Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home with me Alan Tolst.

Now, one of the big themes of this show, the past 18 months, has been the nature of the UK's

fractured politics, with the five main parties, plus the SNP in Scotland and plied in Wales,

all clustered together in the polls, and the strain it is putting on our creaking first-past-the-post electoral system. Well, this week, we'll get another one being thrown into the mix after Britain's newest party, your party, finally got going in earnest. After a difficult birth, say the least, over the past few months, threats of lawsuits, accusations of misogyny, boycotts, expulsions, resignations and acrimony between its two leading figures, Jeremy Corbin and Zara Sultan, former Labour MPs. And that's all before they even held a conference to decide on a permanent name and leadership structure. But last weekend, thousands of the members of your party put all that aside, well, mostly, to meet Liverpool, and two of my colleagues, House magazine Deputy Editor, Sienna Rogers, and Polholm reporter Tom Scottson, were up there to cover it for us. And I'd like to say, they both join me now to talk it all over and discuss where the party goes now. Alongside them, we also have Andrew Fisher, Director of Policy for the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn. So Sienna, it's starting with you then, as I said in the intro, the two central figures to this are Zara Solana and Jeremy Corbyn.

How do they both get involved as former Labour MPs with this, starting with Jeremy Corbyn?

Yeah, this starts with Jeremy Corbyn quite some years ago.

I mean, ever since he was kicked out of the Labour Party, effectively, a parliamentary Labour Party,

people have been wanting him to start a new party and provide that alternative,

and wanted him to do that before the general election.

Obviously, he didn't.

But instead, what he did was, so James Schneider, his former Director of Communications,

kind of came up with the theory, and he sort of produced this roadmap for starting a new party.

He wrote a book about it.

And then Carrie Murphy, who also worked in his lotto when he was Labour leader,

she kind of did the kind of practice.

So she went out starting and coordinating groups all across the country and set up something called collective.

So the idea of this new party is it has to be from the ground up.

It was kind of Corbyn's view.

And they had to bring together all existing independence and activists doing that kind of

grassroots stuff in their communities, bring them all together under a single umbrella.

I think he was quite ambiguous over how that would look.

Like, would it be a kind of loose alliance of an independence

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