It is my view that our response to the Brexit vote should not have been to turn in on ourselves. At a time of grave constitutional and economic challenge for our country, it was incumbent on us to rise to this threat and ensure that the Labour party should defend the interests of our communities and not allow the Tories a free hand.
My awakening to the fight for women's votes came when I was 13, and the BBC screened a drama called 'Shoulder to Shoulder' about the suffragettes, with the great Sian Phillips as Emmeline Pankhurst. It made a huge impression on me - not just the history, but because of the debates it triggered at home.
It took LGBT activists 15 years to defeat section 28, but this is not a movement that's afraid of the long struggle. They know all progress is hard-fought, that discrimination against any individual anywhere is discrimination against all, and that the campaign for true, global equality must therefore be won one issue, case and country at a time.
The principle behind the Equal Pay Act is that if an individual woman finds a man doing similar work and being paid more she can take her employer to a tribunal and get paid equally and compensated. Sounds simple enough. But in reality this law has been hamstrung by a series of stupid loopholes that have developed over the years.
Equal constituencies' sound fair. So why is Labour so against the constituencies bill and why do we call it gerrymandering? Because, like so much Tory rhetoric, it sounds good, but if we look beyond the soundbites it becomes clear that it covers policies that promote narrow sectional interests.
By repealing the Child Poverty Act, which forced governments to take real action to tackle child poverty, this government brings a proud chapter of British history to an undignified end. In future the government will measure child poverty not by looking at whether they have any money, but by looking at their so-called 'life chances.'
What a nightmare it would be if we individually had to criminalise every single abuse of every single commodity, market or financial product. There are thousands of these and new ones being invented every day. Such an approach would have disastrous implications for regulation and policy-making. Any slide towards it must be resisted.
It has always been the case that people on out-of-work benefits have to apply for more or less any job they can reasonably be expected to take. But the operative word there is 'reasonable,' because a job that's appropriate for a single, able bodied 22-year-old man may very well not be appropriate for a single mum who can't afford childcare.