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The most prominent - and by far the most controversial - part of 'Help to Work' essentially forces people to take unpaid work placements as a condition of receiving their benefits.
We got evicted from our house in Guildford. We were chucked out and had nowhere to go. We ended up in social housing. And it was very hard for my mum. My brothers were five and three.
By creating a perception that the U.K. places a higher premium on striking commercial deals than it does on promoting and protecting human rights, our reputation in the world suffers.
Laws protecting this right - whatever the level of the minimum wage, and whatever the Government chooses to call it - are only as strong as the threat of enforcement is both real and feared.
Whatever people's backgrounds or values, a society where more and more people face a daily struggle to house, clothe and even feed themselves and their families cannot possibly be the answer.
Patients who have suffered appalling medical negligence, abused children ignored by social services, mistreated residents of care homes - they have all been given a voice by the Human Rights Act.
We need to have a system whereby, when a victim walks into a police station, she can be confident that she will be believed and that every effort will be made find evidence to support her in court.
Whether it's in Jobcentres or in Whitehall, young people are constantly coming up against a narrative that portrays them as lazy and feckless, when in reality nothing could be further from the truth.
People like to think about MPs in very crass terms: you're either an uber-loyalist babe, or you're a rebel. There isn't any grown-up room to be thoughtful. There isn't space in public debate for that.
For centuries, the courts took the view that preserving the discretion of the authorities trumped the rights of victims to hold them to account. It was because of the Human Rights Act that this began to change.
Help to Work' always felt like a singularly inappropriate name for a scheme which had the express intention of 'stepping up the pressure' on the long-term unemployed, rather than actually helping them into work.
Carving out our own role, distinct from America's, might not be easy. But we must ask ourselves: what alternative is there? Unthinking, uncritical loyalty to the U.S. under Donald Trump is a far less appealing idea.
Given that GPs are essentially a private part of our health care system, providing services independently of the rest of the health service, NHS England is supposed to take a strategic approach to co-ordinating GP practices.
While scrapping the HRA would severely curtail people's ability to seek legal redress in U.K. courts for violations of their fundamental rights, the Tories' threat to withdraw the U.K. from the ECHR are far more frightening.
To give him his credit, I never thought I'd say this, but Donald Trump was talking about the importance of investing in jobs and infrastructure and in the economies across the country, not just the main cities, and that's right.
If we were to allow the Chris Grayling and his cronies to tear up the Human Rights Act and withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights from which it is derived, we would set back the cause of victims' rights by decades.
In passing the National Minimum Wage Act in 1998, the then-Labour Government did more than just establish the legal right to a minimum wage, significant as that was. More importantly, the Act made non-compliance a criminal offence.
Allowing young people to vote for the first time while they are still at school would allow them to engage with the political process, as well as the relevant issues, with the support of teachers to help them make informed choices.
The welfare state, which grew out of post-war solidarity, has for decades been based on the principle that those who pay into the system are entitled to expect that the safety net will be there for them when they fall on hard times.
First-past-the-post builds a direct relationship between a community and their MP. Residents come together to decide who most people want as their national representative. No one has more than one vote and it has to be cast responsibly.
We have all these strong men in politics - whether it's Brazil, or the Philippines, or Trump, or Putin. They're all big men: it's let's look up to them, don't be afraid, they're looking after things. It's so fundamentally anti-democratic.
The fact of the matter is that when governments fail - as the Tories have done - to tackle the root causes of working peoples' need for welfare support, like low pay and high rents, the number of working people relying on benefits increases.
Even though I've had the odd terse word to say about Donald Trump, I still get invited to events at the U.S. embassy. I always attend, because as long as they're prepared to hear the opposite viewpoint, then I'll never miss that chance when I can.
When the Tories came to power in 2010, the ground-breaking Equality Act had just become law. But the newly appointed Equalities Minister wasted no time in systematically undermining both the Act itself and the Commission responsible for enforcing it.
Unesco can rightly be claimed as one of Britain's greatest contributions to that global architecture of peace, and for Penny Mordaunt to be willing to destroy that legacy by withdrawing Britain's membership is nothing but historical and cultural vandalism.
People don't seem to be safe inside Pentonville, and now it transpires inmates can escape. That is the final straw. If they don't have control of the place, what is the point of it being there? This was built in 1842 and is totally inappropriate for modern needs.
It's often been said that politics in Islington, in many ways, begins and ends with housing, and it's not hard to see why. Despite the borough's image of exclusivity - the stereotype that it's all Georgian squares and cappuccino bars - the reality is much more complex.
The Human Rights Act is not a terrorists' charter. It enables ordinary citizens to seek redress when the government breaches fundamental freedoms enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights such as the right to a fair trial, the right to life and free expression.
There are some very plain, very simple offences in the Fraud Act 2006 that can be applied to price manipulation. For example, there's fraud by false representation. This is aimed at people who say something misleading to line their pockets or cause financial harm to someone else.
Our courts' decisions do not permeate the public consciousness - we have no equivalent of the Brown v Board of Education ruling which outlawed racial segregation, or of Roe v Wade, which enshrined a woman's right to choose not just into law but into the public imagination as well.
Putting roadblocks in the way of legitimate strike action only increases the likelihood of more wildcat strikes, which in turn will make it that much harder for employers to address legitimate grievances, given that they'll lose the ability to negotiate with recognised union leaders.
There was a time when a certain type of Tory could have been relied on to swing from the chandeliers in defence of the rights of freeborn Britons. I suppose a lot of those Tories would have been what you might call 'one-nation Tories.' That tradition has died in the Conservative party.
Equal constituencies' sound fair. So why is Labour so against the constituencies bill and why do we call it gerrymandering? Because, like so much Tory rhetoric, it sounds good, but if we look beyond the soundbites it becomes clear that it covers policies that promote narrow sectional interests.
One of the fundamental pillars of international humanitarian law is that proper distinction should be made between military targets and civilians. That is why indiscriminate bombing, let alone the deliberate targeting of residential areas or agricultural infrastructure, is considered a war crime.
The right to strike is one of the most important safeguards working people have in this country. It's a weapon of last resort that has served throughout history as a bargaining tool which allows unions to push for recognition of ordinary workers' rights to be paid fairly and treated with dignity.
The notion of women being written out of history is as old as the Bible, but it always seems more galling when it is the history of progressive movements - such as the abolitionist campaign in Britain or the fight for African-American civil rights - in which the role of women has been diminished.
My awakening to the fight for women's votes came when I was 13, and the BBC screened a drama called 'Shoulder to Shoulder' about the suffragettes, with the great Sian Phillips as Emmeline Pankhurst. It made a huge impression on me - not just the history, but because of the debates it triggered at home.
When upmarket shops like Waitrose collect contributions for local food banks, they serve as a constant reminder to those of my constituents who are lucky enough not to have to worry about where their next meal will come from that those less fortunate than themselves are increasing in number, and suffering more than ever.
The principle behind the Equal Pay Act is that if an individual woman finds a man doing similar work and being paid more she can take her employer to a tribunal and get paid equally and compensated. Sounds simple enough. But in reality this law has been hamstrung by a series of stupid loopholes that have developed over the years.
What a nightmare it would be if we individually had to criminalise every single abuse of every single commodity, market or financial product. There are thousands of these and new ones being invented every day. Such an approach would have disastrous implications for regulation and policy-making. Any slide towards it must be resisted.
It is my view that our response to the Brexit vote should not have been to turn in on ourselves. At a time of grave constitutional and economic challenge for our country, it was incumbent on us to rise to this threat and ensure that the Labour party should defend the interests of our communities and not allow the Tories a free hand.
By repealing the Child Poverty Act, which forced governments to take real action to tackle child poverty, this government brings a proud chapter of British history to an undignified end. In future the government will measure child poverty not by looking at whether they have any money, but by looking at their so-called 'life chances.'
It has always been the case that people on out-of-work benefits have to apply for more or less any job they can reasonably be expected to take. But the operative word there is 'reasonable,' because a job that's appropriate for a single, able bodied 22-year-old man may very well not be appropriate for a single mum who can't afford childcare.
It took LGBT activists 15 years to defeat section 28, but this is not a movement that's afraid of the long struggle. They know all progress is hard-fought, that discrimination against any individual anywhere is discrimination against all, and that the campaign for true, global equality must therefore be won one issue, case and country at a time.
If I had a row with my husband, it's not going to work my saying, 'Right, if you don't do what I want, I'm going to walk out.' It doesn't work on any level. What you do is you go in and you say, 'I have a problem. You have a problem. Let's try and sort this out together.' You don't come to an agreement with people who you're falling out with badly.