SHS in the News

BBC Radio 4’s ‘Any Questions?’ at SHS on Friday 10 September

Shaun Ley will be hosting the programme. He presents both "The World This Weekend" and and the Friday edition of "The World at One".

The topical Radio 4 discussion programme ‘Any Questions?’ was broadcast from Sheffield High School on Friday 10 September.

The panel was Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families and Labour leadership contender Ed Balls, Brendan Barber, General Secretary of the TUC, Minister for Political & Constitutional Reform, Mark Harper and Executive Editor of the Evening Standard, Anne McElvoy.

To listen to the programme, go to the BBC iPlayer

The panel (information courtesy of the BBC)

ANNE MCELVOY is Political Columnist for the London Evening Standard. On the Labour leadership battle, last week she warned: “The message to the two fashionably leftish Eds is clear: you’re going the wrong way and the party will pay.” She is critical of the current state of secondary education, “As the product of a state school, what makes me sadder as the years pass is that the purveyor of a strong defence of academic education tends to come with the word “private” attached or to be seen as in some way exceptional in state schools.”

Anne McElvoy

She joined the Standard from the Independent on Sunday where she was associate editor. Before that she was deputy editor of The Spectator. As a graduate trainee on The Times, she covered the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unification of Germany. For two years, she ran The Times bureau in Moscow. She has published The Man Without a Face – Memoirs of East German spymaster Markus Wolf and The Saddled Cow, a short history of East Germany. She is a regular presenter of Radio 3’s arts and ideas programme, Nightwaves.

ED BALLS is standing for leadership of the Labour Party. He is also Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, a post he held in Government under Gordon Brown. When his rival for the leadership, David Miliband, talked this week about the possibility of Shadow ministers job-sharing, it was Ed Balls and his wife Yvette Cooper who struck many minds as possible candidates for such an experiment. He has denied any talk of private deals between himself and David Miliband and insists that the current state of the economy points to the need to boost growth rather than cut the deficit.

Ed Balls

At this year’s general election, he saw off a strong Conservative challenge in his own (new) constituency of Morley and Outwood, winning by just over 1,000 votes, later claiming that this proved he was both a “winner” and a “team player” – and that he was in touch with the concerns of ordinary voters, a key theme of his campaign. Always one of Gordon Brown’s closest political allies, he was appointed to the cabinet in 2007 after a sprint up the ministerial ladder; he was elected to Parliament in 2005 as MP for Normanton, after being chief economic adviser to Gordon Brown at the Treasury until 2004, where he was dubbed “the Chancellor’s brain”. He was a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard before joining the Financial Times as a leader writer on economics.

BRENDAN BARBER has been general secretary of the TUC since 2003. The annual TUC conference is in Manchester next week and this week he issued a warning: “The poll tax was defeated when MPs returned to Westminster to report that their constituencies were in revolt.

Brendan Barber

The poll tax offended the British people’s basic sense of what’s fair. So will the spending cuts. Every coalition MP with a small majority and every coalition MP who fought an election to oppose deep early cuts needs to feel the pressure from their constituents to change course.” He told the BBC this week that the Labour Party lacked a “compelling vision”. He has worked for the TUC since 1975, and has been described as “an accomplished fixer who has toiled in the smoke filled rooms of Congress House for a quarter of a century. He is a deal maker.” He looks, said the Guardian once, “like a man who buys his shirts with the sleeves already rolled up.” The son of a bricklaying instructor and the grandson of dockers, he became head of the TUC’s press office just before Labour’s election defeat in 1979 and was there when big union battles – like the miners’ strike and the 1986 Wapping dispute – were headline news. His hero is his predecessor as general secretary, Jack Jones, once voted the most powerful man in Britain. Barber is clear about the TUC’s role: it “must be Britain’s conscience – standing up to the powerful forces making us more unequal.”

MARK HARPER is Minister for Political and Constitutional Reform in the Cabinet Office.

Mark Harper

He is the minister charged with guiding a referendum on a change to the voting system through Parliament but says he personally opposes the proposed switch to the alternative vote because the system would make it more difficult to throw governments out. A Chartered Accountant, he was elected MP for the Forest of Dean in 2005 and was Shadow Minister for the Disabled for three years.