Hello my name is David Ronsman and this is Talking Politics. It's a new year, it's a new decade.

We've got Helen, Ancriss and Chris here. We're going to have a fresh attempt to make sense of the future of British politics but specifically the future of the Labour Party.

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For people who may be joining us for the first time, Helen is Helen Thompson, an expert in political economy and the two Chris is Chris Bickerson, who is an expert in European politics among many other things.

And Chris Brooke, an expert in political theory but also knows a lot about British politics and am I allowed to say you know quite a lot about the history of the Labour Party?

Good. So we're going to start with a subject which is I think a turn off for a lot of people so I kind of need to caveat this.

When you talk about electoral reform or abortion representation, a lot of people yawn and it is a perennial thing and it's a perennial issue for the Labour Party.

There's a sort of tradition that when Labour loses two, three, four elections in a row, the question comes up, can they ever win again under First Pass the Post and then you get the argument that you're having now within the Labour Party?

Clive Lewis, the one candidate and we will get on to people personalities, sexism, everything else in a bit.

Clive Lewis, the one candidate who's dropped out, was also the one candidate who had unabashedly said he felt that this was the time for Labour to embrace the idea of alliance, politics and that includes electoral reform.

Keir Starmer, the favourite, has been again unequivocal in saying he is in the business of winning majority at the next election.

It's quite hard to see how Labour wins a majority at the next election. Chris Brook, I'll start with you as the person who knows the history of this.

I circulated for us all to read this interesting article, the Tony Blair wrote in 1987 when this issue came up and Blair flirted with electoral reform just before he became Prime Minister.

But 10 years before that he was very much against it and some of his arguments seemed to me still have residents today and one in particular which is there's an assumption that if you did proportion representation for the people who want it on the Labour side, Labour would retain its dominant position as the alternative government but could then form alliances with smaller parties to get it over the line and create an anti-tory majority.

The risk particularly now, from 1987, is that when you look at what happens to centre left parties under PR systems, they can collapse.

I mean you give people a real choice, they don't have the disciplining effect of first pass the post which is frankly if you want an alternative government this is the only one and people really are free to choose across.

There are big risks that way too, how do you see the balance?

I think that's right and what's also changed is that in the 1980s and the 1990s the conversation about PR turned on the assumption that with PR Labour and the Liberals in some of those days the Liberal-SDP alliance could work together to form that anti-conservative majority but that now looks like a breathtakingly naive assumption that when the Liberals finally had a sniff of power it was through making a deal with the Conservative Party.

We know the Democratic Unionists are willing to be brought off by the Conservative Party. Some people still have this, I think very naive assumption that the Scottish National Party forms part of some kind of progressive block that is itching to form a progressive coalition, that seems to me a largely baseless assumption.

So under certain circumstances it's the case that the Parliamentary arithmetic whether under a PR system or otherwise might point to strong reasons for cooperation between the Liberal Democrats and the Labour Party but there are plenty of scenarios and in 2010 we saw one of them when the logic works the other way.

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