Philanthropists decide how to spend their money based on their own personal whims, rather than what is best for the social good.

Nonbelievers may welcome the collapse in British religiosity, but the decline in church attendance has meant that the chance to chat each week with other people has vanished.

Jobs have become more precarious and staff turnover has increased while union membership has plummeted, weakening workplace solidarity.

Poverty damages the educational potential of children, whether through stress or poor diet, while overcrowded, poor-quality housing has the same impact too.

University should foster imagination and creativity, enriching society in the process.

The bereaved are often treated badly. There is no statutory paid bereavement leave, with the emotionally stunned often compelled to work within days of losing a loved one.

Although economic grievances were critical in delivering the referendum result, Brexit has fomented an all-out culture war.

Everyone is entitled to change their mind when the facts do.

Who can begrudge the generosity of the wealthy, you might say. Wherever you stand on the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a tiny global elite, surely such charity should be applauded? But philanthropy is a dangerous substitution for progressive taxation.

When those with wealth and power fear that their privilege is even mildly challenged, they invariably clothe themselves in the garbs of victimhood.

The existence of billionaires should sound an alarm: they are the most extreme manifestation of wealth generated by the efforts of millions of people being funnelled into the pockets of a tiny few.

From a genuine living wage to a mass housebuilding programme and strong workers' and trade unions rights preventing a race to the bottom, our answers to the grievances that help drive anti-immigrant sentiment must be front and centre.

We are unlikely to spend our last moments regretting that we didn't spend enough of our lives chained to a desk. We may instead find ourselves rueing the time we didn't spend watching our children grow, or with our loved ones, or travelling, or on the cultural or leisure pursuits that bring us happiness.

If you are dim but have rich parents, a life of comfort, affluence and power is almost inevitable - while the bright but poor are systematically robbed of their potential.

If you've never lived outside London, and if you've always had a car, it's difficult to understand how dire bus services undermine your standard of living: from being able to get to work, meet friends in the pub, get the weekly shop or take the kids on a day out.

Thousands do benefit from love, support and comfort in their final chapter: I watched my dad slip away without pain as Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen tracks played in a warm Marie Curie hospice, surrounded by doting nurses and his family.

If you live in London, where politicians and media commentators spend most of their time, you are spoilt for transport choices - trains, an extensive underground network and a regular bus service.

From a very young age, boys are taught that real men get into fights, say demeaning things about girls and women, show extraordinary athletic prowess, avoid looking studious, don't do anything to display supposed emotional 'weakness' and prioritise competition over cooperation.

The age of mass politics is one that demands radical solutions rather than tinkering.

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.