Randeep Ramesh is a long-serving The Guardian journalist who has moved from reporting and editing on social affairs and global politics into the role of chief leader writer, shaping the paper’s unsigned editorials on UK and international issues.
# Guardian Roles Over more than two decades at The Guardian, Ramesh has held a sequence of senior roles, including foreign correspondent, City desk editor and social affairs editor, before becoming an investigative reporter and later chief leader writer.
As chief leader writer he helps decide how the paper takes positions on questions of economic policy, welfare, constitutional change and foreign affairs, so his work increasingly sits at the intersection of reporting, analysis and editorial line.
# Investigative Work Before moving into the leaders column, Ramesh was known for long-running Investigative Journalism projects that combined on-the-ground reporting, data work and policy analysis. He worked on the parliamentary lobbying scandals that exposed the relationships between politicians, lobbyists and private interests, a series that won Scoop of the Year and What the Papers Say Investigation of the Year.
His reporting has ranged across the UK and India, from stories on mass conversions of Dalits to Buddhism, to investigations into the Gurgaon kidney transplant racket that became part of the public record on global organ trafficking.
He has also produced a substantial body of work on the NHS, including coverage of watchdog failures, hospital scandals and tensions between central government, regulators and local services.
# Exposing Gambling As A Social Ill One of Ramesh’s most cited projects is a Guardian series on high-stakes fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs), which argued that casino-style machines were being concentrated in poorer neighbourhoods and were linked to violence, money laundering and addiction.
That series, combining news stories, video and data journalism, helped push FOBTs up the policy agenda and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in the “Exposing Britain’s Social Evils” category in 2015.
# Themes In His Writing Across his reporting and later leader writing, a few themes keep recurring. He often writes about the architecture of the modern British state – how welfare, health and tax systems distribute power and insecurity – and is particularly interested in how reforms play out for people at the sharp end rather than just in Westminster narratives.
There is also a strong thread around accountability, whether that is the accountability of private contractors running public services, regulators overseeing the NHS, or bookmakers and financial firms profiting from the vulnerabilities of poorer communities.
In more recent leader columns he has focused on the political economy of post-austerity Britain, asking where fiscal space really comes from and arguing that governments can make different choices about what counts as “affordable”.
# Roles Beyond The Guardian Ramesh is also involved in media and anti-poverty institutions beyond his day job. He serves on the board of The Guardian Foundation, which works on media literacy and journalistic development, and is a trustee of the anti-poverty charity Z2K, which supports people navigating the benefits and housing systems.
He sits on the advisory board of the University of Sheffield’s SPERI (Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute), linking day-to-day reporting with academic work on political economy.
# Education And Background Public profiles describe Ramesh as a graduate of Imperial College London and the University of Cambridge, with a postgraduate diploma in newspaper journalism from City University, reflecting a technical and analytical background before moving into reporting.
He has also worked beyond The Guardian, including earlier reporting stints such as transport correspondent work for The Independent, which helps explain his interest in regulated industries and consumer regulation.
# Why This Page Exists For a federated wiki, Randeep Ramesh is a useful anchor point for pages on Investigative Journalism, FOBTs And Social Policy, Guardian Editorial Line and Media And Political Economy. If you are building out a cluster of pages on social-policy journalism, he sits at a junction between detailed casework on the welfare and health systems and high-level arguments about what the state is for.
# Links And References
- theguardian.com 
- orwellfoundation.com
- sheffield.ac.uk
- theguardianfoundation.org
- linkedin.com
- x.com