Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the Brexit and Beyond podcast, and I'm delighted to say that our guest

this week is none other than Robert Saunders, who's reader in, is it modern British politics? Modern British

History. Modern British history. Oh, God, sorry, because I was going to talk to you about history,

so that's a rookie era. Reader in modern British history at Queen Mary University of London.

Robert, welcome and apologies for getting it wrong, right at the start.

That's great to be with you. We've got an awful lot to talk about, actually. I mean, I think your work is utterly fascinating.

And I'm sure most of our listeners have read your stuff, either your academic stuff or the things you write in places like the new statesmen.

But we're talking the day after the Stama speech at Labour conference.

So I want to start off with Labor, if I may.

And, you know, you've written a lot about the Labour Party. Can you

what do you think Labour can learn from its recent past? I mean, one of the interesting things

about the Stama speech was there were loads of references to Labour's past in it, coded or

less coded. But what lessons are there for the leadership do you think in terms of how the party

has fared in recent years? Well, I think it has to be

realistic about the scale of its problems, that the Labour Party is not as stranger to losing

general elections. If you think about the 20th century, I think it won a comfortable working

majority three times. Only six of its leaders have ever been prime minister, and two of

them have effectively been excommunicated from the party subsequently. So it's always been a party

actually that has struggled to build the kind of electoral coalition that allows it to win and then

retain power. It has always been a party that has been very bitterly divided and it has struggled

within fighting, I think, to a much greater extent than the Conservative Party. So none of these

things are particularly new. So I think it can look back to previous governments, think,

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