I cherish the creation of public space and services, especially health, housing and the comprehensive education system which dared to give so many of us ideas 'above our station.'

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.

I came from a family where joining a union was the expected thing to do. I've always believed that the relationship between an employer and an individual worker is fundamentally unequal.

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.

You just wish sometimes that people would treat you like a human being rather than seeing your gender first and who you are second.

In the U.S. the powerful critics of austerity such as Paul Krugman and Robert Reich rightly identify the decline of 'labor' as a problem, and renewing trade unionism part of the solution. Our opportunity is to make the same case in the UK.

Britain is a textbook case of how growing inequality leads to economic crisis. The years before the crash were marked by a sharp rise in remortgaging and the growth of 0% balance transfer credit cards. By 2008 the UK had the highest ratio of household debt to GDP of any major economy.