Why doesn't the Labour Party have a podcast?

The Green Party has a podcast. Bold Politics with Zack Polanski. Reform UK has one too, promising listeners “behind the scenes” access to Nigel Farage, in episodes such as “Brexit Special: 10 Years On” and “General Election Now!”

These are different ideological projects, but structurally they are doing the same thing: building direct, leader-linked content channels (on podcast platforms, Instagram, and YouTube) that combine personality and political ideas.

The obvious question - why doesn’t the Labour Party have a podcast? - is really a smaller version of a larger one: is Labour adequately responding to a changed political-cultural environment to communicate its ideas and policies?

Ofcom estimates that podcasts account for only around three per cent of UK adults’ daily news consumption. But podcasts were never primarily a “news” format. Judging them as one misses their value in a new media age.

Para-social relationships in the new media age

It is what Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, in a foundational 1956 paper, called para-social interaction - the one-sided but psychologically real relationship a listener forms with a media performer they encounter regularly.

It is how influencers amass large followings through reliable content streams – reels, stories, tik-toks, across Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube.

More recent research on podcast listening bears this out: when audiences participate, watch others participate, and register a host as authentic, what forms is not an audience in the broadcast sense but something closer to a community.

It is no coincidence that the qualities missing from Labour’s own communications to date are precisely the qualities this format rewards; strong personality; leadership and brand; authentic storytelling; and explanation of policy and political thinking.

The most-listened-to podcasts in Britain - The Rest Is Politics, The Joe Rogan Experience, The Louis Theroux Podcast, The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - succeed for reasons that have very little to do with ‘news’ and everything to do with the above.

Recognisable voices. People who turn up on schedule, explain the world in a consistent way, and build something with an audience that a single broadcast interview cannot.

The rise of the infleuncer political economy

None of this is happening in a vacuum. People no longer encounter politics through news bulletins or broadsheets; they encounter it while scrolling in bed, making dinner, walking to work, watching a video they never searched for, or listening to someone they feel - however illusorily - that they know and can rely on.

In this economy, influencers are not a distraction from politics but a parallel institution performing several of its functions at once: educator, salesperson, culture-setter. People take nutritional advice from people who have never studied nutrition, financial advice from people with no relevant qualification, and their politics from people who have never set foot in Westminster.

Left and right

Tradwife content is a useful illustration of how this works, precisely because it does not present itself as political. At first glance it is lifestyle programming: cooking, homemaking, marriage, an aesthetic of domestic tradition. But tradwife and cottagecore-adjacent content sits close to, and sometimes overlaps with, a harder set of ideas about gender and the family, some of them reactionary.

The same pattern holds on the left, with different aesthetics and communities. Comedian and commentator Cody Dahler is one example, a man who has built a 2 million following talking about news and events through personal brand and comic timing - not a newsroom.

Political sentiment is now formed in places that do not announce themselves as political at all. Taxes. Prices. Rents. Wages. Work. Masculinity. Family life. These are not simply policy areas. They are lived experience, and the lived experience arrives with a story already attached about what kind of country this is, who it works for, and who it has stopped listening to.

Why has Labour failed?

Labour has, to date, behaved as though political communication is still just a matter of landing a message: a press release, a broadcast clip, a set-piece interview, and a social graphic. It has tried to respond to the shift described above, but the attempts have largely misunderstood what the medium requires.

Keir Starmer’s podcast appearances, like on Pete Wicks’s Man Made or UNTAPPED with Spencer Matthews, may well have broadened his reach. But it borrowed someone else’s audience, someone else’s tone and someone else’s relationship with that audience. That is not the same thing as building a media culture of Labour’s own - and no single guest appearance, however well judged, substitutes for one.

Andy Burnham’s media operation has grasped something differently: that political office, like political leadership, can be a media brand. Rather than taking interview questions from journalists he has put equal attention on creating a relationship direct with the viewer. Direct-to-camera clips on social media and reddit Q+As run alongside the broadcast hits rather than instead of them.

How Labour can respond

It is not hard to imagine what a Labour podcast could look like. A host - perhaps someone like David Miliband - providing explanation-rich but culture-literate content: about policies, challenges, who Britain is today and where it is going, about why prices, rents, wages, care, masculinity, family life, and public services feel the way they do, told through people and ideas. Think clips across Instagram, TikTok X, Faceboook, Youtube.

Politics is shaped by culture: by tone, by repetition, by who’s doing the explaining when you’re making dinner, scrolling in bed, walking to work.