Joanne Coates is a working class visual artist based in North Yorkshire. Through photography, installation, and audio, she explores rural life, hidden histories, and class inequality in the countryside. Her work asks questions about power, identity, wealth, and poverty with work rooted in lived experience across class, gender, and disability.

Participation and community are central to her practice. She is the UK House of Commons Election Artist for 2024 and the recipient of the 2024 Baltic Vasseur Arts Award for The Middle of Somewhere. In 2021, she received the Jerwood/Photoworks Award. 

Dr Mark Taylor is Senior Lecturer at the University of Sheffield. He's one of the authors of Culture Is Bad For You: Inequality in the Cultural and Creative Industries (Manchester University Press), and A Class Act: Social Mobility in the Creative Industries (Sutton Trust). 

Dr Ewan Mackenzie is a Lecturer in Work and Employment at Newcastle University. He is interested in the socio-political aspects of work (paid and unpaid) and applies sociological and critical approaches to the realities of work, employment and society. He is interested in the convergence between how work is governed and everyday work and labour, and the possibilities and necessity for more egalitarian ways in which to understand and organise working life. He has published on creative and cultural work, the politics of austerity in public and healthcare sectors, community organising, mass redundancies, and workplace bullying. 

Paul W. Fleming is the General Secretary of the performing arts and entertainment union, Equity, which has 50,000 members. Born in Birmingham, Paul was the first member of his family to attend university, studying philosophy, politics and economics at Mansfield College, Oxford. He then worked as Acting Press Secretary for the New Jersey Democratic Party, before becoming the youngest ever organiser for the Community trade union, covering the steelworks in Scunthorpe. Paul was first elected as General Secretary of Equity in 2020 and was recently re-elected for his second term with 81% of the vote.

Under his leadership, Equity has achieved historic pay rises on the West End and major increases to pay and improvements in working conditions across theatre and TV, saved vital community performance spaces from closure, reversed arts funding cuts and the union continues to hold the government to account on key issues such as Artificial Intelligence.

I've been chief theatre critic at The Times for the past five years. Before that, I was a freelance writer for the paper, covering music, books and occasionally politics. I started my career at a weekly London-based paper called West Indian World in the 1980s and went on to BBC News before going freelance.

Born in 1963, Kenny Crookston was brought up in central Scotland and has been involved in brass bands since the age of eight, a beneficiary of the free tuition readily available at the time. As an accomplished player, he played in his local brass band until the age of 18 before going on to perform for over 30 years in countless concerts, recordings and major competitions with the highly successful and Scottish Champion Whitburn Band, also leading the band’s management team for much of that time.

Having spent two decades working in engineering, a career change in 2004 saw Kenny become Editor of British Bandsman, then the world’s oldest weekly music magazine, becoming a respected commentator and critic over the following 14 years.

An uplift, in 2018, in Brass Bands England’s (BBE’s) Arts Council England funding created a new platform for executive leadership for the organisation. Kenny was subsequently appointed to the new position of CEO and, under his management, BBE’s membership has since increased by over 200% and its scope and reach have grown considerably, notably in areas of safeguarding, education outreach and event presentation. 

Kenny continues to derive great pleasure from playing in a brass band, now conducted by his wife of 35 years who is also a deputy headteacher in a secondary school and one of the world’s most respected brass band adjudicators. 

Jonny Gordon-Farleigh is a co-director of Centre for Democratic Business. He is currently leading 21st Century Social Clubs, a national programme to protect and revitalise Britain's social clubs as community assets and cultural spaces.