Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home.

I'm your host, Alan Tollist, and for the next in our summer series of one-on-one discussions

of interesting people in around politics, we have James Schneider, who was director of

to Media Communications for Jeremy Corbyn, having co-founded the political campaign group Momentum.

He's also a journalist and author whose book R Block How We Win came out last year.

So I'm going to start, change, by asking for your kind of reflections, I suppose, four years on from when Boris Johnson became Prime Minister and kind of the start of that election campaign that ended in December 2019. What are your kind of reflections on that a few years out, I suppose? I don't think

my view of what was happening then has changed that much from at the time. I think very clearly

Boris Johnson was trying to appeal to non-traditional Tory voting leave voters in small and medium-sized

towns. And that's what they said they were going to do. And they were going to use Brexit as the

wedge to do it. And they did so very effectively. And in response to that, we labor, we didn't

really have a position. And so politics for those kind of six months was

totally defined by Brexit with a firm position on one side and a confusing position on the

other side. So you, you know, you compare that to, for example, in the 2017 election where, again,

the Tories wanted that to be an election about Brexit. But because of the

situation, from the perspective of 2017, Brexit basically happened because no one thought that

it wasn't going to happen. But because we hadn't left the EU on the 31st of March 2019,

people that wanted to leave suddenly thought, oh my goodness, maybe we won't leave. We need to do

something about it. And people who really didn't want to leave thought, oh my goodness, maybe we

don't have to leave at all. Let's do something about it. That really focused politics in on

the question of Brexit, which was greatly to the detriment of our political project, which was

based on trying to unite the majority, the many against the few.

Yeah, kind of drowned everything else out, right? Well, let's start. Let's go back a few years.

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