My dad was a labourer and my mum had exactly the same job as Noel Gallagher's mum - she was a dinner lady at our local school. Everyone comes over from Ireland and they get the same jobs.

I came back from university thinking I knew all about politics and racism not knowing my dad had been one of the youngest-serving Labour councillors in the town and had refused to work in South Africa years ago because of the situation there. And he's never mentioned it - you just find out. That's a real man to me. A sleeping lion.

I didn't come into politics to change the Labour Party. I came into politics to change the country.

I think it true that you know sometimes things start to change even before a government changes and actually I think you can begin to see even the Labour machine beginning to understand that it has become over-reliant on targets and processes that local governments have been over-bossed and bullied.

I've worked as a labourer driven taxis and school buses and been a car mechanic - whatever I could do just to get by. But it does mean that I know a little bit about a lot of things.

A firm for instance that does business in many countries of the world is driven to spend an enormous amount of time labour and money in providing for translation services.

My view is that you still in order to win from the Labour perspective have to have a strong alliance with business as well as the unions. You have got to be very much in the centre ground on things like public sector reform.

Liberalism is a really old British tradition and it has a completely different attitude towards the individual and the relationship between the individual and the state than the collectivist response of Labour and particularly Old Labour does.

In individual industries where female labour pays an important role any movement advocating better wages shorter working hours etc. would not be doomed from the start because of the attitude of those women workers who are not organized.

By far the greatest part of those goods which are the objects of desire are procured by labour and they may be multiplied not in one country alone but in many almost without any assignable limit if we are disposed to bestow the labour necessary to obtain them.

Wisdom alone is true ambition's aim wisdom is the source of virtue and of fame obtained with labour for mankind employed and then when most you share it best enjoyed.