• Ed Vaizey (Conservative)
• Siôn Simon (Labour)
• Lord Clement-Jones (Lib Dem)
• Marc Reeves (TheBusinessDesk.com)

Journalist, broadcaster and author, Rosie Millard will chair the debate.

The politicians on the panel are, or have until recently been, party spokespeople for arts and culture. Marc Reeves has recently advised DCMS on new models of independent news provision. They’re all busy people at the moment so pinning them down can’t have been easy.

What would you want to see them asked? How far spending cuts are going to go? Whether encouraging philanthropy is going to help anyone other than large venues? What the heck they were thinking with the Digital Economy Act?

You can watch follow the debate on CiB below and chip in with any thoughts or comments as we go along. The liveblog has a page of its own here too.

In September 2007 CiB mentioned a research project from the University of Birmingham called ACRE.  Phase two of the project has now come round and involves interviewing people born outside the UK who are working in Birmingham’s creative industries.

Here’s the blurb in full:

Do you work in the arts in Birmingham and were born outside of the UK?

We want to hear your views on the city and its creative industries for a major EU research project being undertaken by the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies (CURS) at the University of Birmingham.

Accommodating Creative Knowledge – Competitiveness of European Metropolitan Regions (ACRE) is a research project involving researchers, creative practitioners and policy-makers in 13 countries across Europe.

Aimed at examining the factors that attract highly skilled, creative people to certain locations, we are interested in obtaining the views of those who have come to work in Birmingham from overseas on the following:

• Is Birmingham a good place to live and work?
• Is Birmingham a socially inclusive and tolerant city?
• Is Birmingham a vibrant and creative city?

If you are currently living and working in Birmingham, and would like to take part in this research, please email Rosalie White, ACRE research assistant, r.c.white@bham.ac.uk, or call 0121 414 2237.

Further details on the project can be found at: http://www2.fmg.uva.nl/acre/index.html. For further information about CURS, please see: http://www.curs.bham.ac.uk/.