration for some of the book and particularly a chapter on patriotism that I write about

in the book because my friends are all, they come from a completely diverse set of backgrounds, their working class, their middle class, they come from every race. and different genders. They just, we were really what I think of when I think of this country and we showed just how possible it is to, you know,

for all the divisions and tensions that have been on display in Britain in recent years, that's the England that, as George Orwell once said, lies beneath the surface. This is really, I think, who we are and who the country can be. And so it was really an important upbringing, I guess, from that perspective. Well, in your book, you talk about finding strength rather than fear in our differences. It's what makes us unique and special and brilliant. How do you envisage that we do this when, arguably with the cost of living crisis, disproportionately affecting people on lower incomes, we feel more divided than ever?

Yeah, and I think in lots of ways we've sort of lost the ability to understand one another. That's partly as well because those shared institutions, institutions, whether it's the pub or the working men's club, the factory floor, or, you know, reading people coming to, you know, reading the same newspapers, watching the same news. A lot of that has fallen away over the last few decades. And so there aren't those spaces where people come together in the same way as they used to with our most self-selecting about what we read, who we see, who we spend time with. And I think geographical polarisation has played a part in that as well. One of the reasons that we set up the centre for towns a few years ago was because of the EU referendum, which had exposed this great geographical polarisation in the country. Most people, mostly in the major cities, people were voting remain and only a few miles away

in towns not very far from there. People were voting in very large numbers to leave. That's a lot to do with the decisions that we've made about, where we put investment, where we create jobs. Young people tend now to move to major cities in order to find work. When I was born in Manchester, it was completely the opposite story. People would move to Berry, to Bolton, to Wigan from Manchester because of the mines, the mills, the factories.

And over time, we've seen that change. So you've got lots of people, older people living in some parts of the country, younger people living in others, both with very different experiences of globalisation. And part of the argument in the book is that we're, We need to find new shared institutions and spaces for people to come together. We need to start to rebuild some of those bridges and find a way to understand one another again. Do you think that the relationship between people and the government is broken? Do you think it can be fixed if it is?

I think it can be fixed, but I don't think it will be fixed by politicians lecturing people about getting more involved in politics or coming closer to politics. because I think people are deeply political, but they've lost, to a large extent, any belief that politics can really change things. This seems, you know, for a long time, I think certainly since the MP's expenses scandal, there's been a sort of sense that politicians are all in it for themselves

and that political parties are more interested in their own prospects than that of the country. But I think that's really been fuelled in recent years with a lot of the scandals that we've seen at the very top of politics. and I worry about it a lot. I think during the ongoing circular Brexit debates that we had after the referendum,

I think that people, I still don't think most people in the political system realize how close the whole thing came to collapse. You know, in a representative democracy of people don't feel represented, it just can't survive. And I think that we're now in a place where the one thing,

that could actually change people's lives for the better and change this country for the better politics has become thoroughly discredited. It's why I often say that my party, the Labour Party, isn't so much fighting the Conservative Party at the next general election. What we're really battling against is that sense that things can't be better, things can't be different.

We've got to show that we've got hope and ambition for this country, but the job is to make that hope convincing. That's a big ask. It's a big old ask. Well, on the subject of broken politics and government, more specifically, your second book-shelphie book is The March of Folly by Barbara Tuchman. Pulitzer Prize winning historian Barbara Tuchman grapples with her boldest subject the pervasive presence of failure, mismanagement and delusion in governments throughout the ages. Drawing on an array of examples from Montezuma's senseless surrender of his empire in 1520 to Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.

Tuckman defines folly as the pursuit by government of policies contrary to their own interests, despite the availability of feasible alternatives. Talk to me about this book. I mean, it's quite a book. My dad sent it to me when I got elected and it sat and looked at me on the shelf for several years before I attempted it because it's quite a big book. And like you say, it's got this broad historical sweep that's quite intimidating. but once I delved into it, I was so glad that I did. She writes so brilliantly. She makes the stories come to life.

But it's also that, you know, lots been said about Barbara Tuckman because she's a very well-known historian, but the nuance with which she's able to get across the points that she's making. She often has a completely different take than anybody else on the things that she's writing about. And there's something about that ability to see the world

as nuanced and complex, but also to draw out those big themes that I think we could do with a bit more of in politics. We often try and simplify things to the point of absurdity because we can't cope with messiness and diversity in politics, but actually, you know, politics is complicated because life is complicated

and we, you know, we should be much more comfortable with that. I think she also, you know, one of the things for me that I love about it is that I read it at a time when things were starting to get quite turbulent in British politics. And I was reflecting on the fact that we only ever look back to very recent history for our parallels. If you're someone like me who came of age in 1997, I turned 18 that year, we've lived through this period of relative stability in British politics. from 97 until 2010 there was a fairly broad political consensus. The political parties didn't feel that they were sort of ideologically, hugely opposed to one another. The economy was relatively stable.

There was investment going into parts of the country that hadn't seen it for some time and into our public services. I think you could start to believe that that's quite normal. And actually looking back a bit more in history has helped me to realize that that's not normal at all. and what we consider to be normal often really isn't. So this idea that the history of politics is the history of people making the same mistakes over and over and over again. It's a bit depressing once you realise it. Where do you phrase it like that?

But it doesn't necessarily have to be because we can learn. In a recent interview you said our political system must change or die. Can you expand on what you meant by this? I mean, I just think that this country's biggest problem is that we've written off the, talent the potential, the assets of most people in most parts of Britain for far too long. And so often when I see things that inspire me in British politics, it's miles away from the world of Westminster or from the, you know, not just from Whitehall, but from the town hall as well. It's ordinary people doing extraordinary things in their own communities, but so often,

despite the system, not because of it. and feels to me that we need to tilt power back to people who've got a stake in the outcome and skin in the game. Because one of the biggest lessons for me of the last 13 years, I learned this most of all actually from mums who've been through my constituency surgery, who have children with special needs, that every single one of those women, without exception, regardless of educational background, levels of confidence, professional background, They've mastered the opaque systems that surround their kids and they defeat them over and over again

to get what they need for their children and they do it because they can do no other. It's what I call the great untapped force in our country, the quiet patriotism that is at work that spurs people on to build things that last and to create and to invest in it for the long haul. And I think we've just got our political system fundamentally wrong in that so often those people find the system

rubbing up against them when they should feel the whole system pulling in behind them when they try to do that. How do you think Labour could define a new political era? I think we need to

harness that sense out there that things are fundamentally broken. It feels very despairing when you put it like that, but actually there's an anger out there in the country and it comes not from a negative place. It comes from a recognition in every part of this country

that we could do better, we should do better, we should be doing better than we currently are. I don't mean by beating other countries in the league tables and, you know, all the world beating guff that you hear from certain individuals in politics so often.

I mean just that there's so much potential in our country and we've written that off for far too long. I think we need to spread power and wealth and opportunity far more widely in Britain and then we would build a country that works to Nick the subtitle of the book. And I think the one risk at the moment in politics is that because so much is broken, because

things feel for a lot of people fairly hopeless, I think that we could collapse into this kind of idea that things can't be better. We could retreat and try and play it safe. But it's precisely when it's so clear to people that the economy isn't working for most people that politics isn't representing most people. It's precisely at those moments where things become, change becomes not just possible but inevitable. And I think we've got to really step into this moment and seize it with both hands and start to do things differently. If the March of Folly extended a little bit, a little bit longer, and Barbara Tuckman was writing

about the last 10 years of global politics, how do you think she'd do it? Oh, now that is a really good question. And, you know, I think it's a mark of how brilliant years that I really don't know but you know this idea that you can sort of step slightly outside of what's happening and look at it with fresh eyes I think that's always been

you know it's something that politics is quite uniquely badly placed to do because we're so in it of a day to day you know I mean I wandered into here today to say we've got a statement this afternoon in the House of Commons it's about

the millions of people who've been stuck in unsafe flats since Grenfell unable to move their lives on hold and five years after that tragic fire very little has changed so my mind is very much on that right now and in

a few hours after that it'll be on something else and there's always something happening this sort of relentless you know events events events and it was part of the reason that I the book actually is that I wanted to step out of it and be able to see things with a bit more clarity but I can't claim to have the monopoly on that I mean some of the stories I tell in the

book are about having spent time with some very creative people who helped me to see things differently not least Danny Boyle who you know when I said to him the last time we saw that sort of country that I believe in it was the 2012 Olympic Games opening ceremony and then it all just seemed to fall apart and we we had the Scottish independence referendum and we had Brexit and we had all these people pulling pulling apart where did that united confident global country go and he said to me it's still there it's just waiting for politicians to give voice to it and I think that's you know I'll leave Tuckman to do the the drawing lessons from recent history but my job I think is to give voice to it. Bayleys is proudly supporting the women's prize for fiction by helping showcase incredible

writing by remarkable women, celebrating their accomplishments and getting more of their books into the hands of more people. Look in for a treat to pair with your favourite book. Bayleys is the perfect accompaniment to enjoy either over ice or over coffee. Your third book, Shabby book, Lisa, is my favorite book of all time. It's Half a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. In her absolutely masterful novel, Half the Yellow Sun, Aditya tells the story of the Biafran War in 1960s, Nigeria. We follow a young houseboy, Uw, the intelligent and beautiful Ulana and a shy English writer called Richard. Domestic discord and complex family dynamics parallel the bubbling tensions of political conflict as Nigeria descends into civil war. Adichie addresses issues.

of race, class and violence at a pivotal point in Nigerian history. I mean, this is such an important book. It's important to me for very personal family reasons. It won the Women's Prize in 2007. It then won the winner of winners. That was via a public vote in 2020. So it resonates with our audience. But why is it important to you?

Well, I came to it late, actually. It was the first book that I'd read by Ngozi Adichie. I've now read everything that she's ever written. Oh my God. Once you're in, you're in. I just couldn't stop. But I came to it fairly late. I didn't know anything about the Biafran War.

I don't think I'd actually read any fiction by someone from Nigeria. That has completely changed. She's at the forefront of a whole movement of young up-and-coming and in some cases now very well-established Nigerian writers. I mean, Nigerians really have started to dominate the market in lots of parts of fiction. And off the back of reading her work, I then went and read some Nigerians in space, which is a sci-fi book.

And so, you know, the reach is incredible. But it's just the writing. I tried to, when I was picking my books for this, I tried to sort of think through all the reasons why I love this book, but she just writes better than anyone around in my view. She's, there's a sort of, poetry to it. It's beautiful. It's evocative. You just, you know, the minute you open the book, everything goes away and you're there in that world that she's constructed. And, you know,

in politics, I mean, life, I think for most people is pretty tough at the moment, but in politics, I've always found that I need that. And she's, she's just brilliant. You're so right. It's poetry, it's philosophy, it's a manifesto. It's history. It gives you the sociopolitical context. as well as the most personal stories at the same time she's such a master of her craft she is and she's also then I went on to to learn a bit more about her and to see she did this essay a little while ago about why we should all be feminist yeah and it really reminded me of there's a great writer in Britain called Afua Hirsch yeah and she writes a lot about race and there's a she wrote a piece a few years ago

where she basically said there's no such thing as not being racist. You're either racist or you're an anti-racist. But if you're not an anti-racist, actively challenging racism, wherever you see it, then you're part of the problem. And the Ingozi Adichie essay on feminism, I think it was a lecturer originally that she then published. Yeah, that's right. She wrote it into a little.

I've got it. It's on my shelf and I put it specifically at eye level so I can keep picking it out whenever I fancy just having a little dip in. I mean, it's just, you know, I really feel that in lots of ways my generation dropped the ball on feminism. I think we're having to remind ourselves of that. I think one of the things that the last very difficult, dark, divisive decade has shown me is that the battle for progress is never won. That growing up when I did, there was this sort of sense that the arc of history always bends towards progress. And it doesn't actually.

It's for every generation. I asked my dad this a few years ago when, um, because he did a program called The Reunion on Radio 4, and it was all the people who'd been the architects of the Race Relations Act coming back together to talk about how they'd done it. And it was a pretty pessimistic program because they really felt that a lot of that progress had unraveled. And I said to him afterwards, well, you know, what do you do about that?

And he said every generation just has to pick up the baton. There'll be people pulling in one direction, there'll be people pulling in the other. You've just got to hope there's more of you than there are. of them. And it was really, you know, reading some of her work, her nonfiction work, had really sort of opened my eyes to that as well. I think the thread that's running through a lot of these books actually is that all these people see things at a slight detachment to the norm and the status quo. Eric Hobsbourne once said that as an immigrant, you see

life at a tangent to the world. And I think a lot of these authors that I've chosen, actually, without design are people who do see things differently. I mean, one of the other books that Chimamanda and Gose Adichi has written has a very sort of stark take on modern America. And I think it's really interesting that that's coming from a Nigerian writer. I don't think you would have the same take necessarily from an American writer or even, you know, writer from Britain. So, you know, eye-opening stuff.

And I always feel like I learn something when I read her books, but most of all, I just really enjoy them. On Americana, understanding the difference between Afro-American and Black African in America is so crucial. And I think it takes being in her very specific position to describe it so precisely. Do you see feminism as a central pillar of the UK's regeneration? Yeah. Yeah, I think the short answer to that has got to be, yes. But I come from a family with two feminist parents. My dad was not just involved in the Race Relations Act,

but he also was one of the authors of the Equal Pay Act as well. And he used to run something called the Equal Opportunities Commission, which was a precursor to the later institutions that we still have, now. And so he's always been very active in challenging misogyny, wherever he sees it, including structurally baked into society in the way that we do things. And my mum, for me, sort of embodies feminism really because she never believed that women can't, can't do it all. And I say do it all with feeling because it wasn't so much having it all for her generation as doing it all. but they but you know

lots of them did and it's what opened up opportunities to young people like me you know growing up when I did it did feel that things were possible and that's because of that people in their generation I think but

that it doesn't it feels to me that a lot of that progress has unravelled and that is just such a crying shame there's a it was John Stuart Mill who's one of my favourite philosophers who wrote an essay years and years ago about the great tragedy of writing off half of the population,

just think of all the things that could have been if we hadn't done that. And I think for me, that's a lot of my driving mission in politics, is that things can be better. I know they can, but they could only be better if we harness all the assets and creativity and brilliant diversity and complexity out there. and politics is just so uniquely bad at doing that. It sounds from the way you described your upbringing that you grew up in this house of ideas,

which is very similar to in this book, so much of the action is set in the house of a professor. Your grandfather as well, who was a liberal MP, means that you were from a young age introduced to these ways of thinking or opening your mind. Did you grow up thinking that a political, career was something for you? No, not really. I didn't think it couldn't be, but Parliament did seem a world away from Manchester I grew up in, even though my granddad, like you said,

had been a Liberal MP after the war, he fought in the war and then he came back and wanted to sort of build the peace. And so he stood for election and served one term. And so, you know, in lots of ways it should have been fairly obvious to someone. like me but actually I just knew that I wanted to do something that could make things better and I wasn't sure what that was I ended up when I left university going to work as a housing case worker for a great MP it was one of my sister's friends ideas she just I didn't know what on earth I wanted to do I've never been one of these people with a plan a life plan I still don't have one now that's okay I mean hopefully something will turn up but um she just said to me it's a great job

working for an MP because you learn about all sorts of other jobs that are out there and I thought oh yeah of course because you meet lots of people so I did that and then I went to work for a youth homelessness charity Centrepoint and it was those kids really that we work with at Centrepoint that really sort of shaped me and ended up on this journey of eventually standing for parliament they were so ambitious for themselves for their friends for their community but so often the circumstances of their lives have been determined before they were even born. You know, in this country particularly, we're one of the worst countries in the world for your parents'

levels of background, educational background, and attainment and income levels determining how far you can go. And that's an intergenerational cycle that really in the end is all about power. It's who has it and who doesn't. And that's why I went into politics in the end because I thought they're doing their bit. Now I need to do mine and make sure that we build a system that works for them. Your fourth book today is GDP, a brief but affectionate history by Diane Kyle.

In this charming and fascinating book, Kyle traces the history of GDP from its 18th century precursors through its invention in the 1940s and its post-war golden age and then through the great crash up to today. We learn why this standard measure of the size of a country's economy was invented, how it changed over the decades and what its strengths and weaknesses are. Can you tell us a bit about this boot? How come you've picked it? How come it's in your list?

Okay, so you're looking at me a bit like I've gone mad here. No, no, because I honestly, I hadn't heard of this. But I also hadn't thought about it. I was sitting at the table this morning just on my laptop having a little look through, having a little research. I thought, oh, we place such importance on GDP. Actually, I have never questioned why, because it is actually a bit weird when you think about it.

Yeah, so Diane Coyle, she's a, She's an economist who was at Manchester University for a long time, which is where I first came across her. And she's very careful in the book to say that she thinks GDP is an important measure. The problem is the way that we use it. So we use it really to measure the health of a nation. And as she points out in the book, this is a measure that was built for an era, you know,

with mass factories and so on that isn't good at accommodating. some of the very different features of the economy right now. This is sort of striking bit in the book where she talks about how a lot of European countries decided to add prostitution into their measures of GDP and saw a great GDP bounce that suddenly their economies on paper were doing much better, that you can, if you cut down a forest, the value of that is included in your GDP figures. but if you plant a forest it isn't which when you think that climate change is the biggest challenge that we face as a nation as a world is extraordinary really and this is great Bobby Kennedy quote from one of his speeches when he was running to be president where he says

that it can tell you a lot about what it can't tell you is about the health of our children the quality of our children the quality of our air, the strength and resilience in communities. He says essentially it can tell us everything except that which makes life worthwhile. And I thought of that quote a lot when I was reading the book. Her argument is that we need to be smarter about what we measure and how we use measures of success. And it just feels to me that people like Diane Coyle, their work is so important in politics because,

For me, reading this book was like someone switching a light on. She basically says, look, if what you're measuring is wrong, it distorts your picture. But if you adjust the lens, the things that most matter come back into focus. And it was just, you know, once again, I feel like this is the recurring theme of these. And I didn't mean to do it like this. But once again, it was someone just switching a light on and showing me a completely different way of thinking about things, which is what fiction and nonfiction, just reading. really does for me.

Oh, it's good that quotes and it's so true. It's so true of any situation we could find ourselves in. And actually another sort of light bulb moment was when I read that you said this. You said housing isn't a market. It is a fundamental human right. Of course it is. Of course it is. And yet we place, like we have done with GDP,

such totemic importance on things in a very certain way that doesn't necessarily benefit us. Tell us a bit more about your plans to help renters, why that is important to you. Well, we've been, you know, the housing, call it a market if you like, but our housing system is completely broken. The basic of any decent secure life is a home. And I learned that when I worked with those young people at Centrepoint, nothing was possible until they had the foundation of a decent secure home

where they could go shut the door and know that they were safe and warm and things were going to be okay and I think for most of us who we take that for granted but for a lot of people now in this country that's not a reality at all we haven't built enough social homes

we've lost a lot of our council housing stock because it's been sold off and we haven't built enough to replace it we've got the dream of home ownership way out of reach for a lot of people, not least because we've got a cost of living crisis and people are making very high rent payments

but couldn't possibly save for a deposit. And where all this comes crashing down is in the private rented sector where lots of people are now who shouldn't be there, people who should be in social housing, who can't afford to make their rent payments who are living in often very, very substandard private rented accommodation.

And it's affecting everybody because people are competing for homes in large parts of the country. I mean, we're sitting here in London, you know, this is the epicenter of the housing crisis. And people are only ever a few weeks away from being evicted through no fault of their own and losing their own home. When we think about private rented accommodation, I think often we think about young people who are just, you know, maybe they graduate from university, they're going to private rented accommodation, they're there for a few years. But that's not the reality anymore.

The reality is families in private rented accommodation, often very substandard for years. years and years and years without the stability of being able to be close to parents and grandparents for childcare, you know, having to move around frequently, so costing their children, their school place, all the things that really sustain a decent life. And we think that's got to change. And so one of the things that I set out recently was how we're going to tilt power back towards renters in the private rental market, give them far greater long-term security in their homes, protection from unfair rent increases, the right just to do very basic things like have a

pet or, you know, change your decor. I mean, these are the little things that make your home own. And right now, for a lot of people, those rights are just way out of reach. It feels impossible and it shouldn't. You mentioned the environment there, of course, planting trees, felling trees. Do you think that reaching our net zero goals and measuring the country's health using GDP? Do you think those two things can work in tandem? So Diane Coyle actually, who wrote this book, has done some amazing pioneering work in this field looking at what she calls the, I think that,

I can't remember how many they came up with, I think it's four or five capitals that help you to measure success and chief amongst them is environmental sustainability because if it's not sustainable, it's not working. and she shows how these things coming together, whether it's sort of tangible capital, you know, infrastructure,

like transport networks that connect you to friends and family and apprenticeships and opportunities, how all these different types of capitals all sort of interplay with one another, that if you, for me, Net Zero is a really good example of this, way. If you look at lots of parts of the country, one of the major problems we've got is high streets falling apart. The high street is falling apart largely because the good jobs have gone and the working age population has gone and taken with them the spending power that sustains it. This is felt very, very deeply and emotionally to a lot of people across this country who

feel like their whole place that they call home is being allowed to disintegrate and nobody's doing anything about it. Well, how do you rebuild that? You get good jobs back into those communities. And where are the possibilities and the potential for those jobs most pronounced? It's in the coastal and industrial towns where the problems are most acute because there are a million jobs on the road to net zero and we should be investing to bring them here. That's about giving young people choices and chances so they don't have to get out to get on.

It's about rebuilding the fabric, the social fabric of our communities and it's about tackling climate change. We are running out of time. I've got so many questions that I want to ask you. Like so many things to talk about every single answer, you then spawn like five more questions that I want to ask. We don't have time. We have to move on to your fifth and final book this week,

which is so lovely. I'm so happy you've included this. It's The Home, The Hill We Climb, by Amanda Gorman. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris's inauguration ceremony was a star-studded affair, but Amanda Gorman stole the show with her poem, The Hill We Climb. Amanda was the National Youth Poet Laureate at the time and the youngest inaugural poet in US history.

Tell us about this poem and it's significance for you. So I love poetry and I read quite a lot of it. I just finished reading one of the Seamus Heaney collections that I'd never read before. And I draw a lot of inspiration from poetry, especially in terms of making speeches. I make quite a lot of speeches and often politician speeches are dire and trying to bring them...

I'm glad you said it. Trying to bring them to life, you know, to breathe a bit of life into them. I find nothing does it like reading poetry but also because the poet has to be so succinct in how they express themselves. It forces you to get to the point and that actually is quite a good skill

for a politician to learn or to remember as well. Often we say a lot in order to disguise the fact that we're not saying what we mean. And so I wanted to include a poet. And this one, this amazing your woman and this incredible poem actually leapt out of me because I think what she did really was she took a moment of where it felt like

there was a really profound shift happening, the handover of power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. after I think the most shameful episode in American global politics that I've ever seen this is a president who caged migrant children and separated them from their parents who pulled America out of the World Health Organization at the height of a pandemic

who pulled America out of the Paris Convention on climate change at a time when the planet is burning it was a terrible, terrible episode. And a few years ago I read this book by a guy called Tana Hassey Coates called We Were Eight Years in Power about how could it be that all that hope and optimism that came with the election of Barack Obama could end with the election of a white supremacist to the highest office in the world?

And I think what Gorman does brilliantly in this poem is she takes all that feeling of hope that something better could be on the horizon and she lays it out for you, this is the path that could lie ahead, but it may not lie ahead. And she never dresses up the risk that there is to America and to the world

that things could very quickly collapse again into anger and division and chaos and racism. And I don't know how someone that young has that much wisdom, but for me, the importance of what she did when she got up was not just, the bit that she's been celebrated for, that she gave voice to the sort of country that America could be,

it's that she recognised the very real possibility that it wasn't going to go there. And for me, that's exciting. That's not depressing because, you know, I can't do anything with apathy, but anger, yes. You know, if it has a constructive outlet, anger can lead to real change. And I think, you know,

there were bits of that poem that were hopeful, but there were bits that were angry as well. at what had been allowed to be, angry that they could go back there. And when she spoke up and read out those beautiful words with such poise and composure in front of the world, it just for me summed up exactly where we are. The future is bright, but if it is, you know, is there a new world coming, to paraphrase Nina Simone?

It's up to us. It's all up to us. us and that you know that's a big responsibility it's also quite exciting I like looking at it that way when you pick this poem as one of your bookshelfy choices

you said that it was a powerful moment after the hell of the Trump years you've mentioned anger there you've mentioned hope as well how did you process that time personally how did you turn your own personal anger into

constructive action I think in all the things that I've been involved with in and around politics I think what I've learned is that the worst thing is you know to nick that analogy that my dad used about people pulling in one direction or another and he said you've got to think a democracy like a boat that you you know you got to get in a row and hope that there's more of them than you more of you than them I think the worst thing is not being in the boat. It just, that's when it feels hopeless.

But when you make those connections with other like-minded people who believe, as you do, that things are fundamentally wrong, that things should be different, and then you start doing something about it. That's when hope multiplies. And I learnt that a lot when I was working with refugee and migrant children before I got elected to Parliament. We, you know, we went into Yarswood Immigration Detention Centre

and set of work with the young people. and campaign to close it down. We went into homes where young people were being left destitute as a deliberate act of government policy with very little dissent across the whole political spectrum because it was a deliberate attempt to starve them and their parents out of the country. Some of the horrors that I saw in this country

that I just didn't believe could exist in 21st century Britain gave way to a real sense that change was on the horizon because of being part of that campaign, of working with those communities and seeing the ambition that they had as well. I guess it's just, it's what sort of drives me and spurs me on, really. In politics, you don't win very often.

Often it feels like banging your head constantly and repeatedly against the same brick wall. But you have these little moments where suddenly everything changes. And you've played a small part in change, changing the lives of people that you'll probably never even meet. But there's nothing like it. There's no feeling like it in the world.

So I just, you know, I love that poem because I think that it really gives voice to that. You said a little bit earlier that you find Parliament often, a deadening, difficult place. What needs to change to make it a more enriching place to be? I mean, I guess I should say that I believe in the power of politics and I don't subscribe to this. idea that national politics is beyond broken, that it has no usefulness. If anything, it's the other way around. When I see some of the problems that affect my constituents day in, day out, whether it was the collapse of our local football club that was used as a play thing for big money, people

on the other side of the world, whether it's the frequent flooding events that affects people's homes and businesses up and down the country, all of these problems can only be solved by national governments working together with other like-minded national governments to come together to tackle climate change and to deal with to reassert people over profit and the primacy of democracy over capital so so i believe i believe in politics i just don't believe right now that it is serving the people and when i when i when i a few years ago i was serving as a shadow foreign secretary labor's spokesperson on foreign affairs I started to really see how the strain on the political system comes from the fact that people,

they look at the system and they think, well, that's not delivering. It's not even trying to deliver for people like me. You know, our economy doesn't work for most people. I think people in this country work harder than I can ever remember. I don't remember when I was growing up it being the norm that people had two, three, four jobs, working shifts only seeing their families when they came home to hand over and do the childcare, you know, for the next shift. That's the norm for a lot of families across this country.

And I think people have to see very quickly that things can and will change. And I think they have to see an urgency about that from their politicians. And I don't think that the system that we've got does anything like that. You know, I could moan about the hours and all that sort of stuff, but I won't because actually it's a real privilege to be able to have that platform and to be able to make change for people. The biggest thing is when you really feel that you're not changing the system, that you're part of a system that is the problem.

That's the thing that gets me down. And it's only when I come out of Parliament and I go home to Wiggin that I really start to feel that I can breathe again. Throughout this chat, what I've loved is how many times you've come back to the strength and the beauty of the people of this country. in this poem Amanda Gorman called the US public diverse and beautiful. It's inspiring and it was written just days after the storming of the capital. So all things considered, it is so imbued with hope and optimism.

How important are hope and optimism in difficult times? So they're the sustaining force but they're only sustaining if people believe that it can be real. and what I love about the Gorman poem is that she lays out two alternative paths so often in politics particularly my party's been in opposition now for 13 years we are called Her Majesty's official opposition and I've been an MP throughout all of that

you know I've never served in government and one of the things that have reflected on a lot over that time is how actually oppositional politics is I'm not afraid to disagree with people and in fact the clash of ideas I think is really important but the job of parties like mine isn't to be an opposition, it's to be an alternative

and to give life and voice to that idea that there is an alternative path on offer. I know this is about this is the women's prize for fiction but just if you'd indulge me with one more Bobby Kennedy no go for it. He's got this

he says this thing in one of his speeches where he says some people see things that are and ask why. I see things that never were and ask why not. And I think that is the job of politics. I think poetry does it better. But hence why I've put this poem in my top five and this incredible inspirational young woman who I think will go on to do amazing things for a long time to come. Well, Lisa, from your top five, my final question to you is that if you had to choose one book, as your favourite, I'm going to say, because they're all useful in different ways, but as your favourite, which one would it be in why?

I mean, I would pick half of a yellow sun because I deliberately included some fiction, nonfiction in this as well, just because there's a lot of great nonfiction written by women out there and I wanted to talk about it a little, but fiction really is the thing that I love reading and this book in particular, the language, the poetry. You learn a lot from reading fiction, but actually for me, it's a much about the experience as anything else just for pure unbridled pleasure and reading half of the yellow sun was about as pleasurable as it gets. I concur. Lisa, thank you so much. I'm going to let you run off to Parliament now to make a very important speech. Thank you for your time.

Honestly, really appreciate it. I'm really enjoyed it. I'm Vic Hope and you've been listening to the Women's Prize for Fiction podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Bayleys and produced by Birdline Media Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you next time.