Kitty Ussher

Kitty Ussher

Katharine Anne "Kitty" Ussher (born 18 March 1971) is a British economist and former Labour Party politician.

After training as an economist, she was elected Member of Parliament (MP) for Burnley from 2005 until 2010, succeeding Peter Pike. She served as a minister in Gordon Brown's Government from 2007–09, mainly at the Treasury but also at the Department for Work and Pensions. She did not stand in the 2010 election instead taking a position as the chief economist of the think tank Demos. She was appointed the Director of Demos in September 2010 and wrote four pamphlets over the next year on aspects of economic and industrial policy including recommendations on how to mitigate the risks from future financial crises and which argued the recession was not caused by the UK's over-dependence on finance. On 12 August 2011 she resigned from her position at Demos and switched to being a research fellow at the Smith Institute, as well as writing on aspects of economic and industrial policy.