Quotes from Owen Jones

All I want for 2019 is for much-loved pop stars to stop being inadvertent propagandists for mass-murdering dictatorships.

If you are dim but have rich parents, a life of comfort, affluence and power is almost inevitable - while the bright but poor are systematically robbed of their potential.

It is easier to diagnose a crisis than to cure it, of course.

It is a bad situation, the current state of the Labour leadership, a collective failure, the collapse of strategy and vision on all sides.

If you've never lived outside London, and if you've always had a car, it's difficult to understand how dire bus services undermine your standard of living: from being able to get to work, meet friends in the pub, get the weekly shop or take the kids on a day out.

Nonbelievers may welcome the collapse in British religiosity, but the decline in church attendance has meant that the chance to chat each week with other people has vanished.

The Tories have built a system defined by insecurity - from wages to job contracts to housing to the welfare state. If they want to understand why socialism - long dead, never coming back, or so they thought - has undergone a revival, this is why.

One of the greatest own goals in modern British political history helped create one of the biggest political parties in the western world, but one committed to socialism rather than rehashed Blairite triangulation.

Political reporting is too often trivialised, treated as a soap opera based in Westminster, rather than placed in a broader social or economic context.

Private schools do confer other advantages, of course: whether it be networks, or a sense of confidence that can shade into a poisonous sense of social superiority.

Philanthropists decide how to spend their money based on their own personal whims, rather than what is best for the social good.

The decision on how philanthropic money is spent is made on the whims and personal interests of the wealthy, rather than what is best.

A huge portion of our lives involves the surrender of our freedom and personal autonomy. It is time in which we are directed by the needs and whims of others, and denied the right to make our own choices.

So much of our lives is surrendered to subordinating ourselves to the needs and whims of others, turning human beings into cash cows rather than independent, well-rounded individuals.

When those with wealth and power fear that their privilege is even mildly challenged, they invariably clothe themselves in the garbs of victimhood.

Our social model means economic growth all too often involves concentrating wealth produced by the many into the bank accounts of the few, without improving the lives of the majority.

Everyone is entitled to change their mind when the facts do.

Demonisation is the ideological backbone of an unequal society.

Britain in 2018 has the feel of a Netflix drama approaching its season finale. It's the classic 'how on earth does anyone get out of this one?' kind of cliffhanger, with all of the key protagonists confronted by their nemesis.

We need global tax justice, not charitable scraps dictated by the fancies of the elite.

Donald Trump's mini-me, Boris Johnson, is in the ascendant: the Tory crown is his to lose. But his colleagues know he's an incompetent, a man who cares only for himself, who was fired twice - by a newspaper editor and a party leader - over allegations of dishonesty.

After the rise of Thatcherism, the smashing of the trade unions, and the post-cold war sense that any alternative to free-market capitalism was permanently discredited, you can see why the wealthy felt drunk on the sense of eternal victory.

A desire for social connection is fundamentally hardwired into our psychology, and so being deprived of it has devastating mental and physical consequences. Yet we live in a society which has become ever more fragmented and atomised.

A flourishing, diverse media is essential to a functioning democracy.