I sneaked into an Everton match once. I'm a Liverpool supporter, but Liverpool were away, Liverpool reserves weren't playing, there wasn't even a youth match, so I took my son into an Everton match. God help me. It wasn't me.

We need an NHS with fewer managers, fewer contractors and more power (rather than choice) to patients - with the input of the real experts: healthcare professionals.

We believe that leaders should be following the masses. We only ran in leadership campaigns to get our ideas across, to use it as a platform.

I think that I was the first MP to call for the nationalisation of Northern Rock, although that is hardly surprising because I have been calling for the nationalisation of the financial sector for 30 years or more.

Just as China achieved much more than India in the realm of public health and education under an austere Communist regime, so its economic growth under a capitalist-friendly government strikes a visitor from India as nothing less than spectacular.

I'd aspired to give people a profound education - to teach them something substantial. But the data was at odds with this idea.

In literature classes, you don't learn about genes; in physics classes you don't learn about human evolution. So you get a fragmented view of the world. That makes it hard to find meaning in education.

It's so funny, you go to acting school thinking you're going to learn how to be other people, but really it taught me how to be myself. Because it's in understanding yourself deeply that you can lend yourself to another person's circumstances and another person's experience.