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Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup. Hello. Hello and welcome to rock and roll politics, the podcast with me, Steve Richards, and the entire rock and roll politics co-operative.

This is the first normal, in inverted commas, podcast of 26. I hope you enjoyed our festive series of specials

looking at defectors, the big personal dramas involved in defections and the wider implications.

They are always an important and potent barometer of politics at any given time.

And defections, of course, are playing their part in the current feebrow political mood,

Tories to reform, Labour councillors to Greens, etc.

And they tell us something, defectection, sometimes more in a way than

opinion polls, which aren't a prediction of the next general election, but capture a moment

with varying degrees of accuracy. But anyway, if you didn't listen to them, they're there.

If you did, thank you. And there's

been brilliant emails about some of those festive episodes. But before I tell you what we're

going to be doing in our time together today, I hope you all had a great festive break.

And we're able, at times at least, to switch off from politics.

I know because emails continue to pour in, even though I said,

let, have a rest, you know, just because we're going to be so busy in 2026,

making sense of it all and delving deep.

And some of you had a rest, I can tell, but a lot of you've sent brilliant emails.

...