My first hero, as a teenager, was James Connolly. I remember discovering that he was a feminist, and that was an eye-opener, coming from a man of such poverty.

Britain is a textbook case of how growing inequality leads to economic crisis. The years before the crash were marked by a sharp rise in remortgaging and the growth of 0 percent balance transfer credit cards. By 2008 the UK had the highest ratio of household debt to GDP of any major economy.

The difficulty for the Government is there's this ideological straitjacket of the market will provide, let the market rip and everything will work out... It's back to trickle-down economics, which, it's plain to see, have not delivered.

My impression is that most women public service workers have a long fuse. Precisely because they care so deeply about services, more than anyone, they still want to find a sensible and fair negotiated agreement. But their patience has run out.

If a violent act towards a woman takes place, and the inspiration for that act is violence in cinema, the inspiration for that act would have come from somewhere else if movies didn't exist.

I will confess that almost all my inspiration has come from one emotion: fear. And terrible dread of the moment when I will finally be exposed as a fraud.

We talk on principal, but act on motivation.

I don't spend afternoons practicing my guitar to get better. I do read, though, to get inspiration for my lyrics.