The New Statesman.

Hello, I'm Anous Shakilian and this is The New Statesman podcast. I'm joined today by the political organizer and author James Schneider.

Hello. Hello. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me.

In 2016, he served as Director of Strategic Communications for Jeremy Corbyn.

He currently serves as

communications director for Progressive International and as of this year he was involved in the founding

of the emerging Left Party, your party. But let's talk about your role in that first, James,

because you've actually stepped back from that. Can you explain a bit to our listeners, your

involvement and what you've decided since then?

Yeah, sure. So I ran Jeremy's campaign for Parliament last year, which was great. And obviously,

we had an excellent win and that was a lot of fun. And then from that point on, was working

with other people towards forming a new party. Yeah. Which has been an

interesting and a long process with many twists and turns and I've learned a lot about things

along the way. And now that's so almost up and running. You know, it's we're getting towards

the, we're getting towards the conference. But everybody who's been working on it,

you know, myself included when I was working on, it was all a volunteer. And I have,

you know, as you read out before, I do a number of different things. And so about a month ago,

I, I stepped back from spending quite so much time on it. So I'm not so fully involved now.

But we're grateful to have you on because you can talk our listeners who are very interested in this new project through sort of how it's being created.

And the challenges and opportunities for it as well.

So we will talk a bit about that.

But with the knowledge that you're not a spokesperson for this party.

...