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Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shorts,

is Fettator's Daily Politics Podcast. I'm Katie Balls,

and I enjoy a bit Isabel and James Forsyfe.

Now it is day one of the rail strikes that we will be seeing two more days

if they go ahead, just this week, with threats of more to follow.

Isabel, there's lots of commuter disruption, lots of people who are saying they've been

forced to work from home. Some more pleased about that than others.

But we spoke yesterday about the government's stance on this. Where's Labour and all this?

So this has been building up for a little while, and to a certain extent,

the tensions over this were inevitable giving you've got individual Labour MPs who get

funding from the RMT, which is the union that's striking.

Today, the RMT is not affiliated directly to the Labour Party.

The Labour Party is affiliated to the TUC, which is supporting these strikes.

So there's lots of sort of links going into the party, even though there isn't the,

you know, that official trade union link like with unite.

But obviously also, the strikes are hugely inconvenient for a lot of Labour voters.

And so there lies the conflict for the Labour leadership.

And when I interviewed Rachel Maskell a few weeks ago on Week in Westminster,

I asked her whether she expected front benches to be on picket lines this week.

...