The Festival of Debate is an annual politics festival in England which takes place between May and June across South Yorkshire, but mostly focused in Sheffield. Founded in 2015, [1] organisers say its aim is to "bring people together to share new ideas and lived experience that can help shape our understanding of the world." [2] It is the largest non-partisan politics festival in the UK. [3]
Previous guests have included former leaders of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn [3] and Ed Miliband, [4] writer Afua Hirsch, [5] feminist author Gloria Steinem, [3] civil liberties campaigner Shami Chakrabarti, [3] former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, [4] author and broadcaster Sathnam Sanghera, [6] environmental journalist George Monbiot, [5] composer Brian Eno [2] and writer Armando Iannucci. [3]
The festival was founded in 2015 in the lead-up to that year's UK general election. [1] It is hosted by Opus Independents, a Sheffield-based "not-for-profit independent social enterprise organisation working in culture, politics and the arts". [1] Organisers said the initial aim of the festival was to "engage an increasingly apathetic population with politics". [7]
Stephen John Coogan is a British-Irish comedian, actor and screenwriter. He is most known for creating original characters such as Alan Partridge, a socially inept and politically incorrect media personality, which he developed while working with Armando Iannucci on On the Hour and The Day Today. Partridge has featured in several television series and the 2013 film Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa. In 1999, he co-founded the production company Baby Cow Productions with Henry Normal. For his work he has garnered numerous accolades including four BAFTA Awards and three British Comedy Awards as well as nominations for an Academy Award and Golden Globe Award.
Armando Giovanni Iannucci is a Scottish satirist, writer, director, producer, performer and panellist. Born in Glasgow to Italian parents, Iannucci studied at the University of Glasgow followed by the University of Oxford. Starting on BBC Scotland and BBC Radio 4, his early work with Chris Morris on the radio series On the Hour transferred to television as The Day Today.
Jeremy Bernard Corbyn is a British politician who served as Leader of the Opposition and Leader of the Labour Party from 2015 to 2020. On the political left, Corbyn describes himself as a socialist. He has been Member of Parliament (MP) for Islington North since 1983. As of October 2020, Corbyn sat in the House of Commons as an independent, following the suspension of the whip. On 24 May 2024, Corbyn was expelled from the Labour Party.
Christopher Michael Leslie is a debt collection executive and a former British politician who served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Shipley from 1997 to 2005 and Nottingham East from 2010 to 2019. A former member of the Labour Party, he defected to form Change UK and later became an independent politician.
James Patrick Dowd is a former British Labour Party politician, who was a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1992 to 2017, first for Lewisham West and following 2010 for Lewisham West and Penge. He stood down at the 2017 general election, following the announcement of Prime Minister Theresa May's snap election in June 2017.
Angela Christine Smith is a British former politician who served as Member of Parliament (MP) for Penistone and Stocksbridge from 2010 to 2019 and MP for Sheffield Hillsborough from 2005 to 2010. A member of the Labour Party, she was previously an MP for Labour, later for Change UK, later still as a member of The Independents, then joined the Liberal Democrats before leaving Parliament in 2019. She rejoined Labour in 2022.
Ian Christopher Austin, Baron Austin of Dudley is a British politician who sits as a life peer in the House of Lords. He was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Dudley North from the 2005 general election until the 2019 general election when he stood down. Formerly a member of the Labour Party, he resigned from the party on 22 February 2019 to sit as an independent, and was ennobled in the 2019 Dissolution Honours. He served as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department for Communities and Local Government from 2009 to 2010.
Paul Mason is a British journalist. He writes a weekly column at The New European and monthly columns for Social Europe and Frankfurter Rundschau. He was Business Correspondent and then Economics Editor of the BBC Two television programme Newsnight from 2001, and Culture and Digital Editor of Channel 4 News from 2013, becoming the programme's Economics Editor in 2014. He left Channel 4 in 2016.
In the Loop is a 2009 British satirical black comedy film directed by Armando Iannucci. It is a spin-off from Iannucci's BBC Television series The Thick of It (2005–12), and satirises British-American politics, in particular the invasion of Iraq. At the 82nd Academy Awards the film was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Ioannis Georgiou "Yanis" Varoufakis is a Greek economist and politician. Since 2018, he has been Secretary-General of Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), a left-wing pan-European political party he co-founded in 2016. Previously, he was a member of Syriza and was Greece's Minister of Finance between January 2015 and July 2015, negotiating on behalf of the Greek government during the 2009-2018 Greek government-debt crisis.
Ian Martin is an English comedy writer. Martin was a writer for the BAFTA-winning BBC series The Thick of It. He was famously hired as "swearing consultant" in 2005 by the show's creator, Armando Iannucci, for Series 1 of the political satire and went on to become a full member of the writing team. He won an Emmy for his writing across five series of Veep and was BAFTA nominated for co-writing The Death of Stalin.
Louise Margaret Haigh is a British politician serving as Shadow Secretary of State for Transport since 2021. A member of the Labour Party, she was elected as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Sheffield Heeley at the 2015 general election, as the youngest Labour member of that parliament. She served as Shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland from 2020 to 2021.
The following list contains a run down of politicians, individuals, Constituency Labour Parties, trade unions, Socialist societies, newspapers, magazines and other organisations that endorsed a candidate in the 2015 leadership election
The Democracy in Europe Movement 2025, or DiEM25, is a pan-European political movement and political party founded in 2016 by a group of Europeans, including Yanis Varoufakis and Srećko Horvat. The movement was officially launched at ceremonial events on 9 February 2016 in the Volksbühne theatre in Berlin and on 23 March in Rome.
The 2016 Labour Party leadership election was called when a challenge to Jeremy Corbyn as Leader of the Labour Party arose following criticism of his approach to the Remain campaign in the referendum on membership of the European Union and questions about his leadership of the party.
Kerry-Anne Mendoza is an English writer, journalist and social commentator. She is the former editor-in-chief of The Canary, a left-wing new media outlet.
George Eaton is a British writer and journalist. He is Senior Online Editor of the New Statesman, a position he was appointed to in February 2020. He was previously political editor from 2014 to 2018, joint deputy editor from 2018 to 2019, when he was demoted to Assistant Editor after insulting and deliberately misrepresenting his interviewee, the late Roger Scruton.
There have been instances of antisemitism within the Labour Party of the United Kingdom (UK) since its establishment. Notable occurrences include canards about "Jewish finance" during the Boer War and antisemitic remarks from leading Labour politician Ernest Bevin. In the 2000s, controversies arose over comments made by Labour politicians regarding an alleged "Jewish lobby", a comparison by London Labour politician Ken Livingstone of a Jewish journalist to a concentration camp guard, and a 2005 Labour attack on Jewish Conservative Party politician Michael Howard.
Magid Magid, also known as Magid Mah and Magic Magid, is a Somali-British activist and politician who served as the Lord Mayor of Sheffield from May 2018 to May 2019. His appointment attracted significant media attention, as he is the first ethnic-Somali, the youngest-ever, and the first Green Party councillor to hold the role. In May 2019, he was elected to the European Parliament as Green Party MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber.
Another Europe is Possible is a civil society organisation based in the United Kingdom which was founded in February 2016 to campaign for the 'Remain' option during the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, while also advocating for internal reform of the EU. The group describes itself as advocating a "Remain position in the EU referendum from a specifically left, progressive perspective" and came together to work "across party political lines to campaign for democracy, human rights, and social justice". It states that the EU requires "radical and far-reaching reform, breaking with austerity economics and pioneering a radically new development strategy". The group gained attention as a high-profile protest organising platform during the 2019 British prorogation controversy.
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