We recognise that, like us, other humans have insecurities and ambitions; we fall in love and have relationships that end in heartbreak; we worry about our children's wellbeing; we say things we regret; we're occasionally kept awake by fears or worries; and we try to impress people we look up to.

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.

A society should be judged by how it treats its children. A country that fails to invest in its children is imperilling its future.

Neoliberalism has left Britain's boss classes drunk on triumphalism, paying themselves record salaries and bonuses while their workers are imprisoned by poverty and insecurity. It was never going to last.

As inspirationally tireless as hospice fundraisers are, these are services that desperately need sustainable central funding. This means addressing the social care crisis too, which has inevitable knock-on effects on palliative and end-of-life services.

But surely no company is going to launch an advertising campaign if it thinks it will lose money; therefore, by definition, any social justice-orientated marketing is driven primarily by money, not advancing the cause of human progress.

Modern capitalism is based on a myth: that thriving private entrepreneurs generate wealth through their own hard work, innovation and get-up-and-go.

Britain's end-of-life and palliative care services are a national travesty. That a public debate on this crisis is so sorely lacking has much to do with our fear of confronting dying and death.

Loneliness is devastating our mental and physical health and, at its worst, is killing us. Yet thankfully, unlike some conditions, we can easily cure it. We just need the will.

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.

Here in Britain, black people are disproportionately targeted, arrested and imprisoned for drug offences, while organised and violent crime are granted a massive source of revenue.

Britain's police force is institutionally racist. This was the judgement of the 1999 Macpherson report, and it remains the case.

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.

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.

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

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 linguists have argued that the right often uses stories to make an argument, while the left falls back on facts and statistics.

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

The market fundamentalist ideology that dominates much of the west has attempted to indoctrinate us with a simple myth: that we all rise or fall according to our individual efforts alone; that billionaires amass vast amounts of wealth because they are entrepreneurial, plucky, go-getting geniuses.

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

Britain's unions were broken and battered by Thatcherism and never recovered.

But a rejection of freedom of movement within Europe's own boundaries does not strengthen the case for accepting more migrants and refugees from outside: the reverse, in fact.

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.

Brands are increasingly flirting with the realm of politics.

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.

In the 00s, it was often claimed that political apathy had replaced political participation. Membership of political parties and electoral turnout were both said to be in irreversible decline.

A flourishing higher education sector is critical to a nation's economy and culture.

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.

In the neoliberal era, rolling back the state has in practice meant withdrawing state support and social security for the majority, but continuing vast subsidies for vested interests.

If sharp-elbowed parents are no longer able to buy themselves out of state education, they are incentivised to improve their local schools.

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.

Restoring our shared humanity isn't easy, not least because powerful interests - from media outlets to politicians - relentlessly seek to undermine it. But it is the only hope for a troubled world.

Yes, there is some evidence that migration can slightly depress wages at the bottom end of the labour market, but that's an argument for a genuine living wage, for ensuring all workers are employed on the same terms and conditions, and for extending unionisation.

Turkey's regime is fast degenerating into outright dictatorship, emboldened by the imminent ascent of Donald Trump to the most powerful position on Earth.

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.

What do we value more: an economic system which privileges profit above all other considerations, or the continued existence of human civilisation as we recognise it? A reckoning is coming.

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

My dad saw himself as part of a historic struggle for human liberation: he met my mum canvassing for the Labour party in a snowstorm in Tooting, he helped lead strikes, and recruited miners to socialism.

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.

In a society rigged in favour of landlords over tenants, to rent privately is to be deprived of security.

Almost all human beings have the capacity for empathy. Everyone has the potential to be at least troubled, or feel genuine anguish, about the suffering of other human beings.

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

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.

Increased public ownership of the economy should be structured to create more worker self-management and control.

Capitalism has proved its ability to adapt: at a time when so many younger people quite legitimately feel that the economic system doesn't work for them, big business appealing to their sense of idealism is a savvy move.

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.

Austerity is literally a matter of life and death. Unless it is stopped, lives will continue to be unnecessarily shortened.

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

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