Steering Committee

The club is coordinated by a steering committee based in London.

Josie Appleton is convenor of the Manifesto Club (email Josie.Appleton@manifestoclub.com). She wrote the Manifesto Club reports, 'The Case Against Vetting', 'How the Child Protection Industry Stole Christmas', and 'Hobby Clubs'. She is a journalist and writer based in London. She writes regularly for spiked, and has contributed to a number of publications, including the Spectator, The Times, Times Literary Supplement and Daily Express.


Dolan Cummings coordinates Manifesto Club publications, and manages the website. He is the editorial and research director at the Institute of Ideas in London. In this capacity he has developed a strong interest in the role of ideas and intellectuals and the changing nature of the public sphere, and has written several articles and reviews on this subject. He also edits the reviews website Culture Wars, for which he writes about theatre, film and books, using the site as a whole to explore how emerging ideas are expressed and developed in the arts. He is also the editor of Debating Humanism, a collection of essays exploring different conceptions of humanist politics.

Frank Furedi is professor of sociology at University of Kent, and author of a number of books including Politics of Fear, Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?, Therapy Culture, Paranoid Parenting and Culture of Fear. During the past decade his intellectual work has been devoted towards clarifying the meaning of humanism for the twenty-first century. In Politics of Fear he argues that the politics of fear thrives in an atmosphere where the exercise of human agency is regarded with suspicion if not dread - and that the alternative to this culture of misanthropy is to set about humanising our existence.

Brendan O'Neill is the editor of spiked, ‘the sassy, irreverent UK-based online magazine of news and opinion’, in the words of the San Francisco Chronicle. His writing has been published widely on both sides of the Atlantic, including in the Spectator, the New Statesman, the Guardian, BBC News, Salon, Slate, the Christian Science Monitor, Reason and other publications. He was recently described in the Daily Telegraph as ‘one of Britain’s sharpest social commentators’. He also writes a blog for the Guardian. He was a consultant for the book Human, published by Dorling Kindersley and winner of the BMA Medical Book Award 2005, and is currently writing a book about terrorism, From Bosnia to Baghdad: How the West Spread al-Qaeda. See www.BrendanONeill.net.

James Panton is the Manifesto Club press officer (email press@manifestoclub.com). He is a tutor in politics at St John's College, Oxford. James' academic research focuses on the transformation in our understanding of democracy, politics and rights during the 20th century. He has written for the mainstream press and specialist journals, and contributes regularly to media discussion on democracy, rights, politics and education. He is co-editor of 'Science vs Superstition: the case for a new scientific enlightenment', (Policy Exchange, 2006), which challenges the common belief that scientific progress in today’s world inevitably entails an element of danger or moral uncertainty. The book develops arguments for a more positive attitude towards science and the future.

Bill Durodié is senior lecturer in risk and corporate security at Cranfield University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts, an Associate Fellow of Chatham House, and an Associate of the Royal College of Science. His main research interest is into the causes and consequences of our contemporary consciousness of risk. He is also interested in examining the erosion of expertise, the demoralisation of élites, the limitations of risk management and the growing demand to engage the public in dialogue and decision-making in relation to science.