Hello and welcome to not another one with me Steve Richards, Tim Montgomery, here Martin, Miranda Green.

Thank you so much for tuning in.

Now things are kind of really hard to read at the start of this year.

If you just think of the kind of stories whirling around,

Musk disowning Farage, but Farage then getting a boost with an opinion poll this week

showing reform virtually neck and neck with Labour and Tories in third place.

Meanwhile, you've got 72 Liberal Democrats trying to assert themselves in this new House of Commons.

Is politics becoming more fragmented?

If you look back at the start of years, say kind of ten years ago, it would be, I don't know,

Miliband versus Cameron and what was happening, obviously it was a coalition, but it feels very fractured at the moment.

Is this fleeting? Are we right to even think in those terms?

First of all, that opinion poll, which I know caused a stir in Westminster,

probably didn't cause a great stir beyond that.

Miranda, is a poll at all relevant at this stage in a parliament with the general election

years and years away?

I think they are relevant.

They're not relevant to, in some sense, in inverted commas,

predicting what's going to happen at the next general election.

So I think there's a distinction to be made between the usefulness,

which I would say is great, of the work that the pollsters are currently doing on the state of,

you know, opinion among the electorate and some idea that that will govern what happens,

you know, in four years' time. I have to say, looking at the way that it's been fracturing,

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