When children are very young you read them books that are positive to help them go to sleep. But there comes a moment when they begin to understand the difficulties of the world. They know there are problems and the books they read should reflect that not gloss over them.

I just want to put some positive stuff out there. If it works great. If it doesn't no problem.

But you see our society is still trapped in this binary black/white logic and that has had some very positive implications for our generation. It's had some very negative ones as well and one of the negative ones is that it creates enormous identity problems for people who have one black ancestor and all white ancestors for example.

People meet in bars after work all over the world and talk about the great problems of life and death and the world and politics and they don't take themselves seriously. They can do nothing else except chat about these things in bars after work.

It's true that it's within the realm of cultural politics that young people tend to work through political issues which I think is good although it's not going to solve the problems.

London in the '70s was a pretty catastrophic dump I can tell you. We had every kind of industrial trouble we had severe energy problems we were under constant terrorist attack from Irish terrorist groups who started a bombing campaign in English cities politics were fantastically polarized between left and right.

On the one hand the financial projection is on the agenda - we will see if this problem can be resolved or not. I think it is a right idea to stage a special summit which would deal with the question of priorities of European politics.

The problem of the Middle East is poverty more than politics.

I try not to spend too much time on partisan politics. Life's too short for that. I don't really believe that there have been many human problems solved by politics.

The lesson of the last year is this: foreign policy can't be managed through the politics of personality and our President would do well to take note of an observation John F. Kennedy made once he was in office - that all of the world's problems aren't his predecessor's fault.