If one meets a powerful person - Adolf Hitler, Joe Stalin or Bill Gates - ask them five questions: 'What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?' If you cannot get rid of the people who govern you, you do not live in a democratic system.

The Marxist analysis has got nothing to do with what happened in Stalin's Russia: it's like blaming Jesus Christ for the Inquisition in Spain.

It would be as unthinkable to try to construct the Labour Party without Marx as it would to be to establish university faculties of astronomy,anthropology or psychology without permitting the study of Copernicus, Darwin or Freud, and still expect such faculties to be taken seriously

Thanks to the tabloid campaigns I have many death threats and I was very pleased to get another one the other day.

Encouragement is the most important thing in the world for young people, rather than league tables, which demoralise everyone.

I think to understand how the democratic process works is the most important thing, so people don't get frightened by it, and get put off, and give up.

I've got four lovely children, ten lovely grandchildren, and I left parliament to devote more time to politics, and I think that what is really going on in Britain is a growing sense of alienation. People don't feel anyone listens to them.