Wigan MP says colleagues spend too much time fighting over small differences and need to listen to the public and each other

Labour MPs must ditch tribalism and learn how to listen to the public – and each other – or risk sliding into irrelevance, the Wigan MP Lisa Nandy has said.

Nandy, who has co-edited a book with the Green party MP Caroline Lucas and the Liberal Democrat Chris Bowers urging politicians across the left to work together, told a packed fringe meeting at the Lib Dem conference in Brighton on Sunday that she and many others in her party would happily call themselves “liberal, green socialists” and spent too much time fighting over “small differences”.

“I think the risk for Labour as a whole is that we have stopped listening to each other and we have stopped listening to the wider public, and no political party can survive that,” she told the Guardian. “It’s a trend that we have seen in the Labour party for at least a decade, but it’s become much more serious recently.”

The three politicians are on what they called a “roadshow”, appearing at the Green and Lib Dem conferences as well as Labour’s in Liverpool next week.

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Lucas told the meeting that plans by the Ukip donor Arron Banks to set up a Momentum-style grassroots movement meant there was a “very real risk of a very malign politics” in Britain unless parties on the left could bury the hatchet.



She suggested there could even be open primaries to allow the public to decide whether a Labour, Lib Dem or Green candidate should contest a particular seat. Her own seat, of Brighton Pavilion, is threatened by proposed boundary changes.



Nandy said she had wanted to collaborate on the book, just as Labour was descending into civil war, because she believed most of the public had no interest in the tribal divisions between, let alone within, the parties of the left.



“For me, it was the growing realisation that while we were fighting one another on the progressive left about relatively small differences, we were losing the argument with the wider public,” she said. “On major issues like immigration, social security and the economy, the public simply didn’t agree with us.”



Nandy, an MP since 2010, was widely seen as a rising star in Labour when she joined Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet and some consider her a potential future leader. She resigned after the EU referendum in June and has been a co-chair of Owen Smith’s leadership campaign.

Loyalties to political parties have loosened in recent decades and Nandy said that should make politicians think differently. “We’re finding that people are more open to persuasion; they will change their vote between an election and a byelection, because they disagree with what they hear. We can be scared of this, or we can embrace it,” she said. “It’s about listening, not just to people who agree with you but to people who don’t agree with you.

“If we want to change this country, we’re going to have to do better than the tribal situation we have found ourselves in. I think there is a clamour from outside parliament to see people working across the party divides.”

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The book, The Alternative, includes chapters by the Scottish National party MP Mhairi Black and the Lib Dem leader, Tim Farron. The co-editors warn that “progressives are spread across the political battlefield, often more intent on fighting each other than on using their power and influence smartly”.

Nandy is not advocating mergers between parties. “It’s right that Labour should remind the Lib Dems of the limits of markets, just as it’s right that the Lib Dems should remind Labour of the limits of state intervention.

“It’s the opposite of mergers, the opposite of electoral pacts, the opposite of ‘entryism’.” Instead, she argued, existing parties should coordinate better to achieve change.

“We have this incredibly oppositional political culture that often results in kneejerk policies. We should be looking for cross party cooperation and collaboration, rather than difference and division.”