Where are Britain’s communist parties?
The Politics Show
The New Statesman
4.2 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 21 November 2025
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Whilst Your Party and the Green Party attempt to occupy the space on the left of British politics that they feel Labour has abandoned, our listener asks, what about the British communist parties?
Oli Dugmore is joined by Tom McTague to discuss this, along with other listener questions on political briefings to the press and whether Labour can make a comeback.
READ: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/the-sketch/2025/11/britains-young-communists-are-ready-for-revolution
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The New Statesman. |
| 0:05.2 | I'm Olly Doug Moore, and this is the listener questions edition of the New Statesman podcast. |
| 0:09.6 | To answer your questions, I'm joined today by the New Statesman's editor. |
| 0:12.8 | Tom McTay. Hello, Tom. |
| 0:13.8 | Hello, thanks for having me on. |
| 0:15.0 | It's a pleasure. |
| 0:16.3 | I'm very glad to break podcasting bread with you for the first time. |
| 0:19.9 | This question is from Lynette. |
| 0:22.5 | We've heard a lot about briefing in Westminster. |
| 0:25.1 | What does that actually mean? |
| 0:27.4 | And what does it mean to brief against someone, Tom? |
| 0:31.3 | This is a great question. |
| 0:32.8 | It sort of made me go away and think about the nature of the lobby, which is the collective name for the |
| 0:41.2 | journalists who work in Parliament and report on what's going on. And they rely almost entirely |
| 0:48.8 | on briefings. So some of them are official. Some of them are off the record. |
| 0:54.7 | Some of them are on the record. |
| 0:56.5 | Some of them are sort of unofficial things that you might just pick up in conversations over the telephone |
| 1:02.7 | or when you bump into somebody in the cafe in Port Collis House, which is the building |
| 1:07.8 | where MPs have their offices. |
| 1:09.9 | So a briefing is essentially somebody with power or information that wants to share it with a |
| 1:18.9 | journalist. |
| 1:20.1 | And often it means in a non-attributable way. |
... |
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