Ordinary people who have lots of good ideas want more than a suggestion box, and they need a union to represent that thinking.

Each day more coalition MPs in seats outside the South East come out against George Osborne's regional pay cut plans, and Vince Cable now claims they are dead.

Although there's a lot of focus on the Lib Dems, we need to keep our eyes on the far right of the Tories, who I suspect will become increasingly impatient in their appetite for tax cuts, deregulation and shrinking the state even further.

When I look at my daughter, who's 24, she is much more confident than I ever was and her expectations are higher. But I worry that there is a backlash brewing against progress on equality.

I'd be happy to have regular face-to-face meetings at Downing Street with David Cameron to argue the case for alternative economic policies.

My first hero, as a teenager, was James Connolly. I remember discovering that he was a feminist, and that was an eye-opener, coming from a man of such poverty.

Washing dishes as a 17-year-old in an Oxford college and seeing the privileged lifestyles of the undergraduates there convinced me that a system that allowed luxury for the few at the expense of the many needed to be challenged.