Just as people have long believed that strengthening ties of trade improves the prospects for peace and the free exchange of ideas, Facebook friendships or Twitter followings already transcend national borders.
— Douglas Alexander
The 'Arab Spring' is the most spectacular example of the dispersal of power.
In sport, as in science, business, and diplomacy, as Scots we understand that we benefit from the deep and diverse partnerships that make up the United Kingdom.
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.
Most people understand that Lehman Brothers didn't collapse because Gordon Brown built too many schools and hospitals.
The Commonwealth is a vital and positive partnership between countries striving to develop trade relations and promote democracy and human rights, united by shared values.
The scale of the ISIS threat is not yet matched by a clarity of approach for securing their defeat.
Our responsibility is to protect people and help them into work.
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 It is rather like the way our generation came to see our grandparents' views on the Empire and colonies as outdated.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.
Politics requires the sense of possibility. Dare I say it - the audacity of hope.
Stories come and go. The challenge is to frame the questions that voters will be asking on polling day, such as who has avoided a global depression and worked here to deliver jobs.
Labour's task for government is to build consent for an outward-looking Britain as the best way to advance not just our interests, but also our values at a time of challenge, both at home and abroad.
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.
Politicians often reveal most about themselves in unguarded moments.
What matters in any campaign is that you have a strategic core that makes the judgements, decides the strategy, and can deliver.
My general approach to opposition is where the government is getting something right, we should say so. And where we disagree with them, we should say so, too.
Traditionally, diplomacy was done in an environment of information scarcity. Ambassadors would send back telegrams to foreign ministries, comfortable in the knowledge that their views of a country would be the only source of information the minister would see.
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.
As Scots, we certainly want change today, but the change the Nationalists offer is not the change we want or need.
The Nationalists peddle a misplaced cultural conceit that holds that everyone south of the Solway Firth is an austerity loving Tory.
The style of politics that Damian McBride represents has been discredited, and Labour has moved on.
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.
Politicians diminish themselves by sounding robotic.
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.
Obama better understood community organisation and peer-to-peer communication than any recent candidate, and we are applying that lesson.
Part of the reason I am so evangelical in our campaigning work is that I had an unshakeable faith in Labour values, but we needed a machine worthy of the message. I grew up with a peerless Conservative machine, with vastly superior resources.
As Development Secretary, I have seen in the developing world that climate change there is not a theory, is not a future threat: it is a contemporary crisis.
David Cameron's approach has left Britain weakened and weary because to retreat from the world is as foolish as it is futile.
Being prime minister is not a job to be performed with an eye for the exit.
It would be wrong for us to offer difference from the Conservative Party at the cost of credibility, but equally it would be wrong to offer credibility at the cost of being clear that there remain very fundamental differences.
I think politicians who suggest they are uninterested in the support of newspapers are not being straight with people.
I'm in agreement with David Miliband when he says our generation of Labour politicians are not willing to hand over the direction of the country without a serious electoral fight.
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.
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.
Scotland and England may sometimes be rivals, but by geography, we are also neighbours. By history, allies. By economics, partners. And by fate and fortune, comrades, friends and family.
Kneejerk interventionism or kneejerk isolationism is the wrong course for Britain.
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.
Of course the decision to commit British forces in Iraq was, for many MPs, a wrenching choice. However, our responsibility in the face of a growing ISIS threat is not to be paralysed by history, but to learn the correct lessons from it.
Under Ed Miliband's leadership, we are changing both our party's structures and culture.
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.
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.
What people want is a sense of a better future to come.
When I joined Labour in 1982, I didn't feel I belonged to a party born to power. My repeated experience was of bitter and repeated defeats.
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.
In this age of growing interconnectedness, we understand that turning our backs on the world is simply not an option.
A self-evidently confident politician, Cameron still suffers from a curious hollowness. Ten years after he became Conservative leader, many people still question what he actually stands for or believes in.
I do think our challenge is to balance credibility and a clear message about how we would reduce the deficit with boldness about the choices that we put before the public.
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.
