Hello, my name is David Runsman and this is Talking Politics. This week we're going to get back to talking about British politics, about Brexit.

To start with about the Labour Party, something has got to give at some point, but where is the full line?

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We have Helen Thompson with us this week, pleasure to welcome back Chris Bickerton after the summer, and for the first time also a pleasure to welcome Wazimia Kube, who is a historian of political thought here in Cambridge and also has some insight into the Labour Party and some of its internal goings on.

Yesterday, this is Wednesday morning, yesterday two things happened simultaneously in the Commons, Dominic Rob and Kierstarma were squaring off about the state of the Brexit negotiations, and at the same time the Labour leadership, and Jeremy Corbyn in particular was engaged in a quicksotic, I think that's the polite word for it,

and the fight to retain the right to call the foundation of the state of Israel a racist endeavor, a fight that he lost, and that in itself symbolises one of the things that we're going to talk about today, which is for I assume most members of the Parliamentary Labour Party,

Dominic Rob versus Kierstarma is the fight, but that was not where the leadership was yesterday, they were having a fight which clearly at least for Corbyn is more important than that.

So we've known for a long time that Labour MPs and the Labour leadership are not in the same space on lots of questions, including possibly on Brexit, but then there are all these other divisions too.

The Trade Union movement, but particularly the GMB this week has come out and said that it is pushing for, we're not allowed to call it a second referendum, but a people's vote on Brexit.

So there's a tension there, there's clearly tensions within the membership and between the membership and the leadership over Brexit.

There is the long standing question of what happens to the Labour Party when the membership moves one way and it's possible that Labour voters move a different way.

I'm going to ask Wes Eamon a bit about momentum and whether that's a united or divided organisation.

And then we've also had the resignation of Frank Field or rather withdrawal from the Labour Whip.

And one of the things that he said that he could no longer tolerate were the divisions within his own constituency party.

And you do hear increasingly about some of these fights being played out at the constituency level and often that's where it's ugliest.

British politics at the moment is this kind of nightmarish puzzle where it's so hard to see how all the different bits fit together, but at least with the Tories some of the divisions are kind of where you'd expect them to be.

Trees may sort of caught in the middle between one wing and another wing over Brexit.

But with Labour I really struggle to see where the full line is.

If something is going to give, where is it going to break? Of all of those things that I described is that one that you think is if you were the Labour leadership and Donald has also come out recently and expressed for the first time his real anxiety that the party might split, where is it going to come?

So I think one of the problems with the Labour Party at the moment is that all of these divisions which in many ways are particularly deep and complicated now.

Interact with this broader thing that we're calling Brexit, which for the Labour Party poses a real challenge because on the one hand it's difficult to know where it's going.

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