In 2012, two years after she was first elected as Wigan’s MP, Lisa Nandy was handed a petition organised and signed by local children. It called for the introduction of a fair living wage to allow some of their parents to escape the treadmill of irregular shifts at two, and sometimes three, poorly paid jobs. For Nandy, the moment captured the essence of a crisis that a few years later would turn British politics upside down.
“Some of these children hardly saw their parents because they were working so hard for so little reward,” she recalls. “That was a turning point for me. It made me think about the rise of exploitative agency work in towns like the one I represented; about the political economy of post-industrial regions, dominated by a bad kind of capitalism that needed to be re-thought.”
