At the moment we seem to be heading in the opposite direction. However you dress it up, it's pretty obvious who is being affected by the government's cuts.

I debated whether or not to pin the setting down to a particular date but in the end I decided to leave things vague. It depends how fast technology improves.

Social mobility decreased under Labour and under the current government it is reversing. The differences between the poorest and richest are returning to Victorian levels. We don't have open sewers and infant mortality rates at fifty percent but in economic terms we're getting to a level of disparity we haven't seen for a couple of hundred years. And we're getting there very quickly.

We have this sense that there's something bigger than us, above and beyond. If you take away the idea of God, you need to replace it with a shared moral code. Otherwise, everybody becomes very self-centred and materialistic.

I come from a privileged background but I worked a lot of winter seasons in the Alps and I've done lots of mundane summer jobs back in Britain where I mixed with less well off people. Maybe it comes from there but I've always felt that it's our duty to make society fairer.

New technologies are a good thing but we must consider how they will impact on us so that, when they become achievable, they aren't allowed to run amok.

At the moment we seem to be heading in the opposite direction. However you dress it up, it's pretty obvious who is being affected by the government's cuts.