The Jewish Chronicle Question Time

Chair of Mainstream, the Campaign Against Extremism and UK Trade Envoy to Israel

Ian Austin was Member of Parliament for Dudley North from 2005 until 2019. He was appointed to the House of Lords in 2020 as Lord Austin of Dudley. He trained as a journalist and was a councillor in Dudley. He was a special advisor to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown. He served as a government whip and minister in the last Labour government.

Austin is a supporter of Labour Friends of Israel and chairs the Parliamentary Group on Holocaust Commemoration. He resigned from the Labour Party in February 2019 after 35 years of membership to sit as an independent MP in protest at what he called “the scandal of antisemitism in the Labour Party”.

Baroness Deech was Principal of St Anne’s College Oxford, Chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, a Governor of the BBC, first Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education & Chair of the Bar Standards Board.

A former trustee of the Rhodes Scholarships, member of the Jewish Leadership Council and of the JNF, currently a patron of the Community Security Trust and a trustee of the Roth Institute for the Study of Antisemitism at Tel Aviv University. In 2005 she joined the House of Lords where she speaks on Israel, anti-Semitism and on restitution of property looted by the Nazis.

Jonathan Freedland is an award-winning journalist, author and broadcaster. He has been a weekly columnist for the Guardian since 1997 and a columnist for the Jewish Chronicle since 1998. He is the presenter of BBC Radio 4’s contemporary history series, The Long View; the Guardian’s US politics podcast; and, with Yonit Levi, Unholy, a new podcast on Israel and the Jewish world.

In 2014 he was awarded the Orwell Special Prize for journalism. He is the author of eleven books, nine of them thrillers under the name Sam Bourne. He is currently at work on a new work of non-fiction, The Escape Artist, which will be out in 2022.

Miriam Shaviv is a columnist for the Jewish Chronicle, where she was Foreign Editor and Opinion Editor between 2005-2010. She was previously Knesset correspondent and feature writer for The Jerusalem Post, Features Editor at Times Higher Education Magazine and London correspondent for Times of Israel. She is currently Director of Brainstorm Digital, a marketing agency specialising in digital campaigns for aesthetic clinics.

Jake Wallis Simons is an award-winning journalist and novelist. He is Deputy Editor for the Jewish Chronicle, a writer for the Spectator, a commentator for Sky News and a broadcaster for BBC Radio 4. Previously, as Associate Global Editor for the Daily Mail Online, he reported from all over Europe, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East; before that he was a features writer for the Sunday Telegraph and the Times. He is particularly known for his disclosures of Jeremy Corbyn’s links to extremists and conspiracy theorists, including the revelation that Mr Corbyn said British Zionists “don’t understand English irony”.