Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Loneliness is devastating our mental and physical health and, at its worst, is killing us. Yet thankfully, unlike some conditions, we can easily cure it. We just need the will.
We live in a country where there is a lot of animosity. If your politics is radical it antagonises. People might think I am overconfident. I look petulant when I stand my ground.
Here in Britain, black people are disproportionately targeted, arrested and imprisoned for drug offences, while organised and violent crime are granted a massive source of revenue.
For the well-heeled elites, the 90s and 00s were a non-stop party with no hangover: even after the financial crash, the fortunes of Britain's 1,000 richest families more than doubled.
In the neoliberal era, rolling back the state has in practice meant withdrawing state support and social security for the majority, but continuing vast subsidies for vested interests.
Our social model means economic growth all too often involves concentrating wealth produced by the many into the bank accounts of the few, without improving the lives of the majority.
So much of our lives is surrendered to subordinating ourselves to the needs and whims of others, turning human beings into cash cows rather than independent, well-rounded individuals.
We live in an age where in politics, people can't disagree with each other without good faith being questioned, there is always an ulterior motive - in it for the money, advance a career.
What do we value more: an economic system which privileges profit above all other considerations, or the continued existence of human civilisation as we recognise it? A reckoning is coming.
Yet we have learned from the Scottish independence vote and with Brexit what referendums do to our politics. They foster bitter divisions in ways that parliamentary elections tend not to do.
In the 00s, it was often claimed that political apathy had replaced political participation. Membership of political parties and electoral turnout were both said to be in irreversible decline.
Britain's end-of-life and palliative care services are a national travesty. That a public debate on this crisis is so sorely lacking has much to do with our fear of confronting dying and death.
If you live in London, where politicians and media commentators spend most of their time, you are spoilt for transport choices - trains, an extensive underground network and a regular bus service.
The existence of billionaires should sound an alarm: they are the most extreme manifestation of wealth generated by the efforts of millions of people being funnelled into the pockets of a tiny few.
Restoring our shared humanity isn't easy, not least because powerful interests - from media outlets to politicians - relentlessly seek to undermine it. But it is the only hope for a troubled world.
Turkey is a warning: democracy is precious but fragile. It underlines how rights and freedoms are often won at great cost and sacrifice but can be stripped away by regimes exploiting national crises.
My dad saw himself as part of a historic struggle for human liberation: he met my mum canvassing for the Labour party in a snowstorm in Tooting, he helped lead strikes, and recruited miners to socialism.
Neoliberalism has left Britain's boss classes drunk on triumphalism, paying themselves record salaries and bonuses while their workers are imprisoned by poverty and insecurity. It was never going to last.
A huge portion of our lives involves the surrender of our freedom and personal autonomy. It is time in which we are directed by the needs and whims of others, and denied the right to make our own choices.
In the 1920s prohibition in the US notoriously failed to tackle alcohol use, led to lethal forms of liquor entering the black market, fuelled organised crime and its associated violence, and wasted public money.
Having some form of structure to process and manage grief collectively surely helps: as someone put it to me, grief is like a landscape without a map. Another suggested that grief makes you a stranger to yourself.
Yes, we need action to deal with online hatred and abuse. But let's make sure there are clear safeguards, or history will repeat itself, and peaceful opponents of an unjust status quo will suffer the consequences.
One of the greatest own goals in modern British political history helped create one of the biggest political parties in the western world, but one committed to socialism rather than rehashed Blairite triangulation.
Freedom of movement in Europe has been all but abandoned as a cause in British politics. Brexit was far more about freedom of movement than our exact trading relationship with the EU, and the electorate rejected it.
Being on the left is supposed to be about unbounded optimism, a belief that what is deemed politically impossible by the 'sensible grownups' of politics can be realised, with sufficient imagination and determination.
Dieting is long-haul. Many rapid weight loss programs actually only squeeze the water out of you. Just like a wet sponge. But a good dieter maintains his or her grip on that sponge, not letting it soak up water again.
Because so many employers refuse to pay their workers a wage on which they can live - most Britons languishing below the poverty line are in work - the state has to spend billions of pounds a year on in-work benefits.
Capitalism has proved its ability to adapt: at a time when so many younger people quite legitimately feel that the economic system doesn't work for them, big business appealing to their sense of idealism is a savvy move.
David Cameron set impossible targets and relentlessly portrayed immigration as a social burden while pursuing an economic strategy that suppressed wages. It did not end well for him, nor, more importantly, for the country.
The left's mission isn't simply to grant every citizen the basic means of survival, but comfort and prosperity, too, through collective means. Yet the existence of billionaires is irreconcilable with this emancipatory project.
Britain in 2018 has the feel of a Netflix drama approaching its season finale. It's the classic 'how on earth does anyone get out of this one?' kind of cliffhanger, with all of the key protagonists confronted by their nemesis.
Democracy is a bundle of rights and freedoms wrestled from the powerful. Our rulers only surrender their power when compelled to - when the cost of resisting pressure from below becomes greater than the cost of giving ground to it.
A desire for social connection is fundamentally hardwired into our psychology, and so being deprived of it has devastating mental and physical consequences. Yet we live in a society which has become ever more fragmented and atomised.
From a genuine living wage to a mass housebuilding programme and strong workers' and trade unions rights preventing a race to the bottom, our answers to the grievances that help drive anti-immigrant sentiment must be front and centre.
But surely no company is going to launch an advertising campaign if it thinks it will lose money; therefore, by definition, any social justice-orientated marketing is driven primarily by money, not advancing the cause of human progress.
Humans should be the Earth's custodians, not its butchers. Much attention - though not enough - focuses on the existential threat posed by climate change. But humanity's mass destruction of the Earth's wildlife is all too little discussed.
Thousands do benefit from love, support and comfort in their final chapter: I watched my dad slip away without pain as Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen tracks played in a warm Marie Curie hospice, surrounded by doting nurses and his family.
After the rise of Thatcherism, the smashing of the trade unions, and the post-cold war sense that any alternative to free-market capitalism was permanently discredited, you can see why the wealthy felt drunk on the sense of eternal victory.
In the 1980s, the trade unions suffered a series of calamitous setbacks. Mass unemployment terrified workers into not risking the wrath of bosses. Repressive anti-union laws stunted the ability of workers to organise and defend their rights.
The Tories have built a system defined by insecurity - from wages to job contracts to housing to the welfare state. If they want to understand why socialism - long dead, never coming back, or so they thought - has undergone a revival, this is why.
As inspirationally tireless as hospice fundraisers are, these are services that desperately need sustainable central funding. This means addressing the social care crisis too, which has inevitable knock-on effects on palliative and end-of-life services.
My passionate belief is in the role of movements to achieve political power to transform society. In this country, we talk about the Labour movement, of which the Labour Party is the wing of government for the interests of people we were set up to champion.
Few would deny the importance of tackling online hatred or child abuse content. The internet, after all, has become a key weapon for those who disseminate and incite hatred and violence against minorities, and for those who pose a horrifying threat to children.
Yes, there is some evidence that migration can slightly depress wages at the bottom end of the labour market, but that's an argument for a genuine living wage, for ensuring all workers are employed on the same terms and conditions, and for extending unionisation.
If you've never lived outside London, and if you've always had a car, it's difficult to understand how dire bus services undermine your standard of living: from being able to get to work, meet friends in the pub, get the weekly shop or take the kids on a day out.
Donald Trump's mini-me, Boris Johnson, is in the ascendant: the Tory crown is his to lose. But his colleagues know he's an incompetent, a man who cares only for himself, who was fired twice - by a newspaper editor and a party leader - over allegations of dishonesty.
For years, media moguls and campaigns bankrolled by the rich have fed the lie that migrants are the cause of injustices propagated by the powerful: the failure to build housing, the strain on public services by cuts, the lack of secure jobs, the decline in real wages.
The passenger pigeon, the golden toad, the Caspian tiger: they are all gone, and other species hang by a thread. Our actions are not merely driving other species to extinction: we threaten our own survival, too, by destabilising ecosystems and destroying biodiversity.
But cutting the working week would free the individual, giving millions of workers more time to spend as they see fit. Human freedom should be the core aim of modern socialism. The right to work less would be an act of liberation - and a cause the left should embrace.
Who can begrudge the generosity of the wealthy, you might say. Wherever you stand on the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a tiny global elite, surely such charity should be applauded? But philanthropy is a dangerous substitution for progressive taxation.