General Election Expert Media Group
When the election results were declared on 7 May, it became clear that Britain was in line for its first hung parliament since 1974. Though the Conservatives emerged as the largest party at 306 seats – a gain of 97 - they fell short of the 326 seats needed to form a majority government. Labour lost 91 seats, and despite feverish predictions anything up to 100 Liberal Democrats seats thanks to the Clegg Effect, the Lib Dems actually lost five.
Former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith and high profile Lib Dem Lembit Öpik were among those to lose their seats. The Electoral Commission is also set to investigate after polling stations shut with hundreds of people across the country left standing . Voter turnout was 65.1% - up 4% from 2005.
And if that isn’t enough, the Government will still have to find a way to once and for all deal with the financial problems which have beset the economy over the past two years. And that means policy across the board will be under the microscope.
But whatever the outcome is - whether a minority Tory Government, a Lib-Con or even a Lib-Lab arrangement, politics is going to be in the news for the foreseeable future. The popular University of Manchester’s General Election Expert Media Group will continue its work to help the press communicate these issues in a meaningful way.
To speak to members contact:
Mike Addelman
Media Relations
Faculty of Humanities
The University of Manchester
0161 275 0790
07717 881567
michael.addelman@manchester.ac.uk
or
Suzanne Ross
Media Assistant
The University of Manchester
0161 275 8258
Suzanne.ross@manchester.ac.uk
Banking and Finance
Professor Karel Williams
Karol is one of the country’s leading experts on banking and finance policy, whose insights are regularly sought out by commentators and reporters. He is Director of the ESRC funded Centre for Research on Socio Cultural Change (CRESC) where he leads research by a Manchester Business school team into financialization and financial innovation.
For more details please visit Karel's profile via the link below:
Education
Professor Alan Dyson
Alan is a Professor of Education and one of the country’s leading commentator on education policy. He co-directs the Centre for Equity in Education before his University career began in1988, he spent 13 years as a teacher, mainly in urban comprehensive schools.
For more details please visit Alan's profile via the link below:
Election Analysis
Dr Rob Ford
Rob is a political sociologist with expertise in immigration politics, voting behaviour and support for the extreme right. He has also been employed by the BBC as a consultant psephologist since 2005, working on General, local and devolved elections. Rob is a Hallsworth Research Fellow based at the University's Institute for Social Change.
More details on his research can be found at his staff and personal profile page via the link below:
Professor Rachel Gibson
Rachel is an expert on the impact of New Media on political parties, campaigns and elections. She is based at the University’s Institute for Social Change and currently holds an ESRC Professorial Fellowship to investigate e-campaigning and citizen participation in comparative perspective. She has been a Principal Investigator on the Australian Election Study (AES) and the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes (AuSSA) and has held a number of international research and teaching positions at Universities in Australia, Germany and Spain.
For more details please visit Rachel's profile via the link below:
Dr Matt Goodwin
Matt is one of the UK’s leading analysts of the far right- and in particular the British National Party. He is an ESRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University’s Institute for Political and Economic Governance (IPEG). He has published extensively, and is a regular contributor to newspapers and news programmes in the UK and abroad.
More details please visit Matt's website via the link below:
Dr Jane Green
Jane is an expert on party strategies, issue agendas, policy positions, and voting and a lecturer at The University of Manchester . She is the BBC World Services' election expert for the 2010 election night and makes regular appearances as a political pundit in the media. For the 2010 election she is analyzing party policy similarities and their effects on the vote, the Labour party base, how the national mood is moving against Labour, and the effects of message on turnout. Jane is also an expert on the Conservative Party and is writing various contributions on this topic. You can follow her election thoughts on twitter @ Dr Jane Green.
For more details please visit Jane's profile via the link below:
Dr Andrew Russell
Andrew is a seasoned political pundit, making regular contributions to newspapers and television programmes. A senior lecturer in politics, he has published widely on political parties in general, elections, campaigning and electoral engagement. He has a specific interest in British Liberal Democrats and young people, recently returning from Mozambique as an election observer.
For more details please visit Andrew's profile via the link below:
Dr Nick Turnbull
Nick is a politics lecturer who is an expert in political rhetoric. He is able to analyse how speeches and statements made by politicians use language as a means to persuade. Has written about two main areas of study: social policy and the theory of policy and politics.
For more details please visit Nick's profile via the link below:
Foreign Policy
Professor Inderjeet Parmar
Inderjeet is a Professor of Government and one of the country’s leading analysts of US foreign policy and Anglo American relations. His is a regular commentator in the press and currently serving as Vice Chair of the British International Studies Association and is co-editor of the Routledge book series on US Foreign Policy.
For more information visit Inderjeet’s profile and US Blog via the links below:
Health
Professor John Harris
John Harris is one of country’s leading moral philosophers and has an interest in healthcare funding, access to medicines and allocation of health resource. He is Professor of Bioethics in the School of Law and Director of Manchester’s Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation. John is joint Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Medical Ethics, the leading journal in medical and applied ethics, and was one of the Founder Directors of the International Association of Bioethics. He was elected a Fellow of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci) in 2001 and a Fellow of The Royal Society of Arts in 2006.
Professor James Nazroo
James has expertise in health inequality, ethnicity and ageing and can talk about policy issues in relation to these. He trained as a medical doctor and then turned his hand to sociology. He has conducted extensive research on ethnic differences in health, and how these relate to economic and social inequalities, and more recently on issues of immigration and integration. He has also carried out a large body of research on ageing inequalities in the older population and is co-director of the Manchester ageing network (MICRA).
For more details please visit James' profile via the link below:
Local Government and Regional Policy
Dr Francesca Gains
Francesca is an expert in women’s issues and local government. She is a Senior Lecturer in Public Policy and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Political and Economic Governance. Before entering academia she worked in local government and the probation service, and has had both government funded and Parliamentary research experience.
For more details please visit Francesca's profile via the link below:
Professor Alan Harding
Alan is an expert in local and regional governance, particularly in relation to economic development and regeneration. Director of the Institute for Political and Economic Governance, he has led many applied studies of local and regional economic development and regeneration. Clients have included the European Commission, national Government departments, Regional Development Agencies, local authorities, other public agencies, charitable trusts and foundations, national research councils, private sector umbrella organisations and individual corporations.
For more details please visit Alan's profile page via the link below:
Professor Peter John
Peter is Co-Director of the University’s Institute for Political and Economic Governance (IPEG) and an expert on local government. He leads the UK participation in the Policy Agendas Comparative Project. He is a consultant with NatCen for the Citizenship Survey was a Co-Director of the Home Office Civil Renewal Research Programme and a member of the UK Political Studies Association and the American Political Science Association.
For more details please visit Peter's profile via the link below:
Public Finance, Public Spending and Civil Service
Professor Colin Talbot
Colin Talbot is Professor of Public Policy and Management at The University of Manchester’s Business school. Colin's main area of expertise in is public services and public management reform. He has recently completed major international comparative studies on the creation of arms-length agencies for the UK government; of the use of performance reporting systems for the National Audit Office; and of budget participation and scrutiny systems for the Scottish Parliament. Colin has advised Parliamentary Committees on performance and public spending issues for the Treasury, Public Administration and Welsh Affairs Committees.:
Colin's blog on Whitehall and public management can be found via the link below:Race
Professor Ludi Simpson
Ludi is one of the nations leading thinkers on the statistics of race. Based at the University’s Cathie Marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research, he has recently coauthored “Sleepwalking to Segregation'? Challenging myths about race and migration”. A prolific writer and regular commentator, he is Vice President (2009-11), British Society for Population Studies, on the organising committee (2009-12) of the Radical Statistics Group and manager and designer of POPGROUP demographic estimation and projection software.
For more details please visit Ludi's profile via the link below:
Science and Environment
Professor Geoff Beattie
Geoff has been a keynote speaker at many international conferences and is widely regarded as one of the leading international figures on nonverbal communication. A academic psychologist, journalist and broadcaster, he was awarded the prestigious Spearman Medal by the British Psychological Society for 'published psychological work of outstanding merit'. He appears regularly in the British press and was resident psychologist on all nine 'Big Brother' series. His television credits also include 'Child Of Our Time' (BBC1) 'Diet Trials', (BBC1) 'Tomorrow's World', (BBC1) and numerous documentaries on ITV and Channel 4.
For more details please visit Geoff's profile via the link below:
Dr Sebastian Carney
Seb is leader of CO2 mitigation research at the University’s Centre for Urban and Regional Ecology (CURE). He specializes in low carbon city-regions and works with policy makers across Europe to form emissions inventories, energy futures and importantly energy plans leading to emissions reductions of at least 80%. He is recognized as a top achiever by the National Environmental Research Council and is currently co-lead editor for a World Bank report on Cities and Climate Change. He is Climate Change Advisor to the European Network of Regions (METREX, Secretariat Brussels). His research has led directly to a standard adopted by the EU Covenant of Mayors.
More details of Seb's work are available via the link below:
Dr Ian Cotton
As a chartered electrical engineer, Ian is able to talk about many aspects of energy policy. Working in the largest high voltage laboratory of any UK University in close partnership with many of the electrical utilities, Ian carries out research in the area of power system design and renewable energy systems. He leads the Manchester Energy Initiative which aims to influence energy policy through understanding and explaining novel energy solutions.
For more information please visit Ian's profile via the link below:
Professor Brian Cox
Brian is one of the UK’s best known scientists and a popular presenter on national television and radio. He is a strong believer in making his subject accessible to the public and is a regular commentator on science related Government policies. A particle physicist, in 2005 he was granted a Royal Society University Research Fellowship and is now mainly based in Manchester and at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland where he works on the Large Hadron Collider.
For more details please visit Brian's profile via the link below:
Professor Luke Georghiou
Luke is Professor of Science and Technology Policy and Management at the Manchester Institute of Innovation. He is an expert on issues involving the economy and innovation, including the high-tech economic recovery strategies announced by all parties. He is a regular adviser to governments here and around the world including the Japanese cabinet - a recent speech there was featured on the Japan Broadcasting Corporation’s national news, the OECD and European Commissioners.