Lisa Nandy
Lisa Nandy, an Indian-origin MP, will become Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s new Culture Secretary on Saturday.
The 44-year-old MP was appointed as Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport among 11 women picked for top jobs by Starmer.
Nandy joins a record number of fellow women ministers, including Rachel Reeves, who became the first woman to hold the position of Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Angela Rayner, the second female Deputy Prime Minister in Britain’s history.
UK’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) leader, Nandy, has expressed her privilege to lead the department, highlighting the country’s cultural and sporting heritage.
Nandy, who was a finalist in the Labour Party’s leadership contest in January 2020, will take over the culture ministry brief from Lucy Fraser, who lost her seat in the 2020 election for Conservatives.
She believes the hard work begins today and believes the country’s cultural and sporting heritage is one of its greatest assets.
In her acceptance speech after defeating a far-right Reform UK candidate in her Greater Manchester constituency on Friday, Nandy raged, “I want to say to those people who’ve brought their nasty, hateful, racist politics to our town, the history of Wigan is of working-class people who for 100 years have driven you and your hate out of our town over and over again”.
“So take this result tonight as your marching orders. We are a better town than you. You are not welcome here. You can take your nasty divisive rhetoric elsewhere because we’ve got a job to do”, Nandy continued.
The Manchester-born daughter of Calcutta-born academic Dipak Nandy and English mother Luise Byers has previously spoken at Labour Party conferences about her Indian roots. Her father was well-known for his work in the field of race relations in Britain.
Reflecting on Mahatma Gandhi’s Indian Independence movement, Lisa Nandy recalled how a century ago “the seams of my family were threaded together when the Indian independence campaign, supported by my grandparents, had devastating consequences for Lancashire textile workers. When the cotton stopped coming, the mills stopped running and the workers went hungry”.
“But members of my family, who worked in those mills, were among those who welcomed Gandhi to Lancashire. Because they knew, as I know, as the first mixed race woman to ever hold this office, that solidarity has power and our struggle is one and the same”, Nandy remarked, referring to Gandhi’s famous visit to Lancashire in 1931 when he met mill.
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