26/11/2010

EDWARD DAVEY is the Minister for Employment Relations, Consumer and Postal Affairs. He recently wrote a review on his own website of the first six months of coalition government: “Naturally, we’ve not had it all our own way. The most difficult decision has been breaking our manifesto on tuition fees, something I deeply regret. Yet the new system will be fairer than now, as experts studying the details admit.” Until the election he had been Liberal Democrat Foreign Affairs spokesman for over two years. Before that he served as Chief of Staff to Sir Menzies Campbell when Sir Menzies was leader. He is also his party’s Chair of Campaigns and Communications. Previously tipped as a future party leader, he decided against running in the last leadership election. A former management consultant, he was one of the architects of the plans to replace the council tax with a local income tax. After studying at Oxford, he joined the party as an economics’ researcher and worked with Alan Beith and Paddy Ashdown. In 1997, he was elected MP for Kingston and Surbiton, and was party spokesman on the Treasury. Described as one of the party’s “young Turks”, he was recognised as one of a new breed of Lib Dem intellectual thinkers.

JASON COWLEY is Editor of The New Statesman and a widely published cultural critic and journalist. Before the election, he was very clear about what the country did and did not need to help it through its “national emergency”: “What it doesn't need is a Cameron victory and a Tory-led social revolution”. He was previously editor of Granta and editor of the Observer Sport Monthly magazine and a staff writer on The Times. He has published two books, a novel, Unknown Pleasures and, most recently, the memoir The Last Game: Love, Death and Football. In 2009, Jason won the British Society of Magazine Editors’ Editor of the Year award in his category. The judges said he had transformed The New Statesman and "created issues of the magazine that were the envy of the industry".

TESSA JOWELL MP is Shadow Minister for the Olympics. She sits on the Olympic Board and this week she spoke out against Government plans to stop funding the Youth Sport Trust: "Five years ago, when London won the bid for the Olympics, we made a promise... to transform a generation of young people through sport. The coalition government is placing this legacy in danger, in clear contradiction to everything that the Olympics should mean for our country." As Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport between 2005 and 2007 she introduced 24 hour drinking, cut the level of the BBC licence fee and she was also responsible for bringing in new legislation to allow casino gambling. Tessa Jowell came into government as health minister in 1997, and was minister for education and employment, before getting a cabinet seat in 2001. After a career in psychiatric social work, she became MP for Dulwich in 1992 and was elected to Dulwich and West Norwood in 1997. Earlier this year she was somehow placed as a “landmark” on Google Maps, appearing between Westminster Palace and Big Ben. She was positive about the development: "In opposition it can often feel like you've been forgotten in the public mind. I'm therefore grateful to Google for putting me back on the map."

JILL KIRBY is Director of the Centre for Policy Studies, where she chaired the Centre’s family and welfare policy group for six years. Writing on Conservative Home on the day of the Comprehensive Spending Review, she said she was disappointed: what was missing “was the overriding principle which might have been expected to set the basis for the whole exercise: that increasing government spending on services is not inherently virtuous.” A qualified solicitor, she worked in a city law firm for a number of years. From 2001 to 2003 she was a Consultant to Renewing One Nation, the social affairs unit at Conservative Central Office, and a member of the Conservative Women’s Manifesto Group. And from 2005 to 2006 she served on the Tax Reform Commission, appointed by Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne to advise the Conservative Party on the case for a flatter, fairer tax system. Her publications include The Nationalisation of Childhood (2005) in which she argued that the Government’s agenda for children was creating a direct relationship between children and the state, undermining the responsibility of families. And in 2008, she wrote Who Do We Think We Are which examined privacy and data-sharing, and the balance of the relationship between the individual and the State.