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Sam Williamson is a writer and a former research intern at the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS). His Substack can be found here. Labour’s promise of 10,000 work experience opportunities at Sainsbury’s will do nothing to transform the reality of rising youth unemployment until the government examines its own record. The number we should be talking about instead is the rise in youth unemployment.

Cody Butler is the former Chair of the One Nation Conservative Network, a grassroots organisation dedicated to advancing pragmatic and compassionate conservatism. I am something of an outlier among Tories. To borrow from a Guardian journalist, I am no camp young fogey nursing a kitsch obsession with the Iron Lady. Quite the reverse: I am a wet to the core, with an ever-deepening fascination with Gilmour, Heseltine, Macmillan, Hailsham and that entire gallery of supposed traitors to the Party.

Chico Khan-Gandapur is a managing partner at Metrica Consulting. The Conservative Party’s current polling predicament presents one of the most analytically challenging puzzles in modern British political history. A historically unpopular Labour government, until a few weeks ago led by the joint least popular Prime Minister on record, is presiding over a stagnant economy, a cost-of-living crisis, and the aftermath of its worst council-election performance.

“Have you heard of Jolyon Maugham?” This was the unexpected question in an unexpected phone call I received just after Christmas in 2019 from an old friend. Sadly, I had. The friend was a legal colleague of Maugham’s and he and his fellow colleagues were getting increasingly concerned about Jolyon’s penchant for provocative outbursts on social media particularly on X or as it was then, Twitter. Brexit had lit a fire under his bonnet.

Dr Luke Evans MP is shadow minister for health and social care. This Government wants to tell a positive story about the NHS. Just before Wes Streeting resigned as Health Secretary in the hopes of challenging Keir Starmer for leadership of the Labour Party, he claimed that “our plan for the NHS is working.” But when you look past the headlines and soundbites, you see a manipulation of the numbers where patients are left asking questions about their access to care.

Lord Redwood is a leading commentator on the economy and modern politics, a former industrialist, founder of an investment management company and a distinguished fellow of All Souls College Oxford As someone who studies bonds and sometimes writes about them I dread the times when they become leading news items. It is usually for a bad reason.

Cllr Henry Higgins is a councillor in Hillingdon I have sat in the chair of a planning committee for seven years. I have determined thousands of applications, managed hundreds of public hearings, and steered politically sensitive decisions through committees where the pressure from developers, from residents, from officers, from members was intense and often contradictory. I know what a functioning planning system looks like from the inside.

Dr Helen Millman is a climate scientist and glaciologist based at the University of Exeter. She writes in a personal capacity. The UK’s commitment to reach net zero by 2050 was introduced by a Conservative government and supported across Parliament because the scientific evidence shows that limiting warming to 1.5°C requires global CO₂ emissions to fall rapidly this decade and reach net zero by the middle of the century.

Maurice Cousins is the campaigner director at Net Zero Watch Britain has some of the highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world. If we want to raise living standards, attract investment, rebuild our industrial base and restore some confidence in the country’s economic future, bringing down the cost of energy has to be Westminster’s top priority.

Daniel Freeman is Managing Editor of the Institute of Economic Affairs. Britain has a growth problem. British 18-year-olds today find themselves in a country which has only seen real GDP per capita rise by 7 per cent over their lifetimes. This does not compare well to previous generations. If you were born in 1960, by the time you turned 18 you would be living in a country that was 51 per cent richer. If you were born in 1970 it was 58 per cent richer. Born in 1990? 48 per cent richer. You get the idea.