Hello my name is David Ronsonman and this is Talking Politics. We're going to get back

today to talking about the state of the parties in Britain. We haven't done that for a while,

but we're not going to talk about who's up in the polls, who's up in parliament, we're

going to talk about the membership. Labour has all the members now and the Tories seem

to have none. Does that matter?

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an issue. It's a real pleasure to welcome back

Helen Thompson and Chris Picatin. We haven't chatted for a while, there's been quite a lot

going on I think. We're going to get to some of it, not going to get to all of it. But

the trigger for this conversation is actually it's not the Labour Party, it's the Conservative

Party. I read a story put out by Momentum which said, I mean, Momentum the group within

Labour said that they thought that they would have more members than the Tories, just Momentum,

not the Labour Party, by 2022 because Momentum I think it getting close to 50,000, they're

over 40,000. No one knows how many members the Conservative Party has because it keeps

that information secret though, it will have to reveal it when there's a leadership

election. So if Tories or Mayor had fought Andrea Ledson and only 17 people had voted,

we would have discovered just how few they have, but the current estimate is that it's

about 70,000 and Labour is at 550,000. So you've got these two parties neck and neck in

...