Dawn Foster

“Reading is a pleasure, yes, but not without effort: choosing to read novels purely because they mirror your own experience is stultifying.”

“The majority of us don't do what's best for us all the time because life is complicated and busy - and creating excuses is so much easier than getting on with the business of wellbeing.”

“Decades of anti-migrant rhetoric in parliament and the press has resulted in few voters having realistic ideas of the genuine level of migration, on both a national level and in their local community.”

“We can find any number of ways to criminalise begging, but when we do so, aren't we attacking the problem from entirely the wrong angle? Banning begging or rough sleeping treats street homelessness as a lifestyle choice that can be discouraged through threats of legal action and heavy-handed policing.”

“As long as almost no new social housing is built, gross inequality will persist, and class structures will grow ever more constraining.”

“In one of my secondary schools, the single kindest thing I remember was a teacher who quietly offered to wash the uniform of a friend who was being hounded by children saying he 'stank': his mother was unemployed and couldn't always afford to take his clothes to the launderette.”

“The human cost of austerity goes far beyond the period in which a country's economy endures those methods.”

“The police have spent years pursuing Islamic extremism while too often overlooking the growing violent threat posed by the far-right.”

“For children with special educational needs to receive the help they need to thrive in education, councils need targeted funding that properly addresses the costs of including children in mainstream classrooms with support, or creating space in specialist schools.”

“Conservatives have always embraced the idea of grammar schools - that giving a top tier education to bright children from working class backgrounds provides them with the opportunities their middle class counterparts take for granted.”

“I was one of the few journalists who was quite pro-Corbyn from the beginning.”

“Many people are unable to see friends and family as often as they'd like due to the cost of rail travel.”

“If we have a right to healthcare, we should also have a right to the most fundamental of human needs: shelter.”

“The academisation of schools under New Labour helped the Conservatives bring free schools into being. They said the new model would allow enthused parents to open schools. Instead, most free schools and academies are run by large chains that can outsource their IT facilities, cleaning services and other non-teaching jobs.”

“Most people pass through the doors of a hospital as a last resort. By the time you reach a bed, you've probably made a lot of small-scale decisions that, if they didn't cause your affliction, may have exacerbated your symptoms.”

“Psychologically, it's difficult to ever shrug off the effects of extreme hardship or poverty, family bereavement, chronic ill health or the memory of violent conflict.”

“I've read enough dreary campus novels to know more than I ever wanted to about the punctured Oxbridge academic psyche, and feel as if I've been through a mid-life crisis dozens of times, purely because I've foolishly grabbed a paperback by an author I've vaguely heard of.”

“Supporting people to stay in their homes is surely a better method of reducing homelessness than acting after the fact.”

“Focusing on the gifted always leaves people behind, and portrays working-class people as a repellent hinterland that 'gifted' and 'talented' children need rescuing from.”

“If Freemasons won't be completely open about their membership, should we not say that in all cases membership is incompatible with public service? Asking public servants to either confirm they are not a member of a masonic organisation or to be open when they are won't fully excise the backroom deals or the stench of privilege.”