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.
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.
The age of mass politics is one that demands radical solutions rather than tinkering.
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.
If sharp-elbowed parents are no longer able to buy themselves out of state education, they are incentivised to improve their local schools.
Everyone is entitled to change their mind when the facts do.
Capitalism has proved its ability to adapt: at a time when so many younger people quite legitimately feel that the economic system doesn't work for them, big business appealing to their sense of idealism is a savvy move.
When those with wealth and power fear that their privilege is even mildly challenged, they invariably clothe themselves in the garbs of victimhood.
After the rise of Thatcherism, the smashing of the trade unions, and the post-cold war sense that any alternative to free-market capitalism was permanently discredited, you can see why the wealthy felt drunk on the sense of eternal victory.
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.
What do we value more: an economic system which privileges profit above all other considerations, or the continued existence of human civilisation as we recognise it? A reckoning is coming.
A flourishing, diverse media is essential to a functioning democracy.
Political reporting is too often trivialised, treated as a soap opera based in Westminster, rather than placed in a broader social or economic context.
All I want for 2019 is for much-loved pop stars to stop being inadvertent propagandists for mass-murdering dictatorships.
Because so many employers refuse to pay their workers a wage on which they can live - most Britons languishing below the poverty line are in work - the state has to spend billions of pounds a year on in-work benefits.
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.
Although economic grievances were critical in delivering the referendum result, Brexit has fomented an all-out culture war.
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 decision on how philanthropic money is spent is made on the whims and personal interests of the wealthy, rather than what is best.
We need global tax justice, not charitable scraps dictated by the fancies of the elite.
