People

Clerk

Adam Smith is a journalist who covers the politics of science, an armchair scientist, a walker and an unpublishable novelist. He founded the Rational Parliament because he wants researchers, political types and everybody else to have an equal say in debate, and because our actual parliament is ripe for mockery.

Speaker of the House

Michael Brooks writes a weekly science column at New Statesman and is a consultant at New Scientist. As Speaker, Michael moderates the debate in the Rational Parliament. He demonstrated the scope of his political ambition in 2010 when he formed a political party (The Science Party), stood against Conservative MP David Tredinnick in the general election and lost his deposit.

Process Officer

Alice Casey – bio coming soon!

Rhetoric Officer

Johnny Unger is a linguist and lecturer on discourse analysis at Lancaster University. As Rhetoric Officer, Johnny illuminates how Members of the Rational Parliament use and manipulate language to make their points. In his day job, he researches how language is used in political contexts. You can read his research papers here.

Funders

The Rational Parliament has received seed funding to get itself going from the people at the Good Thinking Society. We’ll need to raise further funds to keep the project going, so read our ideas for funding and submit yours.

Artwork

Parliamentary sketches by David Lee, who is available on davidmarclee [at] yahoo [dot] co [dot] uk.

Friends

If you want to be our friend, help us to organise debates or related activity, get in touch.