Quotes from Owen Jones

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.

A party committed to defending the economic interests of rich elites could never win by saying so.

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.

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.

Tuition fees have formed part of a full-frontal assault on the living standards of a generation battered by a housing crisis, stagnating wages and slashed services.

If only Brexit would go away. It sucks the political oxygen away from the issues we should all be discussing: like low wages, insecure jobs and the housing crisis.

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.

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.

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.

The liberation of workers from excessive work was one of the pioneering demands of the labour movement.

Grief is like wandering through a minefield, as my mother puts it: however carefully you tread, a sudden detonation can happen out of nowhere. A song played in a supermarket; an overheard phrase; someone in the distance who your mind cruelly suggests is your loved one for a fleeting moment.

Austerity and economic insecurity have collided with the scapegoating of migrants and refugees, at a time when global instability and warfare have driven millions to flee violence and persecution, a minority of whom have arrived on European shores to be met with hostility.

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.

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.

Labour's mission is to democratise Britain: but first, it must surely democratise itself.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.