Posted on December 1, 2020 by Eric Blair -
Alice Miles is Director of Strategy and Policy for the Office of the Children’s Commissioner. Alice leads on setting and implementing the strategy and business plan for the Children’s Commissioner, oversees policy development and communications, and has deputising responsibilities for the Commissioner. Former Associate Editor for The Times and national newspaper columnist of the year, Alice also has a wealth of experience gained at the heart of Government. She was senior policy advisor to the Secretary of State for Education and Minister for Children and Families from 2012-15, focusing on child protection and social work reform, and has also acted as senior policy advisor at the Ministry of Justice and Cabinet Office.
Posted on December 1, 2020 by Eric Blair -
Professor Donna Hall has been described as a “public service pioneer” by the Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham. She was awarded a CBE in 2009 for innovation in public service. She was CEO of Wigan Council for 8 years and developed The Wigan Deal – a new relationship with residents which delivered 160 million savings and improved services and resident satisfaction. She is now the chair of the innovative national think tank New Local and the Chair of Bolton NHS Foundation Trust. She was appointed as an Honorary Professor of Politics at the University of Manchester in August 2019 and is a Non-Executive Adviser to Birmingham City Council. Adopted as a child she is passionate about person-centred public services and communities.
Posted on December 1, 2020 by Eric Blair -
Ian Birrell is a columnist and foreign correspondent who won the 2020 Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils for his searing investigation into the abuse of vulnerable people within the healthcare system. Ian is a contributing editor of The Mail on Sunday in foreign reporting and investigations, has a weekly column in the ‘i’ paper and regularly writes for UnHerd. He has also written for The Times, The Washington Post, The Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Sun, The Spectator, Tortoise and The Wall Street Journal among others.
Posted on December 1, 2020 by Eric Blair -
Paul Kissack was previously a Director General in the UK Government working on the national response to the COVID-19 crisis. He has held Director General roles at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and the Department for Education (DfE) and was Deputy Chief Executive for Policy and Organisational Strategy at the Ministry for Children in New Zealand. He has also held senior roles in HM Treasury, the Cabinet Office, and a local authority, and has worked throughout his career on economic and social policy issues and public service reform.
Posted on December 1, 2020 by Eric Blair -
Rianna Croxford is an award-winning investigative journalist at BBC News. In March 2020 she was appointed as the BBC’s Community Affairs Correspondent with a remit to report on diverse and underserved audiences across the UK and has since also reported for BBC Panorama. She was a Gold Winner in the News category at the MHP “30 to Watch” awards for her news coverage of the coronavirus pandemic and recently won “New Journalist of the Year” at the British Journalism Awards 2020. Rianna worked at the Financial Times while training to become a journalist after graduating from Cambridge University with a degree in English Literature in 2017.
Posted on October 19, 2020 by Eric Blair -
Anand Menon is Professor of European Politics and Foreign Affairs at Kings College London. He also directs the UK in a Changing Europe project (www.ukandeu.ac.uk). His areas of research interest include the policies and institutions of the European Union, European security, and British politics. He contributes regularly to both print and broadcast media. He is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of the European Union (OUP, 2012), and co-author of Brexit and British Politics (Polity 2018). He is a trustee of Full Fact a member of the Strategic Council of the European Policy Centre, a Council member of the European Council on Foreign Relations and an associate fellow of Chatham House.
Posted on October 19, 2020 by Eric Blair -
Angela Saini is an award-winning British science journalist and broadcaster. Her latest book, Superior: the Return of Race Science, was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and named a book of the year by The Telegraph, Nature and Financial Times. Her previous book, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong, has been translated into thirteen languages. Angela has a Masters in Engineering from the University of Oxford and was a Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Posted on October 19, 2020 by Eric Blair -
Rosemary Goring comes from Dunbar, and studied history at St Andrews University. She began her career in publishing before becoming Literary Editor of Scotland on Sunday, and then moving to the Herald, the Sunday Herald and the National. Her books include Scotland: The Autobiography: 2000 Years of Scottish History by Those Who Saw it Happen, Scotland: Her Story, and the novels After Flodden and Dacre’s War. She is a columnist with the Herald and the Herald on Sunday, writes for a variety of magazines and newspapers, and is a regular abridger of books for Radio 4. She is working on a book about Mary, Queen of Scots, and lives in the Scottish Borders.
Posted on October 19, 2020 by Eric Blair -
Richard Ekins is Professor of Law and Constitutional Government in the University of Oxford. His publications include The Nature of Legislative Intent, the co-authored book Legislated Rights: Securing Human Rights through Legislation and several edited collections. He leads Policy Exchange’s Judicial Power Project, jointly directs Oxford’s Programme for the Foundations of Law and Constitutional Government (with Nick Barber) and edits the American Journal of Jurisprudence (with Jeff Pojanowski). His research has been relied upon by courts around the common
law world and by legislators and officials in New Zealand and the United Kingdom.
Posted on October 13, 2020 by Eric Blair -
Mark Ford is a professor in the English Dept. at University College London. He is the author of monographs on Raymond Roussel and Thomas Hardy, and of three collections of essays, the most recent of which, This Dialogue of One, was awarded The Poetry Foundation’s 2015 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. He is the editor of London: A History in Verse, as well as of the first two volumes of the Library of America Collected Poems of John Ashbery. His own collections of poetry include Landlocked (1992), Soft Sift (2001), Six Children (2011) and Enter, Fleeing (2018).
Posted on October 13, 2020 by Eric Blair -
Bea Carvalho is the head fiction buyer at Waterstones. Based at the Piccadilly head office, she is responsible for the selection and promotion of new fiction titles for the chain’s 284 branches and website. She has been a part of the central buying team since 2011, initially working on non-fiction, and previously worked as a bookseller in Waterstones bookshops around London including Hampstead, Oxford Street, and The Economists’ Bookshop.
Posted on October 13, 2020 by Eric Blair -
Andrea Stuart was born and raised in the Caribbean and studied English at the University of East Anglia and French at the Sorbonne. She is the author of Showgirls (1996), which was adapted into a two-part documentary, and has since inspired a theatrical show, a contemporary dance piece and a number of burlesque performances; The Rose of Martinique: A Biography of Napoleon’s Josephine (2003), which won the Enid McLeod Literary Prize in 2004; and Sugar in the Blood: One Family’s Story of Slavery and Empire (2012) which was shortlisted for the BOCAS Literary Prize and the Spears Book Award. She has been published in numerous anthologies and her articles have been published in a range of newspapers and magazines.
Posted on October 13, 2020 by Eric Blair -
Delia Jarrett-Macauley, the youngest daughter of a Sierra Leone family, is a writer, academic and arts consultant. Her books include the novel Moses, Citizen and Me, which won The Orwell Prize in 2006, and The Life of Una Marson 1905-65. She has made programmes for BBC radio, taught Women’s Studies and Literature at the universities of London and Kent, and is on the faculty of IES Abroad (London). Delia is also known for her pioneering collections Reconstructing Womanhood, Reconstructing Feminism: Writings on Black Women and Shakespeare, Race and Performance: The Diverse Bard. She was Chair of the Caine Prize for African Writing from 2015-2018.
Posted on January 7, 2020 by Eric Blair -
Gloria was a political journalist for 15 years working for the BBC and then ITV’s breakfast programme GMTV. She interviewed most senior politicians during that time including Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and David Cameron as Leader of the Opposition. She was elected as the Labour MP for Ashfield in Nottinghamshire in 2010 but did not stand for re-election in 2019. She spent most of her time as an MP on Labour’s front bench and Shadow Cabinet.
Posted on November 5, 2019 by Eric Blair -
Farrah Storr is the Editor-in-Chief of ELLE. Prior to this, Farrah was the Editor in Chief of Cosmopolitan from July 2015 until April 2019 and in that time, Farrah grew the brand to become the No.1 UK women’s glossy. Previously, Farrah was the launch Editor of Women’s Health magazine. Under her direction, Women’s Health became the most successful women’s magazine launch of the decade. Her achievements were recognised by the British Society for Magazine Editors when she won the prestigious award ‘New Editor of the Year’ in 2014.
In 2019 Farrah was awarded Editor of the Year at the PPA Awards, for the second year running and most recently was included in the Evening Standard’s Progress 1000 list of London’s most influential people of 2019. In 2018, Farrah was named Editor of the Year at the BSMEs and was also named as one of the 36 BAME people on the Guardian’s list of the 1,000 most powerful people in Britain. She is the author of The Discomfort Zone.
Posted on November 5, 2019 by Eric Blair -
Abigail is Deputy Director of Advocacy and Public Engagement at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. She is driving JRF’s strategy to reframe the public conversation and narratives about people and communities trapped in poverty.
Abigail works with filmmakers, writers, the media, cultural institutions, social influencers and activists, to commission and produce authentic and diverse stories with the purpose of reaching new audiences, opening up minds and shifting attitudes. She recently collaborated with BAFTA nominated documentary maker Sean McAllister on A Northern Soul.
Posted on November 5, 2019 by Eric Blair -
Max Daly is a journalist and author specialising in illegal drugs and crime. He is the Global Drugs Editor at VICE Media and the co-author of ‘Narcomania: How Britain Got Hooked on Drugs’. He is the winner of the 2019 Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils for ‘Behind County Lines’.
Posted on November 5, 2019 by Eric Blair -
Professor Rosie Campbell is Professor of Politics and Director of the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership. Prior to joining King’s in 2018 she held positions at Birkbeck and UCL. She is a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. She has recently written on barriers to participation in politics, gendered patterns of support for the populist radical right and what voters want from their elected representatives.
Her publications cover the subjects of voting behaviour, public opinion, the politics of diversity and political recruitment. She is the principle investigator of the ESRC funded Representative Audit of Britain, which surveyed all candidates standing in the 2015 and 2017 British General Elections, and co-investigator of a Leverhulme funded study of British parliamentary candidates and MPs from 1945-2015: www.parliamentarycandidates.org.
Rosie has co-authored reports for the Fawcett Society, The Expert Panel on Electoral Reform for the Welsh Assembly, the EHRC, BBC Radio Four’s Woman’s Hour, The Electoral Commission, The Fabian Women’s Network and The Hansard Society.