I was obsessed with Nelson Mandela. I had big posters of him in my bedroom and he became my proxy father figure. He was in jail, so I could project all sorts of things about what he would say to me.

I certainly knew the hard side of urban life, stop-and-search.

We need specific work on race equality programmes and programmes targeted at helping those who are yet to fulfil their potential.

People don't contest that I'm British as a black man, but they do contest that I'm English. Too many people are going back to an ethnocentric idea of what being English means.

I'm not going to be cowed by the rampant racism, the organised racism, that comes from parts of the alt-right.

When I was a young child and before he had left us for the U.S., my father would give me Mark Twain novels. In the characters, the weather and the context, my father must have seen many parallels to his own youth in the Caribbean in the 1930s and 40s.

You can't be in business with international development and not understand basic issues of colonialism, postcolonialism and white privilege.

A good life depends on the strength of our relationships with family, friends, neighbours, colleagues and strangers.

I think that's always something when you're working class, when you're aware of things that you haven't had; there are moments when you question yourself, definitely.

White supremacy is not confined to strange men in the Deep South who put on white cloaks, it is not confined to strange gatherings of the English Defence League.

Football is a great way for me to catch up with my sons, and to let off some steam from my professional life.

Reading international law at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London was a wonderful experience. With its incredibly diverse student population, I began to immerse myself in the ways social, legal and political forces contribute to human rights and freedoms.

Too much of the Brexit rhetoric is based on the desire to go out and re-create Empire.

We will not achieve gender equality in the workplace until we fix our system of parental leave.

The 1980s were tough for most of Britain, but nowhere more so than Tottenham.

Plenty of people are intrigued by their family history. Growing up as the son of West Indian immigrants who moved to London in the 1950s and 60s, I was especially fascinated by anecdotes about the lives of my Guyanese relatives, which seemed a million miles away from Tottenham's Broadwater Farm estate.

Prejudice is not just a personal sentiment - it can be institutional too.

My wife does all the driving.

If companies shared profits with their workers, employers and employees would have a greater mutual interest in each other's success.

We cannot have different policing for different communities. It is inherently unfair.

Music, dance, literature and the visual arts open up a rich and intensely rewarding world. It is a world that should not be the preserve of the few.

Separate but equal is a fraud.

If you're in the business of law you're in the business of representation and precedent.

People 'demand' the opportunity to gamble away money they do not have, just like people 'demand' money from loan sharks at extortionate interest rates. This is a warped, empty type of freedom, in which the powerful are free to exploit the vulnerable.

There were a lot of things I thought of doing as I was growing up, from becoming a singer to a priest to a pilot.

For me, a hoodie is like a pair of slippers or pyjamas - something comfortable and well-worn that you can wear unthinkingly. Unless, of course, you happen to be a black male.

Mum eventually graduated with a City & Guilds certificate that hung proudly on our living room wall throughout my childhood.

Stop and search is an integral cog in a racially disproportionate criminal justice system.

I'm just not convinced that the British people I know and love are interested in revolution.

The ingrained image of black men being searched by the police feeds into the collective illusion that black men everywhere need to be policed more than others.

I'm a legislator, but it's hard to legislate when my party's out of power.

I'm so bored of tribal politics. That's part of the problem. I'm so bored of it. I'm not a tribalist. That's not what turns me on.

We look around at our national politicians, we do not see national politicians who are without fault. And, actually, we see quite a lot who get very far - let's take Boris Johnson- with considerable. White. Privilege. Failure after failure after failure rewarded.

I tend not to read fiction - I'll read one novel a year during the summer - but I do read a lot of nonfiction.

When I was growing up, I wanted to be Michael Jackson. I used to sing and dance and perform with my sister at parties for 50p.

I have very eclectic tastes. I love soul and Motown; I listen to some rap - Stormzy, Tinie Tempah, Drake. I also love classical music, American country and the folk tradition. I often start the day with gospel on my way to work. The only thing I have never got into is punk.

Courts are too distant from the communities they put on trial.

Supporting Spurs is a bit like being in the Labour Party. It's a labour of love, believe me.

I grew up under Thatcher; the era of apartheid; the era of the poll tax; the era of riots. I remember Neil Kinnock was a hero.

When I make a contribution in debates and in our public life, the House wants to hear what I say. It goes quiet - it wants to know what my opinion is.

I'd always been the kind of lawyer that was attracted back to policy.

I've got a very full life beyond my career.

I'm not one of those people for which politics is my sole preoccupation.

I'm a prolific tweeter. It allows me to respond to the news of the day or comment on something Jacob Rees-Mogg has said on behalf of my constituents.

I know what to say, how to say it, how to bring profile to the issues I care about and people want to listen to me.

Fathers need to be made aware of their responsibilities - and that's up to all of us to communicate, as parents, as politicians and as members of a community.

Parenting is more than a numbers game: it's a question of whether people are equipped for the toughest job they will ever be asked to do.

Cities can be paradoxical places. In the mornings they buzz with commuters, in the evenings they come alive with diners and partygoers, at weekends the streets fill with shoppers and market traders. But amidst the hustle and bustle, even the greatest city can be a lonely place.

For even the most seasoned observers of American politics, Barack Obama is a phenomenon.

My biggest fear growing up was that I would end up in prison. That was the fate of growing numbers of my peers.