The Owen Powell Memorial Lecture "Britain in the World" Lord Peter Hennessy, Attlee Professor of Contemporary British History, Queen Mary University of London Before joining the Queen Mary School of History in 1992, Peter was a journalist for 20 years with spells on The Times as a leader writer and Whitehall correspondent, for the Financial Times as its lobby correspondent at Westminster, and as a columnist on The Independent. Understanding the hidden wiring of the constitution and the power of the machinery of government in Britain remained at the heart of his research and teaching at Queen Mary when he moved from journalism to academia in 1992. He co- founded the Institute of Contemporary British History in 1986; and later the Mile End Group, a postgraduate research hub and forum at Queen Mary. He won the Times Higher Education Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008. His books include Never Again: Britain 1945-51, The Secret State, The Hidden Wiring: Unearthing the British Constitution, Cabinet and Whitehall, and Distilling the Frenzy: Writing the History of One's Own Times. He won the Orwell Prize for political writing in 2007 for Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties. He was appointed to the House of Lords in November 2010, sitting as a non-political crossbench peer. "Economic Inequality and Our Grandchildren’s Future" Professor Danny Dorling, Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography, University of Oxford Danny Dorling joined the School of Geography and the Environment in September 2013 and was previously a professor of Geography at the University of Sheffield. He has also worked in Newcastle, Bristol, Leeds and New Zealand. With a group of colleagues he helped create the website www.worldmapper.org which shows who has most and least in the world. His work concerns issues of housing, health, employment, education, wealth and poverty. Co-authored texts include The Atlas of the Real World: Mapping the Way We Live and Bankrupt Britain: An Atlas of Social Change. His recent books are, Inequality and the 1%; Injustice: Why Social Inequalities Persist; So You Think You Know About Britain; Fair Play; The Visualization of Social Spatial Structure; The Population of the UK; Unequal Health: The Scandal of Our Times; The 32 Stops; Population Ten Billion; All That is Solid. He is Honorary President of the Society of Cartographers and a patron of Roadpeace, the national charity for road crash victims. "Small Countries, Big Issues: The Caribbean in the 21st Century" Professor Victor Bulmer-Thomas CMG, OBE, Hon. Prof. Univ of London, Associate Fellow Chatham House Victor Bulmer-Thomas is an associate fellow in the Americas programme, honorary professor at the Institute of the Americas, University College London, and an emeritus professor of economics at London University. From 2001 to 2006 he was the director of Chatham House and from 1992 to 1998 he was the director of the Institute of Latin American Studies at London University. He edited the Journal of Latin American Studies from 1986 to 1997 and has authored or edited more than 20 books on Latin America and the Caribbean including, The Economic History of Latin America since Independence (Third Edition, 2014) and The Economic History of the Caribbean since the Napoleonic Wars (2012). He is a non-executive director of the New India Investment Trust and the JP Morgan Brazil Investment Trust. He has received honours from the governments of Brazil, Colombia and the United Kingdom. "Talking to Terrorists" Jonathan Powell, CEO/Founder, Inter Mediate, diplomat and negotiator, former Chief of Staff (Blair government) Jonathan was a British diplomat from 1979 to 1996 working on the negotiations to return Hong Kong to China in the early 1980s, the CSCE human rights talks, CDE arms control talks with the Soviet Union in the mid 1980s, and the ‘Two plus Four’’ talks on German reunification in the late 1980s. Jonathan was Chief of Staff to Tony Blair from 1995 to 2007 and the chief British government negotiator on Northern Ireland from 1997-2007. Since leaving government Jonathan has written, Great Hatred Little Room: Negotiating Peace in Northern Ireland, The New Machiavelli: How to Wield Power in the Modern World and Talking to Terrorists: How to End Armed Conflicts. "International Longevity in the 21st Century" Baroness Sally Greengross OBE, President/Chief Executive ILC-UK Baroness Sally Greengross has been a crossbench (independent) member of the House of Lords since 2000 and co-chairs five All-Party Parliamentary Groups: Dementia, Corporate Social Responsibility, Intergenerational Futures, Continence Care and Ageing and Older People. She is the Vice Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Choice at the End of Life, and is Treasurer of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Equalities. Sally is Chief Executive of the International Longevity Centre – UK; Co-President of the ILC Global Alliance; and was a Commissioner for the Equality and Human Rights Commission from 2006-12. Baroness Greengross was Director General of Age Concern England from 1987 until 2000. Until 2000, she was joint Chair of the Age Concern Institute of Gerontology at Kings College London, and Secretary General of Eurolink Age. Baroness Greengross is Chair of the Advisory Groups for the English Longitudinal Study on Ageing (ELSA) and the New Dynamics of Ageing (NDA). She is President of the Pensions Policy Institute and Honorary Vice President of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health. Baroness Greengross is Patron of the National Association of Care Caterers (NACC) and Patron of Care & Repair England. She holds honorary doctorates from eight UK universities. "On Liberty" Shami Chakrabati, Director, Liberty Shami Chakrabarti has been Director of Liberty (The National Council for Civil Liberties) since September 2003. She was called to the Bar in 1994 and worked as a lawyer in the Home Office from 1996 until 2001 for Governments of both persuasions, before joining Liberty as In-House Counsel. She became heavily involved in its engagement with the 'War on Terror' and with the defence and promotion of human rights values in Parliament, the Courts and wider society. Since becoming Liberty’s Director she has written, spoken and broadcast widely on the importance of the post-WW2 human rights framework as an essential component of democratic society. She is Chancellor of Essex University, a Master of the Bench of Middle Temple, and Honorary Professor of Law at the University of Manchester. In 2011, Shami was invited to be one of six independent assessors advising Lord Justice Leveson in his Public Inquiry into the Culture, Practice and Ethics of the UK Press. She was also chosen as one of eight Olympic Flag carriers at the London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony. Shami's first book, On Liberty, was published in 2014. "That Spatchcocked Federation? The Political Economy of the EU and the UK’s Membership of it" Bill Emmott, Former Editor, The Economist, and executive producer, "The Great European Disaster Movie" Bill Emmott is an independent writer and consultant on international affairs, based in London and Somerset. After studying politics, philosophy and economics at Magdalen College, Oxford. In1980 he joined The Economist, the world's leading weekly magazine on current affairs and business, in Brussels and rose to become Editor from 1993 until 2006. When he left in March 2006, The Economist's circulation was almost 1.1m worldwide, having more than doubled in the previous 13 years. Now, he is involved with books, documentary films and the work of The Wake Up Foundation, a charity dedicated to education and communication about the decline of western societies which he co-founded in 2013 with an Italian film-maker, Annalisa Piras. Their latest film, "The Great European Disaster Movie", aired on BBC4 on March 1st and Arte on April 21st, and is now the centrepiece of an educational roadshow around Europe. Bill writes regular columns on international affairs for La Stampa in Italy and has written frequently for The Times and Financial Times in Britain. He has won journalism awards in Italy and Britain and "lifetime achievement" awards from the Work Foundation and the Anderson School of Management at UCLA. "The New Confrontation with Russia: Is the EU the Continuation of Germany by Other Means?" Peter Hitchens, Journalist, author, and broadcaster Mail on Sunday Born in Malta, educated at the University of York, Peter Hitchens is an English journalist and author. He has published six books, including The Abolition of Britain, The Broken Compass (How British Politics Lost its Way) (reissued as The Cameron Delusion in March 2010), The Rage Against God, and The War We Never Fought. Hitchens writes for Britain's The Mail on Sunday newspaper and is a former foreign correspondent in Moscow and Washington. His recent e-book, ‘Short Breaks in Mordor’, is a compilation of the reports from abroad that won him the Orwell prize for political writing in 2010. Hitchens describes himself as a Burkean conservative, and he is a frequent critic of political correctness. "The Extreme Centre" Tariq Ali, Writer, journalist and film maker Tariq Ali has been a leading figure of the international left since the 60s and is a writer, journalist and film-maker. Born in Lahore in 1943, he was educated at Oxford University, where he became involved in student politics, in particular with the movement against the war in Vietnam. On graduating he led the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. He owned his own independent television production company, Bandung, which produced programmes for Channel 4 in the UK during the 1980s. He is a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio and contributes articles and journalism to magazines and newspapers. He has been writing for the Guardian since the 70s, is editor of the New Left Review and is a political commentator published on every continent.