Throughout its history the Labour left has been a key source of energy and ideas for the party – but left-right tensions have long been the cause of damaging divisions. What lessons does this story hold for today’s left and the struggling Starmer government? Are they irreconcilable enemies - or can they ever work together? Guardian columnist Andy Beckett, author of When the Lights Went Out, Pinochet in Piccadily and The Searchers, a joint portrait of Labour mavericks Tony Benn, Ken Livingstone, John McDonnell, Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn, was in conversation with journalist and novelist Melissa Benn, whose selection of her father Tony Benn’s political writings The Most Dangerous Man in Britain? was recently published by Verso. In the chair was historian Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, whose most recent book Women and the Miners’ Strike, 1984-1985 is published by Oxford.

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“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.