This is a Festival of Ideas Online event and will take place on our Crowdcast platform. It will also be live-streamed to Facebook. You can find out more about how this works in our blog.

Current politics and policy are preoccupied with dealing with the pandemic and Brexit is looming. What about the longer-term future of the city? Three of Bristol’s MPs – Thangam Debbonaire, Darren Jones and Karin Smyth – join us to discuss social care; migration and immigration; the future economy in a developing time of automation; devolution and where it should go next; the housing crisis; growing child poverty and more. We’ll be putting your questions to them as well. Chaired by Festival of Ideas director Andrew Kelly.

This is part of our Future of Democracy series which is taking place all year and will culminate in a constitutional convention, currently scheduled for November 2020.

Please note that Kerry McCarthy is no longer able to attend.

In association with/

Bristol MPs

Thangam Debbonaire became the Member of Parliament for the Bristol West constituency in May 2015, transforming a Lib-Dem majority of 11,366 into a Labour one of 5,673. In the June 2017 general election, she increased that majority substantially, to 37,336. Her vote tally of 47,213 was the second highest in the UK, and her increase in vote share of 30.3% was the biggest in the country.

She started out as a professional cellist, but for the 25 years before she became an MP her main focus was working locally, nationally and internationally to end domestic violence. She moved to Bristol to be Women’s Aid’s first ever National Children’s Officer, setting up support projects in refuges across the UK for children. She helped to increase the quality and quantity of domestic violence interventions helping women, men and children; victims, perpetrators and witnesses.

She was Shadow Minister for Culture, Media and Sport between January 2016 and June 2016; and in October 2016 she rejoined the shadow front bench when she was appointed a Labour Whip – a role she still holds. In Parliament, she chairs the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Refugees and in July 2016 initiated a cross-party inquiry into the experiences of new refugees in the UK. The report ‘Refugees Welcome?’ was published in April 2017.

During the first half of 2017, she took part in the groundbreaking and controversial BBC One documentary series Drugsland, filmed in Bristol. The documentary was broadcast in November and December 2017.

She has a number of other areas of interest including women’s equality, arts and culture, the environment and climate change, autism, and Britain’s relationship with Europe. In July 2017, she became the species champion for the Shrill Carder Bee! In Bristol, she is working to tackle the effects of the housing crisis in the city, to preserve and strengthen its cultural scene, and to promote its environmental sustainability

Darren Jones was elected as Member of Parliament for Bristol North West in 2017. Prior to this, in 2012, he won the selection to become the Labour Party candidate for Bristol North West for the 2015 General Election but was not successful. After that election, he chaired Marvin Rees’ Mayoral campaign, got involved in the Remain campaign and took a trip to Miami to campaign for Hilary Clinton. He was then re-selected as the Labour Party candidate for Bristol North West for the 2017 General Election, which he won with a 16.2% swing by securing 51% of the vote. Before becoming an MP, he was working as a consumer rights lawyer. He is a Member of the Science & Technology Select Committee and is involved in cross-party parliamentary groups such as the Parliamentary Information, Communications and Technology Forum and the All Party Parliamentary Group on Consumer Rights.

Kerry McCarthy is the Member of Parliament for Bristol East, and was first elected in 2005. Her main policy areas of interest are: sustainability and the environment, food policy, the economy, tackling poverty, international aid and trade, transport, and animal welfare. Before being elected to Parliament, she worked as a lawyer and on political campaigns.

She is a member of the Environmental Audit and the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs Select Committees, and is Chair of the Agroecology and Food Waste All-Party Parliamentary Groups. She previously served as Labour’s Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Sep 2015 – June 2016), and prior to that as Shadow Foreign Office Minister (covering human rights and climate change).

She co-founded Feeding Bristol, which recently registered as a charity and works with stakeholders across the city to alleviate hunger in our community. She is a patron of the Music Venue Trust and FoodCycle and is a Vice-Chair of a number of APPGs including Agriculture and Food for Development, Fruit and Vegetable Farmers, Music, Protect Our Waves (supported by Surfers Against Sewage) and Sport, Modern Slavery and Human Rights.

Karin Smyth

Karin Smyth was elected as Labour MP for Bristol South in May 2015. Until then she worked as an NHS manager, most recently with the NHS Bristol Clinical Commissioning Group. Previously she has run an MP’s office and been non-Executive director of an NHS Trust. Born in London to Irish parents who came to Britain in the 1950s, seeking work, she moved to Bristol in the 1990s. She graduated with a degree in Economics and Social Studies from the University of East Anglia in 1988, and subsequently studied a MBA at the University of Bath in 1995.