I would reject wholeheartedly any notion of a Labour Party that is not committed to returning to power at the first opportunity. Of course that needs to be principled power. But standing on the sidelines looking for the purest ideology is a dereliction of the duty for any Labour member.

In my view, airstrikes without an effective ground force are unlikely to make any meaningful contribution to defeating Isis.

No border controls anywhere in the world are able to prevent determined criminals from crossing borders.

In the U.K., we have always had international ambitions and international responsibilities. These obviously predate the E.U.; we have been trading and doing business in Europe for centuries.

For many progressives, 2016 will go down as a year of electoral shocks and profound disappointment. In the U.S., France and many other parts of Europe, the right enters 2017 with newfound confidence while the left recoils in fear of the future, unsure how to get back on the front foot.

The key to understanding the impact of the Human Rights Act in the U.K. is to appreciate that civil liberties and human rights are not two sides of the same coin.

A no deal Brexit would be a complete failure by the government to negotiate for Britain.

Ensuring we have the best possible Brexit deal will take time, effort and huge diplomatic skill.

Significant cuts to funding for the police, for the Crown Prosecution Service, for probation etc, have put the long-term viability of our criminal justice system in doubt.

The Max Clifford case shows that when the police and prosecutors quietly hold their nerve they can succeed, whatever the public profile or popularity of the accused.

Access to our civil courts has been severely restricted by the combination of: the removal of legal aid from some cases based on their type, not their merit; a high financial threshold for the receipt of legal aid in other cases; and a failure to deliver a safety net for vulnerable individuals by the exceptional funding arrangements.

In the aftermath of the second world war, nations came together to say 'never again.' They established the United Nations and agreed a simple set of universal standards of decency for mankind to cling to: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Full access to the single market is what businesses and trade unions want.

The framework for everything I've done has been human rights. That is about protecting the vulnerable and giving people access to courts where they wouldn't otherwise have access to courts.

I don't subscribe to the view that people who are better off don't want to live in a more equal society.

I believe Britain's response to Brexit must be based on core progressive values: internationalism, cooperation, social justice and the rule of law.

Britain needs a good Brexit deal to safeguard jobs, security and trade and to build a new partnership with the E.U. Achieving this will be fiendishly difficult.

The pursuit of an extreme Brexit cannot come at the cost of peace in Northern Ireland.

When I was the director of public prosecutions between 2008 and 2013, I had staff working at the Eurojust HQ in The Hague 24/7.

Theresa May's decision to call an unnecessary general election after Article 50 was triggered was deeply irresponsible.

We cannot allow Brexit to be driven by narrow and divisive Tory ideology.

In the absence of a written constitution, we still rely far too heavily in the U.K. on unwritten and unenforceable 'constitutional conventions.'

Labour's approach is not about what is politically right, it is about what is right for the country.

From my experience both as DPP and previously as a human rights lawyer, I know that human rights and effective protection from terrorism are not incompatible. On the contrary, they go hand in hand.

The Chilcot report is damning. It exposes a litany of failures over a long period, including reliance on flawed intelligence assessments, lack of planning and insufficient foresight of obvious consequences. But the report also exposes a chilling lack of rigour and a political culture of deference.

Our five-year-old son thinks I ought to work in the local bookshop, and I can see the appeal of that.

My background is not typical of a lawyer or a DPP. My dad was a toolmaker before he retired, so he worked in a factory all his life.

I am well aware of different views across my own party and across parliament on pretty well all Brexit issues.

Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt have not been responsible. Instead they have vied in an arms race towards a more and more extreme form of Brexit. Deeper red lines, even more ludicrous promises, but absolutely no coherent or workable plan for the country.

So if you want a really effective criminal justice strategy, you don't build bigger prisons, you invest money in young kids - and you accept that it's going to take years to work through, but it's a more effective strategy.

It will be increasingly difficult to keep Scotland as a part of the U.K. I hope that doesn't happen, but everyone knows David Cameron has put that at risk.

It's really important we make the case that this is not the country of Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson. That intolerance and hatred and division is not representative of our country.

If immigration is simply seen as a numbers game, nobody will ever win that debate. The question should be: what is it we want to achieve? What do we expect of those who are arriving? What is the basic deal?

From a victim's point of view, our justice system is hardly fit for purpose. No doubt individual failings by police and prosecutors provide part of the explanation.

We have to call out terrorism for what it is, and I have always done that, and the Labour Party has always done that.

If you really probe, people are anxious about their job, anxious about their home, their children's future. Obviously it gets translated into things like immigration, but that is nothing new.

We were right to make the case for the U.K. to negotiate a comprehensive customs union with the E.U. And we are right to argue for a strong single market deal, based on common standards, protections and regulations: the right balance of rights and obligation.

I have prosecuted very serious criminals who are now serving very long jail sentences.

After 43 years of membership, exiting the E.U. was never going to be easy.

Everyone remembers where they were on 7 July 2005 when four deadly bombs ripped through the heart of London.

I was a human rights lawyer for 20 years, I believed those values of dignity, equality and non-discrimination were a given. believed the only question in my lifetime would be - how much further do we extend those values? I did not think in my lifetime we'd actually be having an argument about those values.

We will vote down a blind Brexit. This isn't about frustrating the process. It's about stopping a destructive Tory Brexit. It's about fighting for our values and about fighting for our country.

If the vote that is progressive is split then all that does is open up the path for the Brexit party and allow it to pretend it represents the majority view in this country.

Brexit is so important, it would have been neglect of duty to simply sit it out.

I keep an open mind.

I wouldn't characterise myself as a bleeding heart liberal, whatever that is.

For better or worse, when I was director of public prosecutions I had to deal with every challenge that came up, and come up with an answer. Being in opposition, you're not taking the decisions; you're saying what you would do if you were in power, and that's deeply frustrating.

Part of the reason I moved from law to politics was an increasingly profound belief that how we rebuild after the 2008 crash is going to define us for a generation.

My parents didn't have the opportunities they would have liked, but they didn't complain about that because they thought they were part of a society where the next generation would have those opportunities.

I spent five years prosecuting some of the most dangerous terrorists in this country, so it would be quite difficult for people to pin the charge of being soft on terrorism on me.