The New Statesman.

I'm Anoushe Kellean and this is the listener questions edition of The New Statesman podcast.

And I'm joined by my colleagues Rachel Cunliff and Luke O'Reilly.

Hello.

Hello.

Thank you so much for joining me to answer some great questions that we have this week from our lovely audience, as ever, on the economy, policing and

Labour's identity crisis. And lots of you write in, you put comments on YouTube, on Spotify,

email in. Please could you send us voice notes as well? Because we'd love to hear your voice on the

podcast. All you have to do is just record a voice memo on your phone and just send it over to

podcast at newstatesman.co.uk. So hopefully we'll have a few more voices joining us on this

episode in future. This question is from Kevi 1967, who asks, how can Labour politicians

continue to call themselves Labor when they have moved so far away from the founding

principles of the Labour Party? They are now totally unrecognisable.

OK, so this is, you know, this is a big talking point. It's essentially the big question of, has Labor shifted to the right, or is it being true to its values?

And it depends on sort of where you sit in terms of the electorate, how you feel about this, Luke.

What do you think? Because the last budget, the most recent budget, was billed as a, you know,

true Labour budget for, to please Labour MPs as well as Labour voters.

Well, I think the interesting thing for Labour is that labour in this country has changed,

in terms of workers have changed. So you know union membership in 1979, the

height of union membership was 13.2 million. Now it's only 6 million. So it's a massive drop,

right? And in a sense, if you're trying to build a coalition of voters now to win elections

and you're the Labour Party, you have to reach out for a whole other different group of people.

...