DOUGLAS ALEXANDER

The Olympics is a time primarily for sport and celebration, but diplomacy does not stop at the door of the U.N., and for it to work, it must be sustained and consistent.

I take UKIP very seriously. The truth is that UKIP presents an electoral challenge to all political parties. The way to defeat UKIP is not to be a better UKIP but to be a better Labour Party.

We can have enhanced devolution - greater powers in Scotland - but within the strength, security and stability of the United Kingdom, and I think that's what most Scots want.

I think politicians who suggest they are uninterested in the support of newspapers are not being straight with people.

Obama better understood community organisation and peer-to-peer communication than any recent candidate, and we are applying that lesson.

As times change, so do the way each generation see the world. It is rather like the way our generation came to see our grandparents' views on the Empire and colonies as outdated.

What we are going to offer is not a one-way communication, but one-to-one communication.

In every generation, there are horrors that define an age and events that scar the global conscience.

David Cameron wants people to believe that his isolation in Europe is a result of Britain being outnumbered when it matters most.

Newspapers can make their own judgment in terms of who they support in a general election. Our responsibility is to make a considered judgment about where the national interest lies.

Historically, Labour has used technology as a form of control. We would use pagers and faxes to send out messages telling people what line to take. The key learning from the Obama campaign is to use technology to empower your supporters.

I'm at one with Ed Miliband in saying that it's important that people have the right to express their democratic voices and also their deep concerns about climate change because we have a planet in peril.

As shadow foreign secretary, I have been as clear in my support for the government when it does something we agree with as I am in highlighting that which we oppose.

We'll set our approach to borrowing, to spending, to taxation, in a sensible way on a sensible timescale.

Being prime minister is not a job to be performed with an eye for the exit.

Having disrupted business practices, social interactions and political campaigns, 2011 will be seen as the year that the rise of the Internet first disrupted foreign relations.

This Network Generation have grown up in a connected world. With Skype, Facebook, Twitter and the Internet, the world is at their fingertips via their smart phone. They find the idea of watching TV programmes at a time to suit the broadcaster quaint and old-fashioned.

It seems to me that the Conservatives neither recognise the scale of the living standards crisis facing British families nor offer credible answers as to how the British economy or British society can be better in the future.

The Network Generation are secure in, and proud of, their Scottishness. Unlike my generation that grew up in the '80s, they don't see our sense of identity as under threat.

In an era of billion-person countries and trillion-pound economies, we need to find ways to amplify our voice. We are most likely to be heard when the Chinese negotiate with a £10 trillion E.U., not a £1.5 trillion Britain.

If you're part of the Network Generation, you don't have to belong just to one nation. Dual identities come easily to these dual screeners. They fear a separate Scotland would be a narrowing, not a broadening, experience.

There's no doubt that what has emerged in the years after 9/11, unlike the situation in Britain, there were practices sanctioned in the U.S. that fall far below the standard of conduct that should have taken place. It is for the American system of government, in all of its branches, to address that. It is not for a British politician.

Change is a process: future is a destination. People want a sense of hope, possibility and pride about Britain.

As Scots - like everyone else - we live in an increasingly inter-connected world that demands shared solutions to shared problems. Walking away from others have never been our way. Walking with others has been our heritage and still represents our best future.

My vision for Scotland is one in which we fight together for the values we are care about: equality, fairness and social justice. Those values are the same whether you live in Dumfries or Carlisle.