Ask the Experts: A New Political Landscape?

Don’t miss this rare opportunity to unpick the new British political landscape and ask questions to BBC election guru Professor Sir John Curtice FBA, author and political expert Professor Ben Ansell FBA, and former Executive Director of Policy to Keir Starmer, Leader of the Opposition and UK Labour Party Claire Ainsley. What happened in the election? Where are we now? And where are we heading in the aftermath of the UK summer election?
Join us at the bar from 18:00, with the event beginning at 18:30.
Speakers:
Claire Ainsley
Claire Ainsley is the Director of the Project on Center-Left Renewal at the Progressive Policy Institute. Prior to joining PPI, Claire was the Executive Director of Policy to Keir Starmer, Leader of the Opposition and UK Labour Party. Claire also served as the Executive Director of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, where she led JRF’s work on the social and political attitudes of people with low incomes. She is the author of The New Working Class: How to Win Hearts, Minds and Votes, which was published in May 2018.
Professor Ben Ansell FBA
Ben Ansell is Professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. Born in California, he grew up in the UK before returning to the US for his postgraduate studies in political science at UC Berkeley, followed by a PhD at Harvard. He taught for several years at the University of Minnesota, becoming a full Professor at Oxford in 2013 at the age of 35. He was made Fellow of the British Academy in 2018. His work has been widely covered in the media, including The New York Times, The Economist, The Times, BBC Radio and the World Bank’s Economic Development Report. You can learn more about Professor Ben Ansell’s work, and his book Why Politics Fail in his British Academy’s 10-Minute Talk.
Sir John Curtice FBA
Sir John Curtice FRSA FRSE FBA is a British political scientist who is currently professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde and senior research fellow at the National Centre for Social Research. He is particularly interested in electoral behaviour and researching political and social attitudes. He took a keen interest in the debate about Scottish independence.
Chair: Hetan Shah
Hetan Shah is Chief Executive at the British Academy, the UK’s national academy for humanities and social sciences. He is Chair of Our World in Data, which brings together research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems. Hetan was appointed in 2024 by the UK Parliament to the board of the National Audit Office, the UK’s independent spending watchdog. He is Visiting Professor at the Policy Institute, Kings College London and a Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. Hetan serves on a number of advisory boards including the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, the UCL Policy Lab and the Resolution Foundation.