Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, the Spectators' daily politics podcast.

I'm Cindy and I'm joined by Katie Balls and Isabel Harman.

So Labour has recently reported that it's lost 91,000 members last year and recorded

a 4.8 million pound deficit, caused by staff redundancies and a variety of other things.

Now it's about over the last few weeks with being mainly scrutinising conservative membership

numbers, we're talking about these 150,000 members who are going to be picking the next

Prime Minister.

But it does seem like Labour's got a similar problem when it comes to the size of its membership.

Yeah and this is also the Starmer effect on the Corbyn membership.

So Labour membership did get up to, I think it was nearly 500,000 at one point under Jeremy Corbyn.

Now there were quite a few resignations from the party when Jeremy Corbyn was still leader

over anti-Semitism but nothing along the lines of the latest data that we've seen this

week.

And it's not a surprise to those who've been following Labour membership and also Labour

Party finances as the party really is in a very precarious financial situation having

to look at laying off more staff and so on because of the deficit that it now has.

And you might have some people on the centre right of the party or whatever you want to

call it saying, well, we didn't want these people as our members anyway.

And to a certain extent there may well be a fair few people who've gone back to other

parties like the Green Party and more sort of fringe left wing groups who were attracted

by Jeremy Corbyn and perhaps moving those people on is good for Keir Starmer in the sense

that they don't really share that many of the sort of Labour values that he wants to promote.

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