Labour Party (UK) politicians

"There comes a point when a man must refuse to answer to his leader if he is also to answer to his own conscience."

"We are the masters at the moment and shall be for some considerable time."

"Let us not foist this humbug on the world."

"All my moves were designed to promote the happiness and wellbeing of my family, rather than fame."

"I know that in my public life I fell below the standards that I had set myself... I have seen what is wrong but not done enough to put it right. I have been more critical than correct. I have had opportunities of great positions in the service of the state, but I have put them aside. I know that I have not devoted myself enough to promoting the good of others."

"I feel that I've had a happy life, not a very useful life, but a happy one."

"Getting up and criticising the other fellow because he's in and you are not seems to me a futile waste of time. Especially as you know in your heart that you would be doing more or less the same thing if you were in his place."

"There are, I believe, two grounds for rejecting the EMS. The first is economic. It is based, I believe, upon a false analysis of the cause of inflation and the lack of growth, which are essential components in the creation of unemployment. The second ground is political. It is equally as important as the first, and is not simply a political aspect. Acceptance of the EMS is a first essential step towards economic and monetary union, which is at the heart of a federal Europe."

"I can tell you I'm pretty middle-class."

"I will have failed in this if in five years there are not many more people using public transport and far fewer journeys by car. It is a tall order but I want you to hold me to it."

"The Green Belt is a Labour achievement — and we mean to build on it."

"Because of the security reasons for one thing and, second, my wife doesn't like to have her hair blown about. Have you got another silly question?"

"We now have a satisfactory solution not only to coalition forces, but also to the Iraqi authorities themselves."

"This was released I think in February and so it is a great deal of fuss being made, it hasn't in fact been given public release, it was released in February ..."

"It is a fact that homelessness has continued to rise. It doubled under the previous Administration, but that does not help us. The Government intend to reduce — and probably eliminate — the homeless by 2008. [Interruption.] I am sorry, but the House knows that I have problems with English. I did not go to public school, so there is a limit to what I am able to say. Opposition Members can be such twits. We believe that we can eliminate the problem of homelessness by providing more resources, which is precisely what we are doing."

"Look I’ve got my old pledge card a bit battered and crumpled, we said we’d provide more turches churches teachers and we have. I can remember when people used to say the Japanese are better than us, the Germans are better than us, the French are better than us — well it’s great to be able to say we’re better than them. I think Mr Kennedy well we all congratulate on his baby and the Tories are you remembering what I’m remembering boom and bust negative equity, remember Mr Howard, I mean are you thinking what I’m thinking I’m remembering, it’s all a bit wonky isn’t it?"

"When I see that man on the telly — 'Are you thinking what I'm thinking?' No! I'm definitely not! I find most of it quite offensive!"

"I notice from the papers and on television today that the Tories have now brought in a new person to get people to vote Tory, and I could not help noticing that the person is named, as I saw on the website, "Mr. Tosser". I do not know which person on the Front Bench this man is modelled on, but let me tell the right hon. Gentleman that I always thought that his party was full of them, and that is why they have lost three elections."

"We have a right to say that, if it means slightly dearer coal, it is better to have slightly dearer coal than cheaper colliers. Hon. Gentlemen here must face the issue that when they vote against this Bill, they are voting for lower wages for the colliers... It is always characteristic of Liberal hypocrisy to pay lip service to these things and refuse to face the consequences that follow from them. We say that you cannot get from the already dry veins of the miners new blood to revivify the industry. There veins are shrunken white, and we are asking you [addressing himself directly to David Lloyd George] to be, for once, decent to the miners—not to pay lip service, not to say that you are very sorry for them, not to say that that you are very sorry that these accidents occur, not to say that you are very sorry for the low level of wages and for the conditions of famine which have existed in the mining districts since the War, and then to use all your Parliamentary skill, all your rhetoric, in an act of pure demagogy to expose the mining community of this country to another few years of misery."

"Any impartial examination of the British courts will show that even now, when the capitalist class of Great Britain can afford the luxury of apparent impartiality, there is evidence of bias in the courts, and when we start to challenge your position and when your property is in peril your judicial impartiality will go as it has in the past, as it has in Germany, as it has all over the world. The reason why you are so kind and benevolent at the moment is that we do not threaten you. Political toleration is a by-product of the complacency of the ruling class. When that complacency is disturbed there never was a more bloody-minded set of thugs than the British ruling class."

"The Labour Party should oppose the Government arms plan root and branch."

"If the immediate international situation is used as an excuse to get us to drop our opposition to the rearmament programme of the Government, the next phase must be that we must desist from any industrial or political action that may disturb national unity in the face of Fascist aggression. Along that road is endless retreat, and at the end of it a voluntary totalitarian State with ourselves erecting the barbed wire around. You cannot collaborate, you cannot accept the logic of collaboration on a first class issue like rearmament, and at the same time evade the implications of collaboration all along the line when the occasion demands it."

"Economics, said Mr Stanley, is 50% psychology … What we need, apparently, is not statesman but hypnotists, not scientists, but witchdoctors, not confidence born of scientific prediction of the future, but confidence created by a political Confidence Trick. There is nothing surprising in this. It is the kind of mystic Mumbo-Jumbo to which capitalism is driven when austere reason pronounces sentence of death upon it. It is the primitive recoil from reality and the burdens of reality which lies at the root of Fascist psychology."

"The fear of Hitler is to be used to frighten the workers of Britain into silence. In short Hitler is to rule Britain by proxy. If we accept the contention that the common enemy is Hitler and not the British capitalist class, then certainly Churchill is right. But it means abandonment of the class struggle and the subservience of the British workers to their own employers."

"What argument have they to persuade the young men to fight except merely in another squalid attempt to defend themselves against a redistribution of the international swag?"

"[T]he country is now more concerned with the Prime Minister winning the war than with his winning a Debate in the House of Commons. The Prime Minister wins Debate after Debate and loses battle after battle. The country is beginning to say that he fights Debates like a war and the war like a Debate."

"We have in this country five or six generals, members of other nations, Czechs, Poles and French, all of them trained in the use of these German weapons and this German technique. I know it is hurtful to our pride, but would it not be possible to put some of those men temporarily in charge in the field, until we can produce trained men of our own? ... [Y]ou have to purge the Army at the top. It will have to be a drastic purge, because the spirit of the British Army has to be regained."

"The Prime Minister must realise that in this country there is a taunt, on everyone's lips, that if Rommel had been in the British Army, he would still have been a sergeant."

"The rest of the responsibility for the early collapse of the Debate must, of course, rest with the Prime Minister himself, because his speech was unable to compete in attractiveness with the House of Commons meals, and everybody here knows what that means. If the Prime Minister will insist, on these occasions, on indulging in these turgid, wordy, dull, prosaic and almost invariably empty new chapters in his book, then he must expect something like what happened yesterday. ... I understand from my informants...that the Prime Minister was dressed in some uniform of some sort or other. I wish he would recognise that he is the civilian head of a civilian Government, and not go parading around in ridiculous uniforms."

"I have spent now more than a quarter of a century of my life in public affairs, and as I grow older I become more and more pessimistic. I started-if the House will forgive me this personal note - my career in public affairs in a small colliery town in South Wales. When I was quite a young boy my father took me down the street and showed me one or two portly and complacent looking gentlemen standing at the shop doors, and, pointing to one, he said, "Very important man. That's Councillor Jackson. He's a very important man in this town." I said, "What's the Council?" "Oh, that's the place that governs the affairs of this town," said my father. "Very important place indeed, and they are very powerful men." When I got older I said to myself, "The place to get to is the council. That's where the power is." So I worked very hard, and, in association with my fellows, when I was about 20 years of age, I got on to the council. I discovered when I got there that the power had been there, but it had just gone. So I made some inquiries, being an earnest student of social affairs, and I learned that the power had slipped down to the county council. That was as where it was, and where it had gone to. So I worked very hard again, and I got there-and it had gone from there too. Then I found out that it had come up here. So I followed it, and sure enough I found that it had been here, but I just saw its coat tails round the corner."

"By refusing the state effective intervention in the economic activities of society, the Tory is a potential Fascist element in the community. By denying Parliament a vigorous economic life he condemns it to death."

"I do not represent the big bosses at the top; I represent the people at the bottom, the individual men and women, and I say that this Regulation is the enfranchisment of the corporate society and the disfranchisment of the individual."

"I will go so far as to say that if the implications of the [Employment] White Paper are sound, there is no longer any justification for this party existing at all. We think that we represent a fundamental body of doctrine which is conducive to the welfare of the State, and which subsequently the State will have to adopt if it is to be saved. Therefore, I do not see for the life of me—and I am putting a serious proposition to the House—how a Coalition Government can pretend to be able to examine a situation of this sort and put an intelligible series of propositions to the House."

"Apparently some fire-eaters to-day have been saying "Never again must we allow ourselves to get into the same condition of military unpreparedness, so we are going to build up a vast war machine in this country in order to surround defeated Germany with a sea of peaceful tranquillity..." It looks as though the consequences of defeat will be more desirable than those of victory."

"This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at the same time."

"[For Winston Churchill], democracy is a state in which the people acquiesce in the rule of property. Democracy is an admirable institution so long as the poor continue to carry the rich on their backs. When the poor decide to change places, democracy falls into disrepute. That is why, whenever you scratch a Tory, you find a Fascist."

"Although I am not myself a devotee of bigness for bigness sake, I would rather be kept alive in the efficient if cold altruism of a large hospital than expire in a gush of warm sympathy in a small one."

"He is a man suffering from petrified adolescence....He is an extrovert, a picture thinker. He has intelligence but no intellect....He really has the values of a boy of seventeen to eighteen but he makes them sound like mature judgments by his sophisticated speech."

"I deplore the letter today in The Times from a distinguished orthopaedist, who talked about private practice as though it should be the glory of the profession. What should be the glory of the profession is that a doctor should be able to meet his patients with no financial anxiety."

"[W]e ought to take pride in the fact that, despite our financial and economic anxieties, we are still able to do the most civilised thing in the world—put the welfare of the sick in front of every other consideration."

"Why should we, who are clearing up the muddle, allow ourselves to be scared by headlines in the capitalist Press? It is the most prostituted Press in the world, most of it owned by a gang of millionaires."

"That is why no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party that inflicted those bitter experiences on me. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin. They condemned millions of first-class people to semi-starvation. Now the Tories are pouring out money in propaganda of all sorts and are hoping by this organised sustained mass suggestion to eradicate from our minds all memory of what we went through. But, I warn you young men and women, do not listen to what they are saying now. Do not listen to the seductions of Lord Woolton. He is a very good salesman. If you are selling shoddy stuff you have to be a good salesman. But I warn you they have not changed, or if they have they are slightly worse than they were."

"In 1945 and 1946 we were attacked on our housing policy by every spiv in the country—for what is Toryism except organised spivery? They wanted to let the spivs loose."

"I am keeping the mothers and children alive, but he half-starved them to death. He has the impudence to call me Minister of Disease when every single vital statistic by which the health and progress of the population can be measured is infinitely better now under the supervision of a common miner than it was then under the supervision of an aristocrat. I know if you took the vital statistics of the aristocrats they were as well off then as now. He looked after them all right. I am not concerned about that; I am concerned about our own people. Some people are worse off than before the war, of course. We meant them to be."

"I may be ready to be polite 20 years from now, when we are able to look back on 25 years of Socialist government. Then maybe I won't have enough energy to be rude. But while we have the energy to be rude let us be rude to the right people."

"[T]he kind of society which we envisage and which we shall have to live in will be a mixed society, a mixed economy, in which all the essential instruments of planning are in the hands of the State, in which the characteristic form of employment will be by the community in one form or another but where we shall have for a very long time the light cavalry of private, competitive industry."

"Never in the history of mankind have the best religious ideas found greater expression than in the programme we have carried out. “Suffer little children to come unto Me” is now not something said just from the pulpit. We have weaved it into the woof and warp of the national life."

"The language of priorities is the religion of socialism."

"I welcome this opportunity of pricking the bloated bladder of lies with the poniard of truth."

"It has been suggested, I think by the hon. Member for East Aberdeenshire (Mr. Boothby) that the most constructive suggestion he could make was to urge an early General Election and a return of a Tory Government in Britain. Why on earth should he want to prophesy what might result from a Tory Government when history has the record for him? Why read the crystal when he can read the book?"

"The liberal never knew what kind of society he intended until he had, in fact, made it. If we, on the other hand, accept the obligation of planning the direction of economic activity, then we accept with it the burden of deciding who and what must first be served. ... This is the complex answer to those who think socialism is merely a matter of appetite. On the contrary, it is the first time in human history that mankind will have accepted the obligation of free collective moral choice as the ultimate arbiter in social affairs. This, in truth, is the People's Coming of Age."

"A very large part of the population of Wales was English-speaking, and the English-speaking part had a contribution just as big, if not bigger, to make towards Welsh cultural life than the Welsh-speaking part. A great deal of the literature of which Welshmen were proud and a great deal of the poetry for which this generation would be noted had been written in English by Welshmen."

"There is only one hope for mankind, and that hope still remains in this little island. It is from here that we tell the world where to go and how to go there, but we must not follow behind the anarchy of American competitive capitalism which is unable to restrain itself at all, as is seen in the stockpiling that is now going on, and which denies to the economy of Great Britain even the means of carrying on our civil production."

"There is only one hope for mankind — and that is democratic Socialism."

"[I]t is seriously suggested that before this nation has shown its capacity to manage democratic institutions peacefully we should allow it to rearm. I say to America and the people of the world that we are not yet feeling safe enough to allow another German rearmament to take place."

"The Communist Party is the sworn inveterate enemy of the Socialist and Democratic Parties. When it associates with them, it does so as a preliminary to destroying them. There is an old German aphorism which says: "To cast an enemy out it is first necessary to embrace him." That is what the Communists mean when they ask for co-operation and alliance with the Socialists... The Communist does not look upon a Socialist as an ally in a common cause. He looks upon him as a dupe, as a temporary convenience, and as something to be thrust ruthlessly to one side when he has served his purpose."

"I am not anti-American...but I do not believe that the American nation has the experience, sagacity, or the self-restraint necessary for world leadership at this time. They are engaged in the most tremendous rearmament programme the world has ever seen, and I cannot see any sense in it, and no one has yet tried to put any sense in it. ... When are we going to have some sense of national pride and tell the United States that she cannot have Great Britain on any terms? The Americans would understand us. They like plain speaking. Why do we not speak plainly to them?"

"Now that we are engaged once more in policy-making it is essential that we should keep clear before us that one of the central principles of Socialism is the substitution of public for private ownership. There is no way round this."

"[L]ife would indeed be easy if it were always clear what our duty is. Usually there is a conflict of duties as there is of loyalties. In order to serve one you often have to abandon the others. I remember a man saying to me during the last war that he had no use for rebels. Then I asked him how he would describe a German living in Germany and working for the defeat of the Nazis? Judged by conventional standards, the man was a rebel and a traitor. But judged in the wider context of humanity he was a hero. All you can really say here is that a man ought not to betray his first loyalty. The fact is that few people do. The problem is one of deciding which is the first loyalty from among a number of competing ones. And the higher the intelligence, the wider the knowledge, the keener the imagination, then the more loyalties there will be competing for our allegiance, and of course, the deeper the spiritual struggle involved in sorting them out."

"We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run down."

"For the Jew, the immediacy of his remote past is an intimate reality. He is living among places whose names are enshrined in his racial literature and they make sweet music to his ears. From Dan to Beersheba, he can now make a journey – Nazareth, Galilee, Jerusalem, all these and so many more belong to him in a special sense, for they whisper in his blood, and evoke memories of a time that was, before he was compelled to seek shelter in reluctant lands. When therefore the Arab says that the Jew should find a home anywhere except in Palestine he asks something the Jew cannot concede without mutilating his racial personality beyond endurance. It is no answer to say that many centuries have passed into history since the Jew was at home in Palestine. If he had been permitted the security of a safe home elsewhere, the answer might do. But, as we know, it was not so."

"It is not necessary to spend time in formal greetings. Our presence is itself sufficient to show our support for the Chinese people’s revolution. As Mr Attlee has already said, the Labour movement’s reaction to the Chinese Revolution followed the example it set after the first world war when it rallied to the support of the Russian Revolution. It follows naturally that the struggle of the British workers in their own country against the forces of capitalism causes them to sympathise immediately with the struggles of the workers in other countries."

"The day of imperial power is over. We are ashamed of our imperial past in Great Britain, and you have a lot to be ashamed of, too."

"I know that the right kind of leader for the Labour Party is a kind of desiccated calculating-machine who must not in any way permit himself to be swayed by indignation. If he sees suffering, privation or injustice, he must not allow it to move him, for that would be evidence of the lack of proper education or of absence of self-control. He must speak in calm and objective accents and talk about a dying child in the same way as he would about the pieces inside an internal combustion engine."

"Damn it all, you can't have the crown of thorns and the thirty pieces of silver."

"If the Labour Party is not going to be a Socialist Party, I don't want to lead it."

"Nasser's a thug. He needs to be taught a lesson."

"Bevan described the proposal for a free trade market for Europe as a "will-of-the-wisp" which they were expected to spend their time following in Westminster. The whole idea was purely a nineteenth-century conception."

"I could quote almost all the ultimatums given by Hitler to countries that he invaded where he used exactly the same kind of language as the Prime Minister used the other day. The same language was used to Norway. ... We have only to substitute Egypt for Norway, because what did the right hon. Gentleman say? He said that he expected the Egyptian Government to peacefully permit the re-occupation of bases on the [Suez] Canal by the British Forces, and if they resisted they would be overcome with all necessary force. That is exactly what he said. Quite honestly, this is the language of the bully. There is no semblance of legal justification behind it."

"We say that Great Britain has always stood for civilised principles, and for humanity and justice. How do we answer now, when we drop bombs on helpless people? [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh."] Yes, when we drop bombs. How do we answer now at whatever judgment seat any hon. Member likes to mention? A nation more powerful than us may drop even worse bombs on British cities. How answer that? With bombs? Bombs with bombs? That is the bankruptcy of statesmanship. The world has travelled that way in my own lifetime twice. We dare not travel that way again, because this time there will be no return."

"Sir Anthony Eden has been pretending that he is now invading Egypt in order to strengthen the United Nations. Every burglar of course could say the same thing, he could argue that he was entering the house in order to train the police. So, if Sir Anthony Eden is sincere in what he is saying, and he may be, he may be, then if he is sincere in what he is saying then he is too stupid to be a prime minister."

"The social furniture of modern society is so complicated and fragile that it cannot support the jackboot. We cannot run the processes of modern society by attempting to impose our will upon nations by armed force. If we have not learned that we have learned nothing."

"I have never been able to reconcile the obscene conduct of the Russian Communists under Stalin—the assassinations, tortures, imprisonments and the impounding of helpless people in camps—with their philosophy, and I have never understood how the Russians could do so. The only explanation is that it is not part of their Communism at all, but of Byzantinism."

"I do not take the view that Great Britain is a second-class Power. On the contrary, I take the view that this country is a depository of probably more concentrated experience and skill than any other country in the world."

"The great Powers of the world today as they look at the armaments they have built up, find themselves hopelessly frustrated. If that be the case, what is the use of speaking about first-class, second-class and third-class Powers? That is surely the wrong language to use. It does not comply with contemporary reality. What we have to seek is new ways of being great, new modes of pioneering, new fashions of thought, new means of inspiring and igniting the minds of mankind. We can do so."

"The collective psychology of the Moslem states is definitely repulsive to me. It is so morbid and wildly irrational that I am conscious of an abiding sense of unease when I am in one of them."

"[The Common Market is not] a blueprint for European prosperity and stability. ...[it is] the result of a political malaise following upon the failure of Socialists to use the sovereign power of their Parliaments to plan their economic life. ... Socialists cannot at one and the same time call for economic planning and accept the verdict of free competition, no matter how extensive the area it covers. The jungle is not made more acceptable just because it is almost limitless."

"I knew this morning that I was going to make a speech that would offend, and even hurt, many of my friends. I know that you are deeply convinced that the action you suggest is the most effective way of influencing international affairs. I am deeply convinced that you are wrong. It is therefore not a question of who is in favour of the hydrogen bomb, but a question of what is the most effective way of getting the damn thing destroyed. It is the most difficult of all problems facing mankind. But if you carry this resolution and follow out all its implications — and do not run away from it — you will send a British Foreign Secretary, whoever he may be, naked into the conference chamber. ... And you call that statesmanship? I call it an emotional spasm."

"Just consider, all the little nations running for shelter here and there, one running to Russia and another to the United States. In that situation before anything else would happen, the world will have been polarised between the Soviet Union and the United States. It is against that negative polarisation we have been fighting for years. We want to have the opportunity to interpose between these two giants a moderating, modifying and mitigating diplomacy."

"[I]f as a nation we had decided we would repudiate on ethical and moral grounds the hydrogen bomb, we would then have to repudiate all the alliances based upon the possession of the hydrogen bomb by all the other allies. ... Those who desire that Great Britain should have no allies, and only Russia should have allies, are enemies of Great Britain and, not only that, they are enemies of the working class movement. We are only able to have an influence on the rest of the world if we have friends in the rest of the world."

"Unless we plan our resources purposefully, unless we are prepared to accept the disciplines that are necessary, we shall not be able to meet the challenge of the Communist world. As the years go by, and the people see us languishing behind, trying to prevent the evils of inflation by industrial stagnation, trying all the time to catch up with things because we have not acted soon enough—when they see the Communist world, planned, organised, publicly-owned and flaunting its achievements to the rest of the world—they will come to be educated by what they will experience. They will realise that Western democracy is falling behind in the race because it is not prepared to read intelligently the lessons of the twentieth century."

"This so-called affluent society is an ugly society still. It is a vulgar society. It is a meretricious society. It is a society in which priorities have gone all wrong."

"The challenge is going to come from Russia. The challenge is not going to come from the United States. The challenge is not going to come from West Germany nor from France. The challenge is going to come from those countries who, however wrong they may be – and I think they are wrong in many fundamental respects – nevertheless are at long last being able to reap the material fruits of economic planning and of public ownership. ... Our main case is and must remain that in a modern complex society it is impossible to get rational order by leaving things to private economic adventure. Therefore I am a Socialist. I believe in public ownership."

"The issue therefore in a capitalist democracy resolves itself into this: either poverty will use democracy to win the struggle against property, or property, in fear of poverty, will destroy democracy."

"If freedom is to be saved and enlarged, poverty must be ended. There is no other solution."

"The function of parliamentary democracy, under universal franchise, historically considered, is to expose wealth-privilege to the attack of the people. It is a sword pointed at the heart of property-power. The arena where the issues are joined is Parliament."

"No serious student who studies the history of the last half century can deny the ferment of ideas associated with the names of Marx, Engels and Lenin. Their effectiveness in arming the minds of working-class leaders all over the world with intellectual weapons showed that their teaching had an organic relationship with the political and social realities of their time."

"In his management of delicate parliamentary situations Mr. Baldwin was more subtle than is Mr. Churchill. In 1929, when the General Election returned a stronger but still a minority parliamentary Labour Party, Mr. Baldwin did what he had done so successfully in 1924. He sat down and waited. “Give them a chance,” he said, knowing well this was precisely what they didn’t have! Mr. Baldwin was a past master in the use of political inertia. He waited for Mr. MacDonald to weaken his Government by policies which offered a series of rhetorical gestures in place of effective action. Then, when the time came, he struck with remorseless and deadly precision. Because of his restraint and apparent laziness, Mr. Churchill called Mr. Baldwin a “power miser”. But this was a superficial appreciation of the subtlety of Baldwin’s mind. I rate him very high indeed in the ranks of Conservative Prime Ministers. It is true that he presided over a period of capitalist decline in Britain. But there was no capitalist way of preventing the decline. The most that can be said against Mr. Baldwin is that being a Conservative he could not get out of his economic dilemma by applying Socialist policies. In contrast with Baldwin, MacDonald was a pitiful strategist. Instead of putting forward bold and imaginative proposals to deal with the economic and financial crisis he waited like Micawber for “something to turn up”. It was eventually Mr. Baldwin who turned up by kicking Mr. MacDonald into the Premiership of a so-called National Government in which MacDonald was the ignominious prisoner of a Conservative majority. In 1930, Mr. MacDonald, the alleged enemy of capitalism, was waiting anxiously for capitalism to solve its own crisis, and therefore rescue him from his embarrassments."

"Freedom is the by-product of economic surplus."

"Man must first live before he can live abundantly."

"A free people will always refuse to put up with preventable poverty. If freedom is to be saved and enlarged, poverty must be ended. There is no other solution. The problem of how to prevent these three forces from coming into head-on collision is the principal study of the more politically conscious Conservative leaders. How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the twentieth century."

"It is pertinent here to point to the different conditions under which contemporary revolutions of the East have to be carried out as distinct from those of the Americas in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the latter case Investment flowed freely from Europe to America, and along with the investment went skilled artisans of all kinds. It is true America did not have a large peasant population, but this was a further advantage. It was an empty country and it was filled by waves of migrants from Europe; many coming from backward European countries, but the advanced nations also made their contribution. Much of the machinery reaching America took the form of involuntary gifts, for the workings of the capitalist system produced a series of crises accompanied by bankruptcies which left much of the exported capital equipment unencumbered by subsequent financial claims. To this Europe added two wars partly financed by forced sales of European assets in America."

"The technical achievements of the past hundred years have produced a type of society different from any that has ever before existed, posing novel problems for mankind. As I said at the beginning of this chapter, it has changed the character of the adaptions the individual has to make to his environment. His is now a straggle with society and not with nature. The vicissitudes that now afflict him come from what he has done in association with other men, and not from a physical relationship with the forces of nature. The division of labour into which he is born weaves his own life into a series of interdependencies involving not only his own personal surroundings, but moving in everwidening circles until they encompass most parts of the earth. Modem industrial society is no longer a multiplication of a number of simple self-sufficient social groupings, each able to detach itself from the others without damage to itself. It is multicellular, not unicellular. Each part is connected as though by an infinite variety of nerves with all the others, so that separation is now a mutilation. It is similar to a physical organism, but with this difference: that it has no head and therefore no mechanism with which to receive and co-ordinate the vibrations. This is so, not only between nations, but within each nation of the laissez-faire type, because such a philosophy by its very nature rejects the propriety of an a priori principle. There is no way of saying how far such a society has realised the intentions of its architects, because there was no architect and no intention. There is only an emergent. Science works for predictability: capitalist society is profoundly unscientific. It proceeds upon no hypotheses, because that would imply an order of values."

"There are many reasons why capitalist society does not command the assent of the masses. There is to begin with the sense of injustice arising from gross inequalities. This is a fertile source of discontent and will always render capitalist society unstable. But I do not consider this by itself as fatal to the existing order. There have been inequalities throughout the history of mankind, but they have not always proved incompatible with a certain degree of social stability. Complete equality is a motive that has never moved large masses for any decisive length of time. It has inspired sects and special Orders but it does not appear to be a condition congenial to normal living. There are probably causes deep in the human psyche to explain this, but they lie outside the province of this book. A sense of injustice does not derive solely from the existence of inequality. It arises from the belief that the inequality is capricious, unsanctioned by usage and, most important of all, senseless."

"The fact must be faced that Europe will never return to the practices, conventions and principles of pre-war. There is not only political paralysis in Western Europe; there is a profound lack of confidence in conventional values; and this is true for all social classes. This is accompanied by a deep spiritual malaise arising from a prolonged hesitancy to choose between a number of proffered alternatives. It is probably true that Western Europe would have gone Socialist after the war if Soviet behaviour had not given it too grim a visage. Soviet Communism and Socialism are not yet sufficiently distinguished in many minds. The large Communist votes in Western Europe, especially in France and Italy, are evidence that millions of men and women do not believe that competitive private enterprise has any future; at least of a sort that would commend itself to them. It is extremely doubtful whether the Communist vote is a vote for Communism. It is partly a protest vote and partly a demand for Democratic Socialism after the fashion of the first five years of the British Labour Government."

"A free health service is pure Socialism and as such it is opposed to the hedonism of capitalist society."

"A free Health Service is a triumphant example of the superiority of collective action and public initiative applied to a segment of society where commercial principles are seen at their worst."

"Democratic Socialism is not a middle way between capitalism and Communism. If it were merely that, it would be doomed to failure from the start. It cannot live by borrowed vitality. Its driving power must derive from its own principles and the energy released by them. It is based on the conviction that free men can use free institutions to solve the social and economic problems of the day, if they are given a chance to do so."

"The British constitution, with its adult suffrage, exposes all rights and privileges, properties and powers, to the popular will. The only checks are those that arise from a sense of justice and social propriety."

"The conversion of an industry to public ownership is only the first step towards Socialism. It is an all-important step, for without it the conditions of further progress are not established. One important consequence is a shift of power that resolves the conflict between public and private claims. The danger of the State machine being manipulated by private vested interests is thus reduced."

"The emergence of modern industry, with its danger of de-personalisation of the worker, challenges the vitality of democratic principles. In the societies of the West, industrial democracy is the counterpart of political freedom. Liberty and responsibility march together. They must be joined together in the workshop as in the legislative Assembly. Only when this is accomplished shall we have the foundations of a buoyant and stable civilisation."

"The spiv has entered into modern literature not only as a by-product of a rationing system. He is the modern equivalent of the smuggler. He is the prototype of the evader of taxes. All this occasions the bitterest resentment among those citizens whose social situation forces them to pay in full. The consequences from a Socialist point of view of what really amounts to a penalisation of the honest and of those whose job does not permit evasion is exceedingly serious. The power and prosperity of tax evaders thwarts one of the main aims of Socialism: the establishment of just, social relationships."

"In times of crisis the Conservative Party invariably attacks State expenditure on the social services so as to relieve the burden on property. The Socialist Party, on the other hand, rushes to the defence of State spending: their supporters are the poor and defenceless who most need it."

"The introduction of Italian labour into the mines is not a solution. It is merely an escape from present headaches and a precursor of worse ones to come. In our crowded island no one should pretend that a shortage of labour in a particular industry is solved by bringing workers in from abroad. The problem is one of mal-distribution of our own labour force, and this, in its turn, is the consequence of a capital and wages policy that obeys no long term purposive intention."

"There is no evidence to show that the Soviet Union wants a trial of strength."

"The political systems of the totalitarian nations might remain fixed for an indefinite time, if they could prevent the intrusion of modern industrial methods. But they are reaching out for these, and to the extent that they adopt them, they start the same chain of events that led to the growth of political democracy in the West. The only political system consistent with the needs of a modern industrial community is democracy. ... When you train workers to make the blueprints of modern industrial machines, to interpret the blueprints, make and work the machines, you are digging the grave of political dictatorship."

"Mankind is not born with an insatiable appetite for political liberty. This is the coping stone on the structure of progress, not its base. If political liberty and the institutions which enshrine it were the spontaneous imperatives of the human spirit, our task would be much easier. But they are earth-bound and time bound. The pulse of progress beats differently for different parts of the world, and if we are to understand what is happening around us and act intelligently about it, we must recognise that fact and realise that once we stood where they now stand."

"We should try to avoid new causes of tension, such as the rearming of Western Germany."

"That so many people suffer from preventable privation, whilst others enjoy privileges and material advantages that do not on any reasonable reckoning flow from personal accomplishments, is evidence of dangerous social instability."

"It must now be accepted by all thoughtful citizens that the social and economic consequence of the rearmament programme is only a special instance of a general case. If full employment is accepted as an aim to be ensued, and not only given lip service to, then We have left the automatism of the competitive capitalist system behind us, and deliberate selection and choice at the communal level must take its place. A pool of unemployment is the necessary accompaniment of selection by the price mechanism. It is the shock absorber of the capitalist system. The pool decreases or increases in obedience to the ebb and flow of economic activity, and the unemployed are crucified on the cross of the competitive price mechanism. Security of employment and the competitive society are a contradiction in terms. To promise full employment is to promise the transition from the capitalist system to one where we choose consciously to order the pattern of production and consumption; and the principles we employ in the doing of this must commend themselves to the wishes of a free electorate."

"We could manage to survive without money changers and stockbrokers. We should find it harder to do without miners, steel workers and those who cultivate the land."

"The spectacle therefore afforded us by the United States is one of technical brilliance and social blindness."

"Soon, if we are not more prudent, millions of people will be watching each other starve to death through expensive television sets."

"Without free expression of opinion and the means to ensure it a democracy dies."

"Not even the apparently enlightened principle of the ‘greatest good for the greatest number’ can excuse indifference to individual suffering. There is no test for progress other than its impact on the individual."

"I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction."

"Listening to a speech by Chamberlain is like paying a visit to Woolworth's: everything in its place and nothing above sixpence."

"Lloyd George was a bigger man than Churchill, and one of the biggest things about Churchill was that he knew it."

"No society can legitimately call itself civilised if a sick person is denied aid because of lack of means."

"Society becomes more wholesome, more serene, and spiritually healthier, if it knows that its citizens have at the back of their consciousness the knowledge that not only themselves, but all their fellows, have access, when ill, to the best that medical care can provide."

"Gaitskell wants to make capitalism work better – but with controls. That’s what makes him so dangerous. He wants capitalism to go on existing – but without the prizes which capitalism earns for itself. Of course this is impossible. It cannot work."

"There can be no immaculate conception of socialism."

"I stuffed their mouths with gold."

"The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with the faith to fight for it."

"His personality and service to the public, for the good, as he saw it, for them, have been quite outstanding. He was a brilliant personality, a wonderful speaker. His writing was such that you felt bound to put him in the class of the intellectual rather than merely the expanded product of the working class. Everybody who has read his book, In Place of Fear, will agree, I think, with that statement. The constant oratory with which he was able to hold in spell—I would not say that it was equal to, but certainly it was in the region of, the spell which could be cast by Mr. Winston Churchill in another place—was quite unique."

"Bevan was a very remarkable individual. He was a brilliant orator and debater. He proved himself during the Labour Government to be a most capable administrator and during the last few years he had matured as a statesman. His death is a great loss to the Labour and socialist movement. Although we did not always agree I had great admiration and affection for him."

"He was a great and imaginative parliamentarian. His death has deprived public life of a warm and rewarding personality. His friends in all parties will mourn his passing."

"The tool of Marxist analysis that Bevan employed to underpin his criticism of the social and economic system attracted many followers but he was too much of a romantic and poet to believe that the aridities of Marxism, especially as distorted by Stalin, could be a cure for our ills. In personal relations Nye emanated great charm and conversation with him was a delight. The talk bubbed and his flashing intelligence touched what he said with vividness so that new insights seemed to pour from him. At his best on the public platform or in the House of Commons he was magic. He could lift an audience so that they shared with him new heights of understanding and awareness; he could fell his enemies – and sometimes disconcert his friends – with a single devastating phrase, and disarm opponents with a droll wit if the mood was on him."

"I say today that unless the right hon. Gentleman changes his policy and methods and moves without the slightest delay, he will be as great a curse to this country in time of peace, as he was a squalid nuisance in time of war."

"The Socialists dilate upon the National Insurance Scheme, Family Allowances, improved education, welfare foods, food subsidies, and so forth. They point to the benefits flowing to the people from these schemes and particularly to the housewives and children... All these schemes were devised and set in motion in days before the Socialists came to office. They all date from the National Coalition Government of which I was the head. I have worked at national insurance schemes almost all my life and am responsible for several of the largest measures ever passed. The main principles of the new Health Schemes were hammered out in the days of the Coalition Government, before the party and personal malignancy of Mr Bevan plunged health policy into its present confusion."

"[H]e has chosen the very moment of bringing the National Health Service into being to speak of at least half of the British nation as “lower than vermin” and to give vent to the “burning hatred” by which his mind is seared. We speak of the Minister of Health, but ought we not rather to say the Minister of Disease? For is not morbid hatred a form of mental and moral disease and indeed a highly infectious form?"

"He excelled as a critic, but, in contrast to Ernest Bevin, creative thought at that time was not his strongest characteristic. He would present any number of difficulties to any proposition which came from official sources, but seldom put forward any constructive proposals of a practical character. ... Aneurin Bevan's speech [to the Trades Union Congress at Brighton in 1933] was typical of him as he was at that time—well-phrased, fluent, tricky, and entirely unconvincing. Bevan was a politician by instinct and temperament and he rightly concentrated his main activities in that sphere. In my experience he exercised a negligible influence on trade union policy and action. How different from Ernest Bevin!"

"The P.M. [Winston Churchill] received, very formally, a Labour Deputation about Greece. He insisted on my having them all seated in the Cabinet Room before he came up from luncheon so that he might avoid shaking hands with Aneurin Bevan."

"He was, in sympathy, the fellow countryman of any man of any nation throughout the world, ever ready to defend that man, whatever his race, his colour, or his creed, and demand for him equality of rights with all his fellow beings on earth. He hated suffering. He hated inequality. He hated injustice. He hated domination, however and by whomsoever exercised. But, above all, he hated hypocrisy. Aneurin Bevan's supreme qualities were superb, unflinching moral courage, deep sincerity, and complete selflessness. That was his supreme strength. ... There was nothing mean or petty about Aneurin Bevan. He was upright; he was downright; he was forthright. Statesman, administrator, Parliamentarian, orator, incomparable advocate for the weak and the suffering and for justice everywhere, he was, at the same time, a true, sincere, lovable friend, whose memory every one of us will long cherish."

"The overwhelming impression that remains is of a man of size, a man whose intellect was capacious, lively and illuminating, a man whose emotions were strong and human, a man who believed greatly in his country and who believed also, which is rare these days, in the power of ideas, a man who strove to retain the predominance of politics over economics or mass-psychology. For this, in the end, is what we owe to politicians like him. A democracy cannot survive healthily without the example of individual leaders who dare all as individuals and leave, long after their failures are forgotten, the imprint of a great human being."

"He was, I believe, the most principled great political leader of the century in the sense that to sustain and apply his principles in practice was the motive power of his life, the passion that absorbed him while others were engaged in the darker corners of the political workshop. … Aneurin Bevan, I believe, did more than any other man of his time to keep alive democratic socialism as the most adventurous, ambitious, intelligent, civilised and truly liberal of modern doctrines. This, the triumph of his whole life and personality, was the greatest of his achievements."

"There are extraordinary parallels between Nye and Adolf Hitler. They are demagogues of exactly the same sort. ... If Nye were out of the Party, the main Tory propaganda for the next Election would be killed, whereas, if the Executive failed to carry his expulsion, the Tories would assert that Bevan is indispensable and the main master of the Party."

"Easily the most eloquent and impressive speaker in the House of Commons, he was a tower of strength to us in opposition. But he was also quite outstanding as a Minister in the Labour Government and in particular will always be remembered as the architect of the National Health Service. ... Whether one thinks of him as an orator of fire and conviction, a brilliant and formidable advocate, as a witty and urbane companion, or as a cultured and warm-hearted friend, he was above all a man of force and power, a man of strong and independent mind, a man of compelling and magnetic personality, a man who counted—a big man."

"Aneurin Bevan, who so eloquently expressed the aspirations of so many Labour men and women, will always be remembered by all who fight for the aims of socialism."

"In Place of Fear, which Bevan wrote in the white heat of his resignation, exhibits a broad-minded tolerance and intellectual imagination quite foreign to many of his disciples. At the same time he was too impatient of reality."

"Nye Bevan was a formidable negotiator. ... [H]e could spot a point or detect a flaw in an argument without waiting for a speaker to finish. He would purr or pounce according to his mood. If a suggestion was unacceptable to him, he would say so at once, never using the comforting formula that "the matter would be considered" when he really meant he rejected it. I do not remember any occasion when he said one thing and meant another—this was part of the trouble at certain moments."

"Bevan was petulant and vain, but he was on the frontier of being a great man, and he was certainly a great talker and a considerable wit. To shut oneself off from any concourse with him was like forgoing the opportunity to talk to Fox or Disraeli."

"Nye is asleep next door. Later today he will be taken home to Wales. Tomorrow he will be cremated in keeping with his known views. He was never a hypocrite. No falsity must touch him once he is no longer available to defend his views. He was not a cold-blooded rationalist. He was no calculating machine. He was a great humanist whose religion lay in loving his fellow men and trying to serve them... He knelt reverently in respect to a friend or friend's faith, but he never pretended to be anything other than what he was, a humanist."

"I am much grieved to learn of the death of Aneurin Bevan. He was a colleague with me on the back benches in the House of Commons for many years before the war and a real personal friend. He was a great and courageous fighter for what he believed to be right and was respected by members of all parties. He was a great parliamentarian."

"He was the most hated—if also the most idolized—politician of his time. … [I]n five and a half years at the Ministry of Health under Attlee he was to prove himself a great constructive pioneer. He was unusual, almost unique, in the labour movement in combining strong socialist principles with rare creative gifts of practical statesmanship. No less than his fellow-countryman, David Lloyd George, he was to prove himself an artist in the uses of power. … He remains, perhaps, the most attractive figure the British socialist movement has produced in its eighty-odd years of fitful life."

"Nye Bevan dies at 4.15 in the afternoon. I regret the loss of this splendid coloured figure and a great parliamentarian and patriot. When I was once being scolded for being malicious in my descriptions of people, Nye protested, "Harold is not malicious at all, He is the angel of pity.""

"He is more of an extremist and more of an internationalist than the average Labour M.P., and it is the combination of this with his working-class origin that makes him an interesting and unusual figure... Bevan thinks and feels as a working man. He knows how the scales are weighted against anyone with less than £5 a week... But he is remarkably free – some of his adversaries would say dangerously free – from any feeling of personal grievance against society. He shows no signs of ordinary class consciousness. He seems equally at home in all kinds of company. It is difficult to imagine anyone less impressed by social status or less inclined to put on airs with subordinates... He has the temperament that used to be called "mercurial" – a temperament capable of sudden low spirits but not of settled pessimism. His boisterous manner sometimes gives casual observers the impression that he is not serious and his warmest admirers do not claim that punctuality is his strong point. But in fact he has a huge capacity for work... He does not have the suspicion of "cleverness" and anaesthesia to the arts which are generally regarded as the mark of a practical man. Those who have worked with him in a journalistic capacity have remarked with pleasure and astonishment that here at last is a politician who knows that literature exists and will even hold up work for five minutes to discuss a point of style."

"Nye devoted his life to peoples of all classes, colours, and creeds. He was at all time a fearless advocate for what he believed to be right and just. He did not hesitate to challenge authority even though he was often subjected to misrepresentation and abuse. His colourful personality, deep social conscience, and brilliant oratory enlivened the British democratic scene. His place in the Labour movement can never adequately be filled."

"That the parties are so coy in speaking about health is mainly down to Nye Bevan. He made the NHS sacred and untouchable. He may have freed the patient from fear of medical bills, but he has locked the politician in perennial dread of change."

"He had a characteristic not common among politicians and perhaps especially unusual in the self-taught man: he was never satisfied with a debating argument or a particular train of reasoning unless he could relate it to some general principle and inform his contentions with the light which that general principle shed. For a series of years I took part in housing debates where Bevan intervened, and at times I broke a pygmy lance or two against his shield. ... The same thing was to be noticed in all Bevan's interventions: a subject had to be large, it had to have large bearings, it had (if necessary) to be given large bearings, before he could interest himself in it and feel at home with it."

"Those who heard Aneurin Bevan command the House of Commons, in his great days, with an eloquence surpassed, if at all, only by Churchill, are reminded by the biographer's quotations how strangely similar those two antagonistic orators were. Their marvellous and often unexpected vocabulary was that of the self-educated; their oratory often approached, and sometimes crossed, the bounds of intemperance; and they were capable of descent from flights of true imagination to depths of bathos. Bevan's style belonged, like Churchill's, to a more spacious parliamentary and political era, already past before he died."

"He was profoundly committed in his attitude to human beings and society, he was empirical about arrangements and institutions. This, I think, would have shown if he had become Prime Minister. What a voice and vision would then have dominated the life of Britain! How many dark places would have been illuminated, how many doubts and dangers would have been dispelled. Our problems would not have been waved away by a magician's wand overnight; but the attempt to solve them would have been rendered meaningful and more exciting. And I believe would have been solved. Wherever our proper realistic level in the modern world lies, Nye would have seen it, and could have led us there. We would have gone eyes open, tails up, ready to make it not a retreat but a triumph. ... The first task of political leadership is to get men to lift up their hearts. Churchill did it in 1940. Weizmann did it time and time again. Nye would have done it for Britain today."

"A man who was good in the essential sense of the word and that is the goodness of abounding charity."

"Millions of trade unionists will mourn the loss of Aneurin Bevan, a man who brought exceptional gifts of imagination and eloquence, courage and vigour into the service of the Labour movement."

"We come here now in our smart clothes and our pretty hats, but it was not like that when I first heard him speak up here in the thirties. Those are the days that we shall remember him most and we shall think of him as the great man who stuck up for the poor."

"His friends, and his opponents equally, will remember him not only for his eloquence and passion, his humour, the deep affection he inspired, but perhaps most of all for a sense of vision unrivalled in his generation."

"Though he was lazy, he would have been a good Prime Minister, with a rolling sweep of history and a deep love of his country. Unlike Wedgwood Benn, sometimes ridiculously compared to him, he was sensible and willing to make compromises, as he did with the doctors and dentists to get their co-operation in the National Health Service. Nye talked hot air about seizing “the commanding heights of the economy”...but he was too pragmatic to be a keen nationalizer."

"I do not desire to give myself any fresh political label. Though the formation of the Union of Democratic Control it has been possible for me to work in close co-operation with several of your leaders and this joint effort on the part of the Labour members and radicals is having I think a very beneficial effect. I do not desire to alienate myself from any of my former political associates but rather to endeavour to urge them along the same path which I myself am treading."

"It is the intention of His Majesty's Government to lay on the table of both Houses of Parliament every treaty, when signed, for a period of 21 days, after which the treaty will be ratified and published and circulated in the Treaty Series. In the case of important treaties, the Government will, of course, take an opportunity of submitting them to the House for discussion within this period. But, as the Government cannot take upon itself to decide what may be considered important or unimportant, if there is a formal demand for discussion forwarded through the usual channels from the Opposition or any other party, time will be found for the discussion of the Treaty in question."

"Resolutions expressing Parliamentary approval of every Treaty before ratification would be a very cumbersome form of procedure and would burden the House with a lot of unnecessary business. The absence of disapproval may be accepted as sanction, and publicity and opportunity for discussion and criticism are the really material and valuable elements which henceforth will be introduced."

"When war is declared, Truth is the first casualty. books.google"

"The object of this volume is not to cast fresh blame on authorities and individuals, nor is it to expose one nation more than another to accusations of deceit."

"Falsehood is a recognized and extremely useful weapon in warfare, and every country uses it quite deliberately to deceive its own people, to attract neutrals, and to mislead the enemy. The ignorant and innocent masses in each country are unaware at the time that they are being misled, and when it is all over only here and there are the falsehoods discovered and exposed. As it is all past history and the desired effect has been produced by the stories and statements, no one troubles to investigate the facts and establish the truth."

"Lying, as we all know, does not take place only in war-time. Man, it has been said, is not "a veridical animal," but his habit of lying is not nearly so extraordinary as his amazing readiness to believe. It is, indeed, because of human credulity that lies flourish. But in war-time the authoritative organization of lying is not sufficiently recognized. The deception of whole peoples is not a matter which can be lightly regarded. A useful purpose can therefore be served in the interval of so-called peace by a warning which people can examine with dispassionate calm, that the authorities in each country do, and indeed must, resort to this practice in order, first, to justify themselves by depicting the enemy as an undiluted criminal; and secondly, to inflame popular passion sufficiently to secure recruits for the continuance of the struggle. They cannot afford to tell the truth. In some cases it must be admitted that at the moment they do not know what the truth is."

"People must never be allowed to become despondent; so victories must be exaggerated and defeats, if not concealed, at any rate minimized, and the stimulus of indignation , horror, and hatred must be assiduously and continuously pumped into the public mind by means of "propaganda.""

"The use of the weapon of falsehood is more necessary in a country where military conscription is not the law of the land than in countries where the manhood of the nation is automatically drafted into the Army, Navy, or Air Service. The public can be worked up emotionally by sham ideals. A sort of collective hysteria spreads and rises until finally it gets the better of sober people and reputable newspapers."

"A Government which has decided on embarking on the hazardous and terrible enterprise of war must at the outset present a one-sided case in justification of its action, and cannot afford to admit in any particular whatever the smallest degree of right or reason on the part of the people it has made up its mind to fight. Facts must be distorted, relevant circumstances concealed, and a picture presented which by its crude colouring will persuade the ignorant people that their Government is blameless, their cause is righteous, and that the indisputable wickedness of the enemy has been proved beyond question. A moment's reflection would tell any reasonable person that such obvious bias cannot possibly represent the truth. But the moment's reflection is not allowed; lies are circulated with great rapidity. The unthinking mass accept them and by their excitement sway the rest. The amount of rubbish and humbug that pass under the name of patriotism in war-time in all countries is sufficient to make decent people blush when they are subsequently disillusioned."

"At the outset the solemn asseverations of monarchs and leading statesmen in each nation that they did not want war must be placed on a par with the declarations of men who pour paraffin about a house knowing they are continually striking matches and yet assert they do not want a conflagration. This form of self-deception, which involved the deception of others, is fundamentally dishonest."

"War being established as a recognized institution to be resorted to when Governments quarrel, the people are more or less prepared. They quite willingly delude themselves in order to justify their own actions. They are anxious to find an excuse for displaying their patriotism, or they are disposed to seize the opportunity for the excitement and new life of adventure which war opens out to them. So there is a sort of national wink, everyone goes forward, and the individual, in his turn, takes up lying as a patriotic duty. In the low standard of morality which prevails in war-time, such a practice appears almost innocent."

"In calm retrospect we can appreciate better the disastrous effects of the poison of falsehood, whether officially, semi-officially, or privately manufactured. It has been rightly said that the injection of the poison of hatred into men's minds by means of falsehood is a greater evil in war-time than the actual loss of life. The defilement of the human soul is worse than the destruction of the human body. A fuller realization of this is essential."

"Another effect of the continual appearance of false and biased statement and the absorption of the lie atmosphere is that deeds of real valour, heroism, and physical endurance and genuine cases of inevitable torture and suffering are contaminated and desecrated; the wonderful comradeship of the battlefield becomes almost polluted. Lying tongues cannot speak of deeds of sacrifice to show their beauty or value. So it is that the praise bestowed on heroism by Government and Press always jars, more especially when, as is generally the case with the latter, it is accompanied by cheap and vulgar sentimentality. That is why one instinctively wishes the real heroes to remain unrecognized, so that their record may not be smirched by cynical tongues and pens so well versed in falsehood."

"When war reaches such dimensions as to involve the whole nation, and when the people at its conclusion find they have gained nothing but only observe widespread calamity around them, they are inclined to become more sceptical and desire to investigate the foundations of the arguments which inspired their patriotism, inflamed their passions, and prepared them to offer the supreme sacrifice. They are curious to know why the ostensible objects for which they fought have none of them been attained, more especially if they are the victors."

"When the generation that has known war is still alive, it is well that they should be given chapter and verse with regard to some of the best-known cries, catchwords, and exhortations by which they were so greatly influenced. As a warning, therefore, this collection is made. It constitutes only the exposure of a few samples. To cover the whole ground would be impossible."

"There is the concealment of truth, which has to be resorted to so as to prevent anything to the credit of the enemy reaching the public. A war correspondent who mentioned some chivalrous act that a German had done to an Englishman during an action received a rebuking telegram from his employer: "Don't want to hear about any good Germans"; and Sir Philip Gibbs, in Realities of War, says: "At the close of the day the Germans acted with chivalry, which I was not allowed to tell at the time.""

"In Vienna an enterprising firm supplied atrocity photographs with blanks for the headings so that they might be used for propaganda purposes by either side."

"Atrocity lies were the most popular of all, especially in this country and America; no war can be without them. Slander of the enemy is esteemed a patriotic duty. An English soldier wrote (The Times, September 15, 1914): "The stories in our papers are only exceptions. There are people like them in every army." But at the earliest possible moment stories of the maltreatment of prisoners have to be circulated deliberately in order to prevent surrenders. This is done, of course, on both sides. Whereas naturally each side tries to treat its prisoners as well as possible so as to attract others. The repetition of a single instance of cruelty and its exaggeration can be distorted into a prevailing habit on the part of the enemy."

"Contempt for the enemy, if illustrated, can prove to be an unwise form of falsehood. There was a time when German soldiers were popularly represented cringing, with their arms in the air and crying "Kamerad," until it occurred to Press and propaganda authorities that people were asking why, if this was the sort of material we were fighting against, had we not wiped them off the field in a few weeks."

"A good deal depends on the quality of the lie. You must have intellectual lies for intellectual people and crude lies for popular consumption, but if your popular lies are too blatant and your more intellectual section are shocked and see through them, they may (and indeed they did) begin to be suspicious as to whether they were not being hoodwinked too. Nevertheless, the inmates of colleges are just as credulous as the inmates of the slums."

"The narrowest patriotism could be made to appear noble, the foulest accusations could be represented as an indignant outburst of humanitarianism, and the meanest and most vindictive aims falsely disguised as idealism. Everything was legitimate which could make the soldiers go on fighting."

"War is fought in this fog of falsehood, a great deal of it undiscovered and accepted as truth. The fog arises from fear and is fed by panic. Any attempt to doubt or deny even the most fantastic story has to be condemned at once as unpatriotic, if not traitorous. This allows a free field for the rapid spread of lies. If they were only used to deceive the enemy in the game of war it would not be worth troubling about. But, as the purpose of most of them is to fan indignation and induce the flower of the country's youth to be ready to make the supreme sacrifice, it becomes a serious matter. Exposure, therefore, may be useful, even when the struggle is over, in order to show up the fraud, hypocrisy, and humbug on which all war rests, and the blatant and vulgar devices which have been used for so long to prevent the poor ignorant people from realizing the true meaning of war."

"It must be admitted that many people were conscious and willing dupes. But many more were unconscious and were sincere in their patriotic zeal. Finding now that elaborately and carefully staged deceptions were practised on them, they feel a resentment which has not only served to open their eyes but may induce them to make their children keep their eyes open when next the bugle sounds."

"Between nations, where the consequences are vital, where the destiny of countries and provinces hangs in the balance, the lives and fortunes of millions are affected and civilization itself is menaced, the most upright men honestly believe that there is no depth of duplicity to which they may not legitimately stoop. They have got to do it. The thing cannot go on without the help of lies. This is no plea that lies should not be used in war-time, but a demonstration of how lies must be used in war-time. If the truth were told from the outset, there would be no reason and no will for war. Anyone declaring the truth: "Whether you are right or wrong, whether you win or lose, in no circumstances can war help you or your country," would find himself in gaol very quickly. In war-time, failure to lie is negligence, the doubting of a lie a misdemeanour, the declaration of the truth a crime."

"When the people of one country understand how the people in another country are duped, like themselves, in war-time, they will be more disposed to sympathize with them as victims than condemn them as criminal, because they will understand that their crime only consisted in obedience to the dictates of authority and acceptance of what their Government and Press represented to them as the truth."

"There is nothing sensational in the way of revelations contained in these pages. All the cases mentioned are well known to those who were in authority, less well known to those primarily affected, and unknown, unfortunately, to the millions who fell. Although only a small part of the vast field of falsehood is covered, it may suffice to show how the unsuspecting innocence of the masses in all countries was ruthlessly and systematically exploited."

"There are some who object to war because of its immorality, there are some who shrink from the arbitrament of arms because of its increased cruelty and barbarity; there are a growing number who protest against this method, at the outset known to be unsuccessful, of attempting to settle international disputes because of its imbecility and futility. But there is not a living soul in any country who does not deeply resent having his passions roused, his indignation inflamed, his patriotism exploited, and his highest ideals desecrated by concealment, subterfuge, fraud, falsehood, trickery, and deliberate lying on the part of those in whom he is taught to repose confidence and to whom he is enjoined to pay respect."

"None of the heroes prepared for suffering and sacrifice, none of the common herd ready for service and obedience, will be inclined to listen to the call of their country once they discover the polluted sources from whence that call proceeds and recognize the monstrous finger of falsehood which beckons them to the battlefield."

"In my opinion, any man who can afford to buy a newspaper should not be allowed to own one."

"Morality and expediency coincide more than the cynics allow."

"In politics, being ridiculous is more damaging than being extreme."

"The proposition that Muslims are welcome in Britain if, and only if, they stop behaving like Muslims is a doctrine which is incompatible with the principles that guide a free society."

"Not only was it wrong for us to deal superficially with what Europe involved but we've paid the price ever since, because every time there's a crisis in Europe, people say with some justification, "Well, we wouldn't have been part of this if we'd really known the implications." Joining the European Community did involve significant loss of sovereignty but by telling the British people that was not involved I think the rest of the argument was prejudiced for the next thirty years."

"Diversity was the encouragement of people to live together in harmony despite their differences and rejoice in the differences rather than deplore them."

"Roy Hattersley...returned to the smoke of battle in Westminster where he at once began to work actively for Callaghan. He called in Roy Jenkins's room to tell him ... Roy Hattersley told him why. His growing lack of sympathy with Jenkins's political position was reinforced by Jenkins's recent television broadcast saying that more than 60 per cent of national income devoted to public expenditure would lead to tyranny – quite the opposite of what Tawney and Crosland had written and Hattersley himself believed. Hattersley was supporting Callaghan for fear of ‘splitting the vote’ and letting Foot in."

"Until Roy Hattersley said he would shoot himself if I became prime minister, I had not been able to see any possible advantage in standing."

"You cannot just have a socialist revolution in Norwood and nowhere else."

"There is now a desperate need for a London-wide left caucus of those interested in the GLC and local councils so that we can compare and discuss what is happening in each borough."

"I feel a degree of regret that Marshall did not push on and say 'Abolish the GLC', because I think it would be a major saving and would have released massive resources for more productive use."

"The H-block protest is part of the struggle to bring about a free, united Ireland. They have my support, and they have the support of the majority of the Labour Party rank and file. I have been consistently in favour of withdrawal from Ireland and to get away from the idea that it is some sort of campaign against terrorism. It is in fact the last colonial war."

"I can't think of a more appalling contrast between this wedding beanfeast and what is happening in Ireland."

"Everyone is bisexual. Almost everyone has the sexual potential for anything."

"Nobody supports what happened last Saturday in London. But what about stopping it happening? As long as we are in Ireland, people will be letting off bombs in London. I can see that we are a colonial power holding down a colony. For the rest of the time violence will recur again and again as long as we are in Ireland. People in Northern Ireland see themselves as subject peoples. If they were just criminals or psychopaths they could be crushed. But they have a motive force which they think is good."

"What Britain has done for the Irish nation is, although is spread over 800 years, worse than what Hitler did to the Jews. The difference is that one was compacted into a short period of time"

"He asked to see me again. I think he wants me for my body."

"The next election will bring an influx of over 120 new MPs who will be overwhelmingly on the Left."

"There are other people whose fear is if you bring down South Africa there will be a communist regime takeover - and that's a risk I'm prepared to see. I would much rather see South Africa under a communist regime than under the present one if that's the choice I'm faced with."

"I take a much more pragmatic view than many people on the Left about working with Neil Kinnock. Kinnock represents the best vehicle possible for achieving socialism now."

"Nothing could have been greater than the pride of serving this city. I do not believe — I am sure I speak for my colleagues on all sides — nothing else that happens to us in our lives will be as rewarding and fulfilling as the years that we have spent in this building."

"What a squalid and irresponsible little profession it is. Nothing prepares you for how bad Fleet Street really is until it craps on you from a great height."

"The British judiciary is one of the most corrupt in the world because of politically active judges."

"If Voting Changed Anything They'd Abolish It"

"I'm not in favour of the army, I'm in favour of replacing it with armed workers' brigades to defend the factories."

"I urge everybody to stay inside the Labour Party and fight to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again. There must now be a serious question over whether Frank can hope to beat Steven Norris on May 4 when Londoners will widely perceive the Labour nomination to have been stolen. The lesson of Wales is that our voters will not be taken for granted. A Labour campaign that was dead in the water from day one will limp on to polling day and never allow us to get on to the real issues that matter to Londoners, such as transport, unemployment and crime. In the interests of uniting the Labour party, I hope Frank Dobson will consider his position over the next few days. He must decide whether he is willing to accept this tainted result or stand down in the interests of Labour and London. Over the last six months Londoners have had to listen to politicians. Now it is time for politicians to listen to Londoners, and I shall be saying nothing further until I have had a chance to listen to Londoners."

"The IMF and World Bank are still appalling, and now the World Trade Organisation too. All over the world people die unnecessarily because of the international financial system. Every year the international financial system kills more people than World War II. But at least Hitler was mad."

"As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted 14 years ago..."

"Only some ghastly dehumanised moron would want to get rid of the Routemaster."

"George Bush is just about everything that is repellent in politics... You have got this super-patriotic hawk who was a coward when his country was actually involved in a war and has the most venal and corrupt administration since President Harding in the 20s. He is not a legitimate president... This really is a completely unsupportable government and I look forward to it being overthrown as much as I looked forward to Saddam Hussein being overthrown."

"Some US journalist came up to me and said: 'How can you say this about President Bush?' Well, I think what I said then was quite mild. I actually think that Bush is the greatest threat to life on this planet that we've most probably ever seen. The policies he is initiating will doom us to extinction."

"The American agenda is sweeping everything before it, and although it's not perfect, the EU is better on environmental issues. It's a less rapacious form of capitalism."

"I just long for the day I wake up and find that the Saudi royal family are swinging from lampposts and that they've got a proper government that represents the people of Saudi Arabia."

"When you see someone trying to manoeuvre it round the school gates you have to think, you are a complete idiot."

"Oliver Finegold: Mr Livingstone, Evening Standard. How did it ... Ken Livingstone: Oh, how awful for you. Finegold: How did tonight go? Livingstone: Have you thought of having treatment? Finegold: How did tonight go? Livingstone: Have you thought of having treatment? Finegold: Was it a good party? What does it mean for you? Livingstone: What did you do before? Were you a German war criminal? Finegold: No, I'm Jewish. I wasn't a German war criminal. Livingstone: Ah … right. Finegold: I'm actually quite offended by that. So, how did tonight go? Livingstone: Well you might be, but actually you are just like a concentration camp guard. You're just doing it 'cause you're paid to, aren't you? Finegold: Great. I've you on record for that. So how did tonight go? Livingstone: It's nothing to do with you because your paper is a load of scumbags. Finegold: "How did tonight go?" Livingstone: It's reactionary bigots ... Finegold: I'm a journalist. I'm doing my job. Livingstone: … and who supported fascism. Finegold: I'm only asking for a simple comment. I'm only asking for a comment. Livingstone: Well, work for a paper that isn't ... Finegold: I'm only asking for a comment. Livingstone: … that had a record of supporting fascism. Finegold: You've accused me ..."

"It may very well be offensive, and that is a matter of personal judgment, but it was not racist. I have been through several media firestorms and I have taken the view that if I made a mistake I apologise. But I am not going to apologise if I don't think I have done anything wrong. It would be easy to buy off media pressure by lying but I am not going to do it."

"When reporters say to me I'm only doing this because it's my job... that's the same abdication of moral responsibility at the thin end of the wedge that in its most extreme and horrific version ends up with others being prepared to stand as a concentration camp guard. You are responsible for your own choices in this life. I have always been, so are reporters."

"Racism is a uniquely reactionary ideology, used to justify the greatest crimes in history — the slave trade, the extermination of all original inhabitants of the Caribbean, the elimination of every native inhabitant of Tasmania, apartheid. The Holocaust was the ultimate, "industrialised" expression of racist barbarity. Racism serves as the cutting edge of the most reactionary movements. An ideology that starts by declaring one human being inferior to another is the slope whose end is at Auschwitz. That is why I detest racism."

"To avoid manufactured misunderstandings, the policies of Israeli governments are not analogous to Nazism. They do not aim at the systematic extermination of the Palestinian people, in the way Nazism sought the annihilation of the Jews."

"Today the Israeli government continues seizures of Palestinian land for settlements, military incursions into surrounding countries and denial of the right of Palestinians expelled by terror to return. Ariel Sharon, Israel's prime minister, is a war criminal who should be in prison, not in office. Israel's own Kahan commission found that Sharon shared responsibility for the Sabra and Shatila massacres."

"All racist and anti-semitic attacks must be stamped out. However, the reality is that the great bulk of racist attacks in Europe today are on black people, Asians and Muslims — and they are the primary targets of the extreme right. For 20 years Israeli governments have attempted to portray anyone who forcefully criticises the policies of Israel as anti-semitic. The truth is the opposite: the same universal human values that recognise the Holocaust as the greatest racist crime of the 20th century require condemnation of the policies of successive Israeli governments — not on the absurd grounds that they are Nazi or equivalent to the Holocaust, but because ethnic cleansing, discrimination and terror are immoral. They are also fuelling anger and violence across the world. For a mayor of London not to speak out against such injustice would not only be wrong — but would also ignore the threat it poses to the security of all Londoners."

"You can't expect to work for the Daily Mail group and have the rest of society treat with you respect as a useful member of society, because you are not."

"I want to say one thing specifically to the world today. This was not a terrorist attack against the mighty and the powerful. It was not aimed at presidents or prime ministers. It was aimed at ordinary, working-class Londoners — black and white, Muslim and Christian, Hindu and Jew, young and old — indiscriminate attempt to slaughter, irrespective of any considerations for age, for caste, for religion or whatever. That isn't an ideology, it isn't even a perverted faith, it is just indiscriminate attempt at mass murder — and we know what the objective is. They seek to divide Londoners. They seek to turn Londoners against each other."

"Finally, I wish to speak, through you, directly to those who came to London today to take life. I know that you personally do not fear to give your own life in exchange for taking others — that is why you are so dangerous. But I know you do fear that you may fail in your long-term objective to destroy our free society, and I can show you why you will fail. In the days that follow look at our airports, look at our sea ports and look at our railway stations, and even after your cowardly attack, you will see that people from the rest of Britain, people from around the world will arrive in London to become Londoners and to fulfill their dreams and achieve their potential. They choose to come to London, as so many have come before because they come to be free, they come to live the life they choose, they come to be able to be themselves. They flee you because you tell them how they should live. They don't want that and nothing you do, however many of us you kill, will stop that flight to our cities where freedom is strong and where people can live in harmony with one another. Whatever you do, however many you kill, you will fail."

"In this city 300 languages are spoken and the people that speak them live side by side in harmony. This city typifies what I believe is the future of the human race and a future where we grow together and we share and we learn from each other."

"I want finally to thank Londoners for their solidarity. There are some places in the world where such an incident would have unleashed internal strife and physical violence. London has stood together, we haven’t had any problems of the sort you might see in other parts of the world and I think it says everything about what is right about this city."

"If you go back a couple of hundred years to when the European cities really started to grow and peasants left the land to seek their future in the cities there was a saying that “city air makes you free” and the people who have come to London all races, creeds and colours have come for that. This is a city that you can be yourself as long as you don’t harm anyone else. You can live your life as you chose to do rather than as somebody else tells you to do. It is a city in which you can achieve your potential. That, I think, is our strength and that is what the bombers seek to destroy. They fear that freedom, they fear a world in which the individual makes their own life choices and their own moral value judgements and that is what they seek to snuff out. But they will fail."

"Perhaps if they're not happy here they can go back to Iran and try their luck with ayatollahs, if they don't like the planning regime or my approach."

"It would actually be quite nice if the American ambassador in Britain could pay the charge that everybody else is paying and not actually try and skive out of it like some chiselling little crook."

"One thing that Chairman Mao did was to end the appalling foot binding of women. That alone justifies the Mao Tse-tung era."

"To take such generous contracts and screw them up so dramatically must suggest that these are the most probably the worst business people ever assembled in one place to run anything. … the civil servants were taken to the cleaners and on the face of it you still end up with a £750 million overspend based on your mismanagement of them. I think they should be sacked, hung drawn and quartered, thrown out of the country and the whole thing (the London Underground) returned to public ownership. I saw that they (Metronet management) wanted to talk to the Mayor about this — wasting their breath sunshine! — they can go out and raise the money amongst their shareholders who came here to get their snout in the trough — they screwed it up; they are not getting any of our money!"

"I think Londoners find it bizarre that ten weeks after the allegations in the Evening Standard, you haven't questioned Lee [Jasper]. All these questions about Lee — he can come down from his office now and answer them, and you sanctimonious hypocrites are dragging this out so the lies can carry on in the Standard, you're not talking about Lee coming here 'till March. Bring him here today. Ask him your questions. Let Londoners see the answers. You're dragging this out for electoral purposes. Sanctimonious hypocrites, every one of you."

"I am not in favour of any parental choice in education. You will go to your local school."

"When Hitler won his election in 1932 his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews."

"One of the things that Chávez did when he came to power, he didn’t kill all the oligarchs. There was about 200 families who controlled about 80% of the wealth in Venezuela. He allowed them to live, to carry on. I suspect a lot of them are using their power and control over imports and exports to make it difficult and to undermine Maduro."

"Ken is the man that we all need Ken is the leader of the GLC!"

"We look to the left and to the right And we need help but nobody's in sight Where is the man that we all need Tell him he's to come and rescue me."

"[The former Labour Party general secretary, Margaret McDonagh had died a few days before] Take her most controversial political battle. She helped exclude Ken Livingstone from the Labour candidacy for London mayor in 2000. As general secretary she took most of the blame for it. He won as an independent and she was accused of being "a control freak". At the time this was seen as a grotesque political error. I saw it differently then. And I do now. Livingstone shouldn't have been the Labour candidate for anything and it was worth losing, and enduring the political attacks, to assert that."

"First of all, I've never heard of the fellow. Second, I'm not going to dignify it with a response."

""One day the world will know that #RedKen was right"."

"Today Livingstone said that Hitler supported Zionism. Most people know that Zionism was in fact a response to antisemitism; most people know that Hitler wasn't in the business of responding to antisemitism but was himself the greatest antisemite of all time. Livingstone smears Jews, at least those who refuse to identify as anti-Zionist, by saying that they're like Nazis. He encourages people on the left and in the student movement to relate to Jews as though they were Nazis; unless they disavow Israel. Antisemitism? No, not at all. Just criticism. ... The Livingstone Formulation is named after Ken Livingstone. ... [It] conflates anything allegedly antisemitic, in this case repeatedly insulting a Jewish reporter by comparing him to a Nazi, into the category of legitimate criticism of Israel. Secondly, it goes further than accusing people who raise the issue of antisemitism of being wrong; it accuses them of being wrong on purpose; of crying wolf, of playing the antisemitism card. It alleges an intent, often a collective intent and so a conspiracy, to mobilise Jewish victim-power for illegitimate purposes."

"When the Labour Herald printed a foully anti-semitic cartoon Mr Kenneth Livingstone, boss of the GLC, not only defended its publication, but said that the only thing he regretted about it was that it did not go far enough."

"You're a disgusting racist, you're rewriting history. A Nazi apologist. A Nazi apologist. You're a disgusting Nazi apologist, Livingstone."

"I think you've lost it, Mr Livingstone ... What are you on at the moment? You certainly shouldn't be on Labour’s national executive."

"He has every right to his own view but not to express it when he is mayor of this city."

"I know one thing... Ken Livingstone is a folk hero."

"[Pigeons are] rats with wings."

"As the first Jedi Member of this place, I look forward to the protection under the law that will be provided to me by the Bill"

"As long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up you are never going to make progress."

"It is not fair to Tony or to the Government that the entire focus of political debate at the moment is about me. I know I'm in a very special position, I'm the wife of the Prime Minister, I have an interesting job and a wonderful family, but I also know I am not Superwoman. The reality of my daily life is that I'm juggling a lot of balls in the air. Some of you must experience that."

"My immediate instinct when faced with the questions from The Mail on Sunday ten days ago was to protect my family's privacy and particularly my son in his first term at university, living away from home."

"For many women, becoming a widow does not just mean the heartache of losing a husband, but often losing everything else as well. In too many countries, a woman who is widowed becomes in effect a non-person. Through no fault of her own, she can suffer social discrimination, stigma and even violence, sometimes, as in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, being forced to “cleanse” herself by having sexual intercourse with a relative or stranger."

"God has made Canada one of those nations which cannot be conquered and cannot be destroyed, except by itself."

"The Council of the Union of Democratic Control re-affirms its unshaken conviction that a lasting settlement cannot be secured by a peace based upon the right of conquest and followed by commercial war, but only by a peace which gives just consideration to the claims of nationality, and which lays the foundation of a real European partnership."

"Political nationalism has become, for the European of our age the most important thing in the world, more important than civilization, humanity, decency, kindness, pity, more important than life itself."

"While it is fashionable to-day to declare that "war does not pay" nearly everyone believes that policies which lead inevitably to war do pay. Every nation sincerely desires peace; and all nations pursue courses which, if persisted in, must make peace impossible. All nations are quite ready to condemn "in the abstract" armaments, economic nationalism, international suspicion and mistrust, while each one individually clings to his armament, adds to his tariff, invents new modes of economic nationalism, and insists upon an absolute national sovereignty which must make international order impossible and the prolongation of anarchy and chaos inevitable."

"The root problem is very simply stated: if there were no sovereign independent states, if the states of the civilized world were organized in some sort of federalism as the states of the American Union, for instance, are organized, there would be no international war as we know it. ... The main obstacle is nationalism."

"It is not the facts which guide the conduct of men, but their opinions about facts; which may be entirely wrong. We can only make them right by discussion."

"I joined the Labour Party not because it was Left Wing, but because it was definitely internationalists and would seem to be the group in the Labour Party which would serve my purpose best for propaganda along internationalist lines."

"This book endeavors to clear away the mists which prevent so many from seeing the road."

"The elaborate financial interdependence of the modern world has grown up in spite of ourselves. Men are fundamentally just as disposed as they were at any time to take wealth that does not belong to them. But their relative interest in the matter has changed. In very primitive conditions robbery is a moderately profitable enterprise. Where the rewards of labor are small and uncertain, and where all wealth is portable, the size of a man’s wealth depends a good deal on the size of his club and the agility with which he wields it. But to the man whose wealth so largely depends upon his credit, dishonesty has become as precarious and profitless as honest toil was in more primitive times. The instincts of the City man may at bottom be just as predatory as those of the robber baron, but taking property by force has been rendered impossible by the force of commercial events."

"The prosperity of a people depends upon such facts as the natural wealth of the country in which they live, their social discipline and industrial character, the result of generations, of centuries, it may be, of tradition. In addition it depends upon a special technical capacity for such-and-such a manufacture, a special aptitude for meeting the peculiarities of such-and-such a market, the efficient equipment of elaborately constructed workshops, and the existence of a population trained to given trades."

"One cannot take up a leading article in even the foremost papers dealing with foreign relations, without finding it assumed that European governments have the instincts of savages and the foresight of cattle-lifters. Are we to assume that the governments of the world, which presumably are directed by men as farsighted as bankers, are permanently to fall below the banker in their conception of enlightened self-interest?"

"The more our commercial system gains in complication, the more does the common prosperity of us all come to depend upon the due performance of all contracts. Commercial development is broadly illustrating one profound truth: that the real basis of social morality is self-interest. If the subject of rivalry between nations is business, the code which has come to dominate business must necessarily come to dominate the conduct of governments."

"What are the fundamental motives that explain the present rivalry of armaments in Europe, notably the Anglo-German ? Each nation pleads the need for defence; but this implies that someone is likely to attack, and has therefore a presumed interest in so doing. What are the motives which each State thus fears its neighbors may obey? They are based on the universal assumption that a nation, in order to find outlets for expanding population and increasing industry, or simply to ensure the best conditions possible for its people, is necessarily pushed to territorial expansion and the exercise of political force against others.... It is assumed that a nation's relative prosperity is broadly determined by its political power; that nations being competing units, advantage in the last resort goes to the possessor of preponderant military force, the weaker goes to the wall, as in the other forms of the struggle for life. The author challenges this whole doctrine. He attempts to show that it belongs to a stage of development out of which we have passed that the commerce and industry of a people no longer depend upon the expansion of its political frontiers; that a nation's political and economic frontiers do not now necessarily coincide; that military power is socially and economically futile, and can have no relation to the prosperity of the people exercising it; that it is impossible for one nation to seize by force the wealth or trade of another — to enrich itself by subjugating, or imposing its will by force on another; that in short, war, even when victorious, can no longer achieve those aims for which people strive...."

"The fight for ideals can no longer take the form of fight between nations, because the lines of division on moral questions are within the nations themselves and intersect the political frontiers. There is no modern State which is completely Catholic or Protestant, or liberal or autocratic, or aristocratic or democratic, or socialist or individualist; the moral and spiritual struggles of the modern world go on between citizens of the same State in unconscious intellectual cooperation with corresponding groups in other states, not between the public powers of rival States."

"War has no longer the justification that it makes for the survival of the fittest; it involves the survival of the less fit. The idea that the struggle between nations is a part of the evolutionary law of man's advance involves a profound misreading of the biological analogy. The warlike nations do not inherit the earth; they represent the decaying human element."

"Are we, in blind obedience to primitive instincts and old prejudices, enslaved by the old catchwords and that curious indolence which makes the revision of old ideas unpleasant, to duplicate indefinitely on the political and economic side a condition from which we have liberated ourselves on the religious side? Are we to continue to struggle, as so many good men struggled in the first dozen centuries of Christendom — spilling oceans of blood, wasting mountains of treasure — to achieve what is at bottom a logical absurdity, to accomplish something which, when accomplished, can avail us nothing, and which, if it could avail us anything, would condemn the nations of the world to never-ending bloodshed and the constant defeat of all those aims which men, in their sober hours, know to be alone worthy of sustained endeavor?"

"It is, of course, merely a truism to say that war, like other social or political evils, is the outcome of the bad management of human society, which is, in its turn, due to certain errors or deficiencies. But our task is to discern the sort of error or deficiency."

"The force which makes for war does not derive its strength from the interested motives of evil men; it derives its strength from the disinterested motives of good men. Pacifists have sometimes evaded that truth as making too great a concession to Mars, as seeming to imply (which it does not in fact) that in order to abolish war, men must cease to be noble. Base motives are, of course, among those which make up the forces that produce war. Base motives are among those which get great cathedrals built and hospitals constructed-contractors' profit-seeking, the vested interests of doctors and clergy. But Europe has not been covered by cathedrals because contractors wanted to make money, or priests wanted jobs."

"Let us face squarely the paradox that the world which goes to war is a world, usually, genuinely desiring peace. War is the outcome, not mainly of evil intentions, but on the whole, of good intentions which miscarry or are frustrated. It is made, not usually by evil men knowing themselves to be wrong, but is the outcome of policies pursued by good men usually passionately convinced that they are right."

"We seem to assume that if only someone could find the cure for our disease, some new plan, we should at once see that it was the cure and apply it. We ask for leaders and leadership. But if the right course, which the leader indicates, is regarded by the multitudes sincerely as the wrong one, they will declare that he is no leader but a misleader. Inevitably in a democracy the leader is he who expresses existing convictions in the most vivid way, who possesses, as someone puts it, "the common mind to an uncommon degree"."

"The convictions of the multitudes — and on certain points like the desirability of organizing the world on a nationalist basis there is overwhelming agreement — are sincere convictions. They are, as we know, sometimes disastrously erroneous; but they are also disastrously honest. The Nationalisms, the Protectionisms, the Mercantilisms and all the other fallacies which rack Europe and create the chaos are sincerely held fallacies. They are, to these multitudes, the truth, and the prophet who denies them shall be stoned."

"Our daily life is no longer cursed by fear of those pestilences, plagues, black deaths, which used to devastate Europe. The layman has abolished those plagues by using the medical expert's knowledge. The medical expert has said in effect, "There are not many things that we are agreed upon, but at least we are agreed upon this: that though we cannot cure bubonic plague or cholera, we can prevent them, for we know that they are caused by microorganisms transmitted through water and vermin. Keep sewage from your drinking water and vermin from your homes, and you will prevent these plagues." The layman has seen the point, applied appropriate measures, and these dreadful pestilences have disappeared. Now, if our publics these last twenty years could have grasped certain social truths, not inherently more difficult to understand than the microbic theory of disease, a large part at least of the economic and political pestilences which have come upon us in our generation would not have arisen."

"Our evils are due mainly to the failure to apply to our international relationships knowledge which is of practically universal possession, often self-evident in the facts of daily life and experience."

"There are many who say in effect that public opinion has little to do with war, that it is explained by the influence of the vested interests who profit by it — armament makers or groups of capitalists. But even when we have admitted that those interests do exert great influence, it only pushes the question further back. Why are the mass of men, millions, powerless in this matter as against a tiny minority, a few dozen or a few score or a few hundred who profit by the general disaster? There are undoubtedly some who say to the millions in effect: "We should like you to go to war because it would expand our profits." But why do the millions obey?"

"Why is it relatively easy for a few armament makers to persuade 'men to go to war, to give their lives; and quite impossible for the much larger group who would benefit by another form of general destruction to persuade men to destroy their property? It is broadly, of course, because the folly of burning down houses is plain; the folly of the policies which lead to war is not so plain."

"Before war can be fought, a long series of necessary steps, which quite obviously are not and cannot be enforced steps, must be taken by the mass of men. Naval and military budgets must be voted in parliaments and congresses, not just once or twice in a generation but year after year; not secretly, but accompanied by long and public discussion, the budgets being supported by members of parliament, or deputies or congressmen who are still in many states continuously reelected in free and secret franchises, often by great majorities."

"To shut our eyes to the part that John Smith plays in the perpetuation of unworkable policies, in building up the forces of which he becomes the victim, is to perpetuate his victimization. The only means by which he can be liberated from the evil power of organized minorities is by making him aware of the nature of the impulses and motives to which the exploiters so successfully appeal. If such phenomena as nationalism, for instance, can assume forms that are gravely dangerous, it is because the nationalist appeal finds response in deep human impulses, instincts, in psychological facts which we must face."

"One speaks of dictators ruling by "force". But what has enabled dictatorial governments to possess force? The only means by which a man can become a dictator is by getting at the public mind. The politician does not become dictator by the strength of his own muscles. He must persuade others, millions of others, to use their muscles in a certain way. The German National Socialists began as a party of ten persons. And it would have remained a party of ten persons had not its promoters been able to persuade — not force — others. Ten persons had no force as against the power of the German nation. The potential power of that party of ten persons consisted simply in its potential power to reach the public mind. Without that popular appeal it could never have come into being. And if, and when, it loses that popular appeal, it will cease to be."

"The parties, Fascist, or other, which bring about dictatorship want dictatorship. But John Smith who insists on certain policies which produce war does not want war. The first is the result of conscious intention duly carried into effect. The second is the result of an intention which miscarries, miscarries because of certain current errors and fallacies."

"As an Englishman, particularly as an Englishman standing upon foreign soil, I am, of course, prepared to argue that every war we have ever fought was a purely defensive war. But I am obliged to take cognizance of the quite simple historical fact that for about one thousand years, since the time indeed when Norwegians ravaged our coasts and a certain Scandinavian landed at Hastings in 1066, every war we have fought happens to have been fought in other people's countries. Now if defense means merely keeping burglars out of the house, what were we doing on all those occasions in other people's houses? Our history in this respect is not peculiar. The United States is proud of her remoteness from the old world, her freedom from entanglement in its quarrels, her isolation. Yet in her relatively very short history as an independent state she has fought at least six foreign wars while her troops have landed on foreign soil on nearly a hundred occasions. Not one of those wars was for the purpose of defending American soil."

"Now, please don't misunderstand me. When I point out that all our wars for a thousand years have been fought in other people's countries, I do not mean that any of these wars was necessarily aggressive. They may well have been, everyone of them, defensive. But plainly they were not defensive of soil, territory. Of what then were they defensive? They were defensive of the nation's interests, rights; interests which may well collide with the interests of other nations in any part of the world ... Nations do so differ as to what their respective rights are and differ sincerely. And often the question, which of the two is right, is extremely difficult, as anyone who has attempted to disentangle rival territorial claims in the Balkans or elsewhere knows only too well."

"One great state says to others, as each in effect has been saying during the ten years of armament debate: "It is true that we ask for considerable power. Perhaps, all things considered, greater power than you. But it need not disturb you in the least, for we give you our most positive assurance that that power will be used purely for defense. And by defense we mean this: that when we get into a dispute with you as to our respective rights, when, that is, the question is whether you are right or we are right, what we mean by defense is that we shall always be in a position to be sole judge of the question. And so much stronger than you, that you will have to accept our verdict without any possibility of appeal. Could anything be fairer?""

"We use power, of course, in the international fields in a way which is the exact contrary to the way in which we use it within the state. In the international field, force is the instrument of the rival litigants, each attempting to impose his judgment upon the other. Within the state, force is the instrument of the community, the law, primarily used to prevent either of the litigants imposing by force his view upon the other. The normal purpose of police — to prevent the litigant taking the law into his own hands, being his own judge — is the precise contrary of the normal purpose in the past of armies and navies, which has been to enable the litigant to be his own judge of his own rights when in conflict about them with another."

"Within the state we have made defense of the individual the obligation of the whole community, and by that fact have established such preponderance of power on the side of the law that it could never be good business to challenge it. And that fact has, in large measure, swept highwaymen from the roads and pirates from the seas."

"So long as an individual, whether person or state, has only his own arms to depend upon in order to defend his rights by arms, then he must be stronger than anyone likely to challenge those rights. Which means that that other is deprived of similar defense. Within the frontiers man long ago made the discovery that the only way out of that dilemma is for the community, by putting its combined power behind a protective law, to assume the defense of the individual. Defense must be a communal, a collective function, or it cannot exist effectively at all."

"The conception that we can only protect ourselves if we are prepared to protect others surely ought to belong to the nursery stage of social education. But such things as the mechanism of security through law, the place of force in society, are things not, it would seem, included usually in the common education of our peoples."

"The economic difficulty of the modern world is not shortage of materials but the organization of their exchange and distribution; distress arises, not from scarcity but from dislocation and maladjustment."

"I doubt whether the public has fully grasped the change which has come over the nature of modern wealth. If the nature of that change were grasped by our publics, we should be much nearer to accepting the international organizations necessary for the defense of welfare and of civilization than we are. As it is, we are in danger of being diverted to the discussion of schemes for a vast rearrangement of frontiers in defiance of national feeling — for the boundaries of the national and the economic unit do not conveniently coincide — before which the difficulties of a Disarmament Conference would pale into insignificance."

"In the modern world, material is only wealth if you can get rid of it. The British miner cannot eat his coal, nor clothe his children with it, nor build his house with it. If coal is to mean for the British miner food and shelter and clothing, he must get rid of it. Get rid of it, that is, to someone who has money, sell it. But how is that someone to get money? He can only get it by one means: By getting rid of his material to someone who has money, who can only get money by getting rid of his material — round the world."

"The fact that men are naturally quarrelsome is presumed to be an argument against such institutions as the League. But it is precisely the fact of the natural pugnacity of man that makes such institutions necessary. If men were naturally and easily capable of being their own judges, always able to see the other's case, never got into panics, never lost their heads, never lost their tempers and called it patriotism — why, then we should not want a League. But neither should we want in that case most of our national apparatus of government either — parliaments, congresses, courts, police, ten commandments. These are all means by which we deal with the unruly element in human nature."

"I would not hesitate to say that nine out of ten of the critics of the peace movement get the argument turned upside down. "You cannot change human nature" has become a sort of incantation with those critics. Perhaps you cannot "change human nature" — I don't indeed know what the phrase means. But you can certainly change human behavior, which is what matters, as the whole panorama of history shows."

"Not more knowledge but better use of the knowledge which we now have, is perhaps the main educational need and the main educational problem which confronts us."

"Man's greatest advances these last few generations have been made by the application of human intelligence to the management of matter. Now we are confronted by a more difficult problem, the application of intelligence to the management of human relations. Unless we can advance in that field also, the very instruments that man's intelligence has created may be the instruments of his destruction."

"The obstacles to peace are not obstacles in matter, in inanimate nature, in the mountains which we pierce, in the seas across which we fly. The obstacles to peace are in the minds and hearts of men. In the study of matter we can be honest, impartial, true. That is why we succeed in dealing with it. But about the things we care for — which are ourselves, our desires and lusts, our patriotisms and hates — we find a harder test of thinking straight and truly. Yet there is the greater need. Only by intellectual rectitude and in that field shall we be saved. There is no refuge but in truth, in human intelligence, in the unconquerable mind of man."

"Angell argued that in a modern economy no economic benefit could be generated even by successful wars of conquest... Angell’s argument showed, beyond reasonable doubt, that war and territorial expansion are not, in general sensible policies. His views have often been derided on the basis that they were falsified by the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, which was pursued to the bitter end even though it destroyed the global market economy that had formed the backdrop to his analysis. But in reality the outcome proved him right. Of course, Germany, the power most influenced by the arguments of Clausewitz and his successors, reaped nothing but grief from the war. But the attempts of the victorious allies to exact reparations, extend their colonial influence and so on were also entirely futile, exactly as Angell had predicted."

"In 1909, he published a little book of some hundred pages, Europe's Optical Illusion, and he awoke one morning to find himself famous."

"What is the "Great Illusion" which Norman Angell wishes to explode? In few — and therefore insufficient — words, it is this: war is a quite inadequate method for solving international disputes; war does not carry any advantage, not even to the victors, least of all any economic advantage."

"The Great Illusion in its turn created certain illusions in those who read the book superficially (or who only heard about it). Because Norman Angell had proved war to be foolish, to be a bad business proposition, many believed that he had said there would be no more war in Europe. Against this misinterpretation Norman Angell at once protested with the greatest heat. He asked: "Why then do I pursue my fight against war?" Indeed, why should pacifists continue their frequently thankless and unpopular work if they believe that war will never occur any more? Rational people do not try to break down an open door."

"The final chapter of The Great Illusion presents a convincing plea for a change in foreign policy from that of a war policy to one of international cooperation and peace. If this is not made, war, he says, will be inevitable. The fact that we are living in a world of international interdependence makes it imperative that we organize the international community of nations accordingly, basing the community on the common interests which bind nations together, relinquishing the principle of isolated national defence, providing collective security through common effort by erecting an international authority which can replace the prevailing international anarchy."

"Norman Angell speaks to the intellect. He is cool and clear. He has a profound belief in reason and in rationalism. He is convinced that at long last reason will prevail when we succeed in sweeping away the mists of illusion and intellectual error."

"He has a profound and warm belief in what he calls in one of his books "the potential rationalism of mankind". Let us hope that his optimism may be vindicated."

"She behaves with all the sensitivity of a sex-starved boa constrictor"

"She is a half-mad old bag lady. The Finchley Whinger."

"...so unpopular, if he became a funeral director people would stop dying"

"He was a fairly competent chairman of Housing [on Lambeth Council]. Every time he gets up now I keep thinking, "What on earth is Councillor Major doing?" I can't believe he's here and sometimes I think he can't either."

"Since the great days of Jimmy Greaves, it's the only time anyone's managed to score five times in a Chelsea shirt."

"To make matters worse, they have elected a foetus as the party leader. I bet a lot of them wish they had not voted against abortion now!"

"That this House is appalled, but barely surprised, at the revelations in M15 files regarding the bizarre and inhumane proposals to use pigeons as flying bombs; recognises the important and live-saving role of carrier pigeons in two world wars and wonders at the lack of gratitude towards these gentle creatures; and believes that humans represent the most obscene, perverted, cruel, uncivilised and lethal species ever to inhabit the planet and looks forward to the day when the inevitable asteroid slams into the earth and wipes them out thus giving nature the opportunity to start again."

"I have gone to a safe house, as they say, so I might as well have a different name"

"I found it intellectually numbing, tedious in the extreme. All you were was a sort of high-powered social worker and perhaps not even a good one. So I won't miss that."

"Living proof that a pig's bladder on the end of a stick can be elected to Parliament"

"At one point Portillo was polishing his jackboots and planning the next advance. And the next thing is he shows up as a TV presenter. It is rather like Pol Pot presenting the Teletubbies."

"I think my exact words were "Fuck me!""

"We'll look back and wonder who were these barbarous people, just like we look back at those who supported bull-baiting"

"Personally I wish the police had truncheoned the English fans to death, but I can’t really say that on the record."

"I am finding the inherent politeness of this place quite destabilising. Having come from a House where politeness is about as rare as an orderly queue at a London bus stop, the culture shock on entering your Lordships' House has been profound. Indeed, such relentless politeness is not merely destabilising, but positively exhausting."

"I could have been a serious athlete, only to have my promise cut short when I discovered Woodbines and women. Thankfully I have long since given up the former, and the latter have long since given up on me—except, of course, for the lovely Lady Stratford, who for reasons beyond my comprehension still tolerates my presence."

"More people have probably died from eating dodgy Chinese food than contracting some form of avian flu. The last thing we want is for the Daleks from Defra to start suggesting that they want to exterminate wildlife—as is their normal response when confronted with such a problem. We do not want any proposal that migrating birds are going to be destroyed because of alarmist figures and notions that appear in the Tory press."

"If champagne ever wanted cheering up, it would drink Tony Banks."

"...one of the most charismatic politicians in Britain, a true man of the people."

"The nation yesterday was awaiting a clear, statesmanlike call from the Chancellor of the efforts and, if necessary, the sacrifices that are needed to lift the country out of the perpetual series of crises and near crises that have dogged us ever since the war. That was what we were led to believe would happen. What did we get? We had a shambling, fumbling, largely irrelevant and, at one point, degrading speech. The Chancellor told us that the Budget was prepared under the piercing eye of Mr. Gladstone. There was one passage that was quite obviously written under a portrait of Horatio Bottomley."

"Traders and financiers all over the world had been listening to the Chancellor. For months he had said that if he could not stop the wage claims, the country was "facing disaster". Those were his own words. Rightly or wrongly these people believed him. For them, 5th September—the day that the Trades Union Congress unanimously rejected the policy of wage restraint—marked the end of an era. And all these financiers, all the little gnomes in Zurich and the other financial centres about whom we keep on hearing, started to make their dispositions in regard to sterling."

"We cannot accept that this is a little local matter within the control of South Africa's internal affairs. Oppression, apartheid, and racialism—those are crimes against humanity as a whole."

"A second devaluation would be regarded all over the world as an acknowledgement of defeat, a recognition that we were not on a springboard, but a slide. I myself have always deprecated—perhaps rightly, perhaps wrongly—in crisis after crisis, appeals to the Dunkirk spirit as an answer to our problem, because what is required in our economic situation is not a brief period of inspired improvisation, work and sacrifice, such as we had under the leadership of the right hon. Member for Woodford (Sir W. Churchill), but a very long, hard, prolonged period of reorganisation and rededication. It is the long haul, not the inspired spurt, that we need."

"I have stated these Commonwealth problems in terms of hard economic facts, but I should be the last to disagree with those hon. Members on both sides of the House who put the problem in yesterday's debate in terms more of sentiment, kinship and bonds of a less materialistic character than those that I have been describing. … I submit to the House that we cannot consistently with the honour of this country take any action now that would betray friends such as those. … if there has to be a choice [between the Commonwealth and Europe] we are not entitled to sell our friends and kinsmen down the river for a problematical and marginal advantage in selling washing machines in Dusseldorf."

"We all know perfectly well why the Government are standing by their policy of the independent deterrent. The reason is simply prestige, keeping up with our nuclear neighbours. Frankly, we cannot do it. The Americans spend on research alone £2,500 million a year, which is half as much again as our total defence budget, and it is rising rapidly. We can only be a nuclear Power if we can afford the means to produce twenty or more alternative weapons as an assurance against the many which are certain to fail. Out of our resources, we were able to afford only one intercontinental ballistic missile, and that was Blue Streak. The failure of Blue Streak was the moment of truth for this country so far as the independent deterrent was concerned. To cling to the policy after that was...like the action of a rather pathetic sort of man who cannot afford a television and who cannot bring himself to admit the fact, so he puts up the aerial instead."

"This party is a moral crusade or it is nothing."

"The period of 15 years from the last time we were in Scarborough, in 1960, to the middle of the 1970s, will embrace a period of technical change, particularly in industrial methods, greater than the whole of the industrial revolution of the last 250 years."

"In all our plans for the future, we are re-defining and we are re-stating our Socialism in terms of the scientific revolution. But that revolution cannot become a reality unless we are prepared to make far-reaching changes in economic and social attitudes which permeate our whole system of society. The Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or for outdated methods on either side of industry."

"This odious doctrine of apartheid at 11-plus. ... We reject it because as a nation we cannot afford artificially to segregate three-quarters of our children, and virtually cut them off from the normal chance of higher education."

"They [the Conservatives] cannot think beyond outmoded techniques of monetary regulation, followed by panic stop-go-stop measures, when bold planning for industrial expansion is called for. They cannot raise their eyes beyond a system of society where making money by whatever means is lauded as the highest service, while earning money by contributing to production and exports, or teaching or nursing is a mug's game. An Opportunity State for all our people? The Conservatives glory in one where the rewards go to land racketeers and property spivs, while the man who ventures his skill in scientific or technological advance, or in the chancy risks of export markets, is left out in the cold."

"You need men with fire in their bellies and humanity in their hearts. The choice we offer, starting today, is between standing still, of clinging to the tired philosophy of a day that is gone, or moving forward in partnership and unity to a just society, to a dynamic, expanding, confident and above all purposive new Britain. ... The spirit of 1945 is in the air again."

"Let us not be afraid to express the passionate concern everyone of us feels about present housing conditions. ... This is a problem which brooks no escape, no evasion. It is no use talking about a free market: the provision of decent housing for all is a clear and inescapable obligation of government."

"The government have only a small majority in the House of Commons. I want to make it quite clear that this will not affect our ability to govern. Having been charged with the duties of Government we intend to carry out those duties."

"The Smethwick Conservatives can have the satisfaction of having topped the poll, and of having sent here as their Member one who, until a further General Election restores him to oblivion, will serve his term here as a Parliamentary leper"

"The answer is to increase industrial efficiency, to build up our exports, and to substitute home production for imports wherever this can be achieved competitively and economically, to broaden the base of our economy with capital investment, through the training of skilled manpower and the encouragement to accept change, to enable us to expand without running into strains and stresses such as have revealed themselves in past periods of expansion."

"The measures we have taken, the further measures we shall be taking in the coming weeks, will create the conditions in which these problems are going to be solved. I believe that our people will respond to this challenge because our history shows that they misjudge us who underrate our ability as a nation to move, and to move decisively when the need arises. They misjudged our temper after Dunkirk, but we so mobilized our latent and untapped strength that apparent defeat was turned into a great victory. I believe that the spirit of Dunkirk will once again carry us through to success."

"This country cannot afford now—if it ever could afford—unofficial strikes, wasteful stoppages, long, weary arguments about industrial demarcation, any more than we can afford out-of-date industrial methods, industrial promotion based on influence and connexion rather than technical ability, or management attitudes which give a higher priority to tax avoidance or the earning of quick, uncovenanted capital profits than to modernization and innovation in industrial production methods, or aggressiveness in exports."

"Britain's frontiers are on the Himalayas"

"[The 1964 General Election] was a decision that not only our industrial system but every aspect of our national life that has been corrupted by the doctrine of a self-perpetuating establishment should give way to an open society where knowing your job would mean more than knowing the right people. It was a decision that national purpose should override sectional interest, that earning money took precedence over making money. It was a decision for change: not change for its own sake, but change, radical and dynamic, for economic and social purpose. It was a decision, in short, that Britain should have a government and that the government should govern."

"We have not been pushed around either abroad or at home and we are not going to be. This is government of the people; it is government for all the people, and the accent is on government."

"[Labour will deal with racketeering in the price of land.] I call that a socialist theme. Yes, and I should have thought a Liberal theme. That great modernizing party on this theme at least at Scarborough last week carried through an exercise in recidivism which places its present leadership some years behind the Liberals some 60 years ago. In 1909 and 1910 they filled the land with song—'God gave the land to the people'. Now in 1965 we have the first fruits of Liberal revisionism. While they would not intend to throw doubt on the Almighty's intention in this respect, their researches suggest he did not intend this declaration to be taken too literally."

"We are more interested in the monthly trade returns than in Debrett, more preoccupied with what is said by the industrial correspondents and economic editors than what is said by William Hickey; more concerned with modernizing the machinery of government and the action that will need to follow the report of the Estimates Committee on the Civil Service than in altering the layout of Burke's Landed Gentry."

"I know I speak for everyone in these islands, all parties, all our people, when I say to Mr. Smith tonight: "Prime Minister, think again"."

"In my talks with the African Nationalist leaders...I regarded it as my duty to remove from their minds any idea or any hope they might have had that Rhodesia's constitutional problems were going to be solved by an assertion of military power on our part, whether for the purposes of suspending or amending the 1961 Constitution, of imposing majority rule tomorrow or any other time—or for that matter of dealing with the situation that would follow an illegal assertion of independence. To quote the words I used to them: If there are those who are thinking in terms of a thunderbolt hurtling from the sky and destroying their enemies, a thunderbolt in the shape of the Royal Air Force, let me say that thunderbolt will not be coming, and to continue in this delusion wastes valuable time, and misdirects valuable energies."

"It is difficult for us to appreciate the pressures which are being put on men I know to be realistic and reasonable, not only in their executive capacity but in the highly organised strike committees in the individual ports, by this tightly knit group of politically motivated men who, as the last General Election showed, utterly failed to secure acceptance of their views by the British electorate, but who are now determined to exercise backstage pressures, forcing great hardship on the members of the union and their families, and endangering the security of the industry and the economic welfare of the nation."

"We have taken steps which have not been taken by any other democratic government in the world. We are taking steps with regard to prices and wages which no other government, even in wartime, has taken."

"For we are the party of change. We seek not to conserve but to transform society: industrial change to realize the vast potential abundance which has so long been denied; social change to redress the distorted balance between private self-seeking and social compassion; structural change which recognizes the challenge to our society brought about by uneven regional development and by the great challenge which is presented by the urban explosion in terms of the problems of transportation and social environment; change in the relationships within our society in an age which rejects the feudal and class relationships which others seek, in conserving, to perpetuate."

"The greatest enemy that lies in our path in creating the kind of Britain we want to create is conservatism in all its forms. We cannot afford Tory conservatism, with its smug preoccupation, complacently looking on while the rest of the world passes us by."

"[Ramsay MacDonald was] a man of great stature, capable of inspiring massive affection and massive attack—a man who created and led a great party and who has become a legend in that party equally for the manner of his leaving it as for the years he gave its creation. ... They drew their inspiration from Merrie England and dry statistics, they sang their widely differing battle songs, and Ramsay MacDonald had to fashion from the strains of Edward Carpenter's 'England Arise', from the 'Internationale', from 'Jerusalem', from the 'Red Flag', from 'These Things Shall Be', a new harmony. In 1906 in MacDonald's fortieth year, he saw the victory—the dawn of the new era."

"We commemorate a man, a leader, who in the years of creation and achievement towered above his contemporaries in figure and manner, in voice and power, who worked and fought, and who suffered—as they all suffered who dared to preach socialism in an unreceptive and hostile age. He was a man who had vision, and dared all in those years to make that vision a reality; a man who inspired affection in his associates as in his own domestic circle, and who, daring all, created a lasting and durable political instrument which today 60 years after its first political success, provides the Government of this country and in so providing owes more than many are prepared to admit to the young Ramsay MacDonald."

"He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery."

"From now on, the pound abroad is worth 14 per cent or so less in terms of other currencies. That doesn't mean, of course, that the Pound here in Britain, in your pocket or purse or in your bank, has been devalued."

"I am not prepared to stand aside and see this country engulfed by the racial conflict which calculating orators or ignorant prejudice can create. Nor in the great world confrontation on race and colour, where this country must declare where it stands, am I prepared to be a neutral, whether that confrontation is in Birmingham or Bulawayo. In these issues there can be no neutrals and no escape from decision. For in the world of today, while political isolationism invites danger and economic isolationism invites bankruptcy, moral isolationism invites contempt."

"We are the party of human rights—the only party of human rights that will be speaking from this platform this month. (Loud applause.) The struggle against racialism is a worldwide fight. It is the dignity of man for which we are fighting. If what we assert is true for Birmingham, it is true for Bulawayo. If ever there were a condemnation of the values of the party which forms the Opposition it is the fact that the virus of Powellism has taken so firm a hold at every level."

"Hughie, get your tanks off my lawn."

"May I say, for the benefit of those who have been carried away by the gossip of the last few days, that I know what's going on. [pause] I'm going on, and the Labour government's going on."

"The last two years show that what Enoch [Powell] says today Edward [Heath] will be proclaiming as Tory policy anything from three to six months later...Selsdon Man is not just a lurch to the right, it is an atavistic desire to reverse the course of twenty-five years of social revolution. What they are planning is a wanton, calculated and deliberate return to greater inequality...The message to the British people would be simple and brutal. It would say, "You're out on your own"."

"[Tory domestic policies were directed to four aims:] To force up food prices; to force up prices of other essentials; to cut down the welfare services to means-tested levels; to force up rents in a free-for-all in housing. ... In borough after borough, city after city, we have learnt what Tory housing policy means. In many areas—not in all—cuts in the housing programme for basic needs; in all areas, higher rents."

"Chris Mullin: What do you regard as your biggest error? Harold Wilson: That I underestimated the power of speculation to knock government policy aside."

"David Dimbleby: You couldn't - you couldn't set our minds at rest on the vexed question of what the Sunday Times did actually pay you for the book? Harold Wilson: No, I don't think it's a matter of interest to the BBC or to anybody else. Dimbleby: But why .. Wilson: If you're interested in these things, you'd better find out how people buy yachts. Do you ask that question? Did you ask him how he was able to pay for a yacht? Dimbleby: I haven't interviewed ... Wilson: Have you asked him that question? Dimbleby: I haven't interviewed him. Wilson: Well, has the BBC ever asked that question? Dimbleby: I don't know ... Wilson: Well, what's it got to do with you, then? Dimbleby: I imagine they have .. Wilson: Why you ask these question, I mean why, if people can afford to buy £25,000 yachts, do the BBC not regard that as a matter for public interest? Why do you insult me with these questions here? Dimbleby: It's only that it's been a matter of .. Wilson: All I'm saying, all I'm saying .. Dimbleby: … public speculation, and I was giving you an opportunity if you wanted to, to say something about it. Wilson: It was not a matter of speculation, it was just repeating press gossip. You will not put this question to Mr. Heath. When you have got an answer to him, come and put the question to me. And this last question and answer are not to be recorded. Is this question being recorded? Dimbleby: Well it is, because we're running film. Wilson: Well, will you cut it out or not? All right, we stop now. No, I'm sorry, I'm really not having this. I'm really not having this. The press may take this view, that they wouldn't put this question to Heath but they put it to me; if the BBC put this question to me, without putting it to Heath, the interview is off, and the whole programme is off. I think it's a ridiculous question to put. Yes, and I mean it cut off, I don't want to read in the Times Diary or miscellany that I asked for it to be cut out. [pause] Dimbleby: All right, are we still running? Can I ask you this, then, which I mean, I .. let me put this question, I mean if you find this question offensive then .. Wilson: Coming to ask if your curiosity can be satisfied, I think it's disgraceful. Never had such a question in an interview in my life before. Dimbleby: I .. [gasps] Joe Haines (Wilson's Press Secretary): Well, let's stop now, and we can talk about it, shall we? Dimbleby: No, let's .. well, I mean, we'll keep going, I think, don't you? Wilson: No, I think we'll have a new piece of film in and start all over again. But if this film is used, or this is leaked, then there's going to be a hell of a row. And this must be .. Dimbleby: Well, I certainly wouldn't leak it .. Wilson: You may not leak it but these things do leak. I've never been to Lime Grove without it leaking."

"I believe that the situation has now gone so far that it is impossible to conceive of an effective long-term solution in which the agenda at least does not include consideration of, and which is not in some way directed to finding a means of achieving, the aspirations envisaged half a century ago, of progress towards a united Ireland...A substantial term of years will be required before any concept of unification could become a reality, but the dream must be there. If men of moderation have nothing to hope for, men of violence will have something to shoot for."

"I've been wading in shit for three months to allow others to indulge their conscience [on the EEC]."

"I'm like Baldwin. I'm here to give people a quiet life."

"Yet people who benefit from this now viciously defy Westminster, purporting to act as though they were an elected government, spending their lives sponging on Westminster and British democracy and then systematically assault democratic methods. Who do these people think they are?"

"The people must have confidence in their publicly-owned industries. Private industry must have the necessary confidence to maintain and increase investment to do their duty by the people. And confidence demands that a clear frontier must be defined between what is public and what is private industry."

"I get a little nauseated, perhaps, when I hear the phrase "freedom of the Press" used as freely as it is, knowing that a large part of our proprietorial Press is not free at all"

"I have never been emotionally a Europe man. I have been and remain fundamentally a Commonwealth man. I therefore cannot ignore the fact that the vast majority of Commonwealth countries now want Britain to stay in."

"I intend to play it low-key throughout. The decision is purely a marginal one. I have always said so. I have never been a fanatic for Europe. I believe the judgment is a finely balanced one."

"The lead Britain can give and is already giving rests on the fact that we are a world-minded people. Britain will give a lead in political attitudes and political developments in Europe. We cannot do that by taking our bat home and sinking into an off-shore island mentality."

"This Party needs to protect itself against the activities of small groups of inflexible political persuasion, extreme so-called left and in a few cases extreme so-called moderates, having in common only their arrogant dogmatism. These groups, equally the multichromatic coalitionist fringe or groups specifically formed to fight other marauding groups, these groups are not what this Party is about. Infestation of this kind thrives only, and can thrive only, in minuscule local parties."

"I want to talk to you as an old friend who has always been loyal to me. You are the only person I know who never leaks. I am getting tired of this job. I've spent thirteen years trying to keep this party together and it's been a pretty thankless task. Do you know I've only been to the theatre about twenty times in all those years? Because I have had to keep on top of everything that is happening."

"There are three groups on the Left. There is what is now called the "soft" Left, to which you and I and Michael always belonged. There is a middle group and then there are the really vicious group."

"Overseas anti-democratic forces have conspired for years to undermine the political position of individuals and parties who have opposed apartheid."

"I have always said about Tony [Benn] that he immatures with age."

"It stems from the loss of the election and the growth of the 'cowboys'. The Labour Party has got out of the way of losing elections. We are now the natural party of government...These cowboys are absolute Trots. The number of Communists in the party is very small but the Trots are much more sinister. They are negative and have no policy. There is a fairly high number of—not intellectuals but let's say intelligentsia element there, stemming not least from the growth of sociology as a discipline in the universities."

"Roy Jenkins? ...tended to knock off at 7 o'clock...a socialite rather than a Socialist...The SDP. It's not a party, it's a clique or a click, as they say up 'ere. As for Dr Owen and Mr Rodgers, I never thought of them as Cabinet calibre...perfectly good junior ministers. Jim [Callaghan] took a different view. I had retired by then—voluntarily—which is a very unusual thing in politics."

"[H]e was extremely pleased with the things President Reagan had done. One feels in Europe there is somebody in charge."

"President Reagan is likely to be more successful in dealing with the Soviet Union than any recent American leader. ... he had been impressed with Mr Reagan's instincts and style."

"Begin, Shamir and Sharon were the evil three. Sharon is the most evil man I've run across in Israeli politics. [I regarded myself when Prime Minister as] the best friend Israel had in the Western world."

"A week is a long time in politics."

"'I thought', said Nye, 'that you were a Yorkshireman but your Dad has been telling me all about Manchester. Where were you born, boy?' With a Yorkshireman's natural pride, I said, thinking of Sheffield's steel, 'Yorkshiremen are not born; they are forged.' 'Forged were you?' said Nye in that musical Welsh lilt of his, 'I always thought there was something counterfeit about you!'"

"Was he prepared to modernize industry even if it meant more unemployment? He would never say. Ostensibly backing his chancellor, he would undermine his attempt to reduce public expenditure by backing policies that must increase it. Preserving the unity of the party meant for him the clever balancing of portfolios in cabinet, giving the left the hard-slogging administrative ministries and keeping the Treasury, foreign policy and defence in the hands of the centre and right. He prided himself on the subtlety of his ministerial reshuffles... Wilson saw politics as a giant slalom race, getting through the gates: the fact that he and country were going downhill was irrelevant."

"A. J. P. Taylor told me in 1970, in one of those impromptu addresses to individuals that made the Beaverbrook Library so entertaining a place, that Wilson was transparently Lloyd George redivivus and Roy Jenkins an aspirant Asquith."

"He's much more dangerous than Gaitskell because he isn't honest and he isn't a man of principle but a sheer, absolute careerist, out for himself alone."

"Harold Wilson, in a sense, was to politics what the Beatles were to popular culture. He simply dominated the nation's political landscape, and he personified the new era, not stuffy or hidebound but classless, forward-looking, modern. Even his enemies and detractors, and there were a few, could not deny his brilliance, his brain and the intelligence born of natural wit, not social background... He had, in the end, a very simple belief in the virtues of social justice and equality and, by and large, throughout his time in politics, he applied them. He once said: "The Labour party is a moral crusade, or it is nothing." That should be his real epitaph and long may it remain so."

"His purpose in politics was to remove the disfiguring evils of poverty and to create a caring society, with equal opportunity, open to advancement and in tune with the changing needs of his time. He was proud to have been responsible for the birth of the Open University. He was by nature a conciliator, and the least assertive of men, but he fought with the doggedness and determination of a true Northerner when he had to. Those qualities, and his high intelligence, kindliness and approachability, helped to spread his influence over a much wider area than his own party. It was a natural expression of that to be a passionate opponent of apartheid and of racial discrimination. He was the most successful leader that Labour has ever had, winning four elections out of five although on each occasion he came to office at a time of great economic difficulty. Above all, he was a devoted servant of his cause and his country."

"For a time this phenomenal memory and the ability to think on his feet enabled him to appear the complete politician. Only gradually did it become clear that his cleverness was an end in itself, that he had no notion of what to do with it, and that mere statistical conjuring was, after all, not enough... The more Harold Wilson writes, the more he confirms the common suspicion that behind the pipe smoke and the clever footwork lay a political black hole. Revealing nothing, he really reveals everything."

"Now, to fit into his reshuffle jigsaw puzzle, he has put Reg P. in the Cabinet but as Minister of Overseas Development under the FO. It is this kind of behaviour that makes one despair of him. He subordinates all considerations, not only of principle but of administrative effectiveness, to his balance of power manoeuverings."

"One of Harold's endearing traits was his desire to bring women to the fore. He was an instinctive feminist: the first Prime Minister to have two women in his Cabinet. Like Ted [Castle] he never regarded women as rivals, but rejoiced in their success and was always trying to promote them to new opportunities. Such men are rare."

"If the criterion of leadership is sparkling intelligence, resilience, victory in elections and flexibility, together with a willingness to fight one's own Party when one has little choice, then Wilson certainly has a claim to have been the best leader Labour ever had. But in Wilson the flexibility was too heavily prized and the willingness to fight too seldom in evidence. He totally failed in the role to which he himself made his principal claim, as a regenerator of the British economy. It was fortunate for the Labour party and the country that Wilson retired when he did. His time as Prime Minister had been a time of economic crisis. On the face of it he had been as well equipped as anyone could be to handle the frightening economic problems with which he had been confronted. Yet he had never given any evidence that he had thought deeply about the country's predicament. He had exhausted his credit with foreign governments and with central banks which might, in the near future, be requested to help suck the UK out of the bog into which it had fallen. He now lacked the strength, and the reputation, to handle yet one more economic crisis. Whatever he had achieved, he would not see a socialist Britain in his lifetime. But he would have been surprised if he had, not necessarily pleasantly. At least, in retirement, he had no reason to fear conspiracies by his Cabinet colleagues."

"Wilson was always mildly anti-European, in the sense that he seemed not to like continental Europeans, their style of life or their politics. He was basically a north of England, non-conformist puritan, with all the virtues and the inhibitions of that background. The continental Europeans, especially from France and southern Europe, were alien to him... Despite this background, Harold Wilson decided from October 1974 that a 'yes' position was the most practical choice. As a statesman – which was part, but only part of his complex personality and always was – he knew that Britain must be centrally placed in Europe's future. As a party leader, he saw it as the best way to hold Labour together – because the antis would not leave the Party over Europe, but the pros would. As a shrewd politician, he saw the pro position as the most likely winning one... Mr Heath had taken the British Establishment into Europe. Harold Wilson took in the British people."

"When, 50 years ago, on 14 February 1963, Harold Wilson was elected leader of the Labour party, even many of his supporters – wrongly I now believe – thought him a politician without principle... He was what used to be called "a good Labour man" – instinctively the enemy of privilege and certain that improvement in the lives of the disadvantaged and the dispossessed depended on the success of the Labour party. That is why he worked so hard, and sometimes deviously, to keep it united. I should have understood that 50 years ago."

"No prime minister ever interfered so much in the work of his colleagues as Wilson did in his first six years... Unfortunately, since he had neither political principle nor much government experience to guide him, he did not give Cabinet the degree of leadership which even a less ambitious prime minister should provide. He had no sense of direction, and rarely looked more than a few months ahead. His short-term opportunism, allied with a capacity for self-delusion which made Walter Mitty appear unimaginative, often plunged the government into chaos. Worse still, when things went wrong he imagined everyone was conspiring against him. He believed in demons, and saw most of his colleagues in this role at one time or another."

"[W]hat really endeared the people of this country to him was that they knew from his background, his upbringing and his own life, in which there was hardship, that he was a compassionate man who understood their needs and who was doing his best, often in difficult circumstances...to meet those needs and to ensure that people had a better life. That was his philosophy and his purpose in coming into the House, in being in opposition and in being a Minister... This country owes a great deal to him."

"Harold was, above all else, a great political survivor, a fine politician if, perhaps, never truly a statesman."

"We have Mr. Wright's allegation that a surveillance operation was mounted against Lord Wilson of Rievaulx when he was Prime Minister in the mid-1970s... Many criticisms can be made of Lord Wilson's stewardship—I have made some in the past and I have no doubt that I may make some more in future—but the view that he, with his too persistent record of maintaining Britain's imperial commitments across the world, with his over-loyal lieutenancy to Lyndon Johnson, with his fervent royalism, and with his light ideological luggage, was a likely candidate to be a Russian or Communist agent is one that can be entertained only by someone with a mind diseased by partisanship or unhinged by living for too long in an Alice-Through-the-Looking-glass world in which falsehood becomes truth, fact becomes fiction and fantasy becomes reality. The result of the allegation has been substantially to fortify the view that I expressed in a letter to The Times 18 months ago, which is that MI5 should now be pulled totally out of its political surveillance role."

"I shall remember him above all for his courtesy and his kindness. He hated being disagreeable. He liked to be nice to people, which is not always the case with those who had his thrust to power. He also had very good nerve in a crisis. And as he experienced quite a number of crises, that was a big asset. In some ways he was easier to work with when things were going wrong. He was cool and unrecriminatory... He served his country well."

"He got a clear-cut first, and there is some evidence that he achieved the highest marks in PPE of any undergraduate of the decade... Academically his results put him among prime ministers in the category of Peel, Gladstone, Asquith, and no one else."

"My warmest congratulations on your election victory. As you enter the great office of Prime Minister, I want to extend my very best wishes for success for you and your government and the people of the United Kingdom. I look forward to the continuation of the close and friendly cooperation, based on mutual confidence and respect, which has bound our countries so closely for so long."

"The most politically skillful of them was Harold Wilson. It was my good fortune that we were friends before he became prime minister. I was able to persuade him to remain east of Suez for a few years longer... The problems he faced in Britain were deep-seated—lowered levels of education and skills, lower productivity because unions were not cooperating with management. The Labour Party in the 1960s and 1970s was dominated by the trade unions and could not tackle these basic issues, hence Wilson was seen as going for quick fixes. To keep the party behind him, he had to zigzag, making him appear wily and devious."

"I do not believe that it is too generous to describe Harold Wilson as one of the most brilliant men of his generation... For my generation at least, as observers through television and from a distance, his ever-present pipe became a symbol of tranquillity in times of some turmoil... He was a man of many achievements and, perhaps above all, a very human man who served his country well and honourably and who has earned, by that, a secure place in its history."

"[F]ew modern British governments have disappointed their supporters more thoroughly than his. After thirteen years in opposition, Labour returned to office in 1964 on the ticket of technical competence, purposive planning, faster growth and higher social spending. Socialism, as Wilson put it, would be harnessed to science, and science to socialism. When he and his colleagues limped back into opposition six years later, it was hard to tell which half of the promise had been more comprehensively belied. His Government had wrecked its own National Plan less than a year after announcing it, achieved a lower annual growth rate than that of the Conservatives and consumed vast quantities of energy and time in a bitter struggle with the trade unions, in which it was humiliatingly defeated. What Wilson had christened the 'social wage' did indeed absorb a larger share of the gross domestic product, but that was only because the whole economy had grown more slowly than expected. His second incarnation as Prime Minister was even less happy than his first. In 1974 Labour promised 'an irreversible shift of power and wealth to working people and their families', to be achieved through a social contract with the unions, entailing higher social spending and an end to wage controls. Two years later, Wilson resigned, having presided over record levels of inflation and unemployment, having launched an incomes policy patently designed to reduce real wages and having started the long series of expenditure cuts which were to destroy all hope of putting Labour's election pledges into effect."

"Wilson was in himself a new and deadly threat to the Government. He was a formidable parliamentary debater with a rapier wit... [H]e could get under Harold Macmillan's skin in a way Hugh Gaitskell never could. While Gaitskell was more of a statesman than Wilson, Wilson was an infinitely more accomplished politician... I can say little in favour of either of Harold Wilson's terms as Prime Minister. Doubtless he had principles, but they were so obscured by artful dodging that it was difficult for friends and opponents alike to decide what they might be. Yet I regretted his departure for several reasons. I had always liked him personally, I had appreciated his sense of humour, and I was aware of his many kindnesses. He was a master of Commons repartee, and I usually scored nothing better than a draw against him in the House."

"Harold's record as Prime Minister and leader of the Labour Party has been underestimated. As Prime Minister, during a period of unremitting economic difficulty, he maintained full employment but was unable to restrain inflation. Unwilling to break trades union power by allowing mass unemployment, as Mrs Thatcher was later to do, he tried the alternative policy of income and prices restraint... It failed, but it was a failure rooted in a commitment to social justice... In another way, Harold's achievement as Prime Minister has been underestimated. He was without prejudice. He did not judge people on their colour, race, gender or class. Members of his government were drawn from many backgrounds."

"Chartism] might have become purely proletarian—in which case there would always have been a tendency towards revolution—or it might have progressed by a middle and working class alliance—in which case a pacific policy was almost essential. In fact...the extremists undermined the case of the moderates and the moderates queered the pitch of the extremists. Nevertheless it is unlikely, even if their respective fields had been clear, that either could have succeeded."

"The success of the middle class alliance depended on the acceptance by the working class element of middle class leadership and middle class ideas."

"The destruction of this inequality, the creating and maintaining of a society in which it cannot exist becomes the essential and direct purpose of all Socialist activity."

"[T]he fundamental objective and criterion by which policy must be judged [is] the achievement of Economic Equality... [W]ithout it Labour policy becomes merely opportunist, distinguishable only from the policies of other parties by the suggestion of attractive means to 'Prosperity', a greater humanitarianism, and, as some would have it, far less favourable circumstances in which to take action... A failure to advance in the direction of that ideal [of social justice] is bound to appear little short of betrayal."

"I was a witness of two civil wars and their ghastly and tragic consequences, and I learnt, as never before, to value the freedom of British political traditions."

"It must be admitted that politically communism is the same [as fascism]."

"Socialists should understand that it is their duty to do anything in their power directly or indirectly to assist the revolutionary opposition within fascist countries."

"So long as production is left to the uncontrolled decisions of private individuals, conducted, guided and inspired by the motive of profit, so long will Poverty, Insecurity and Injustice continue."

"Fascism has become the last defence of a crumbling economic system. It is the last bulwark of Capitalism."

"While prepared to fight for the democratic ideals as such and for the ideal of collective security as such there is little to attract us in fighting merely to preserve the territorial integrity of the British Empire."

"Peace can only be secured by re-establishing the rule of law in international affairs...neither a neo-nationalism nor a cowardly surrender to Fascism will be accepted by the vast mass of our people. For the moment rearmament is also essential...the scandalous gaps in our defences have become a byword."

"I want to say a word about industrial relations in this industry. This takes my mind back nearly 20 years when, fresh from the University, inexperienced but keen, I started my earning career by lecturing in a small mining town... That was in 1927 just after the end of the coal strike. I do not know that I taught the miners much in the way of economics, but they taught me a great deal. They taught me what economic feudalism was. They taught me what the naked exercise of arbitrary economic power meant. They taught me what it was to be victimised... They taught me what was the reality of economic life."

"Between the wars, the heavy unemployment in Great Britain and keenly competitive conditions abroad were factors which had to be taken into account in wage negotiations. Employers were afraid that higher wages, by adding to their costs, would make it more difficult for them to sell their goods, especially in export markets. If this happened unemployment would increase and workers' representatives had to bear this in mind also. The larger the number of unemployed, also, the more difficult it was to maintain full workers' solidarity, i.e. an employer could resist a strike, and make cuts in wages more easily the more workers were out of work. Thus in the last resort it was the existence of heavy unemployment, at home and abroad, which allowed employers to resist wage claims and discouraged workers from pressing them too far."

"Conditions have greatly changed in Great Britain since the end of the war owing to the existence of full employment. Negotiations about wages between the two sides of industry now take place in entirely different circumstances. There is no reserve of labour to compete for jobs. ... If wages rise faster than productivity the increases in cost can usually be passed on in increased selling prices. There is thus in the economic system very much less check on the upward movement of money wages. ... [I]f wages at home rise unchecked, it is more likely in general that exports will gradually cease to be competitive and there will be balance of payments difficulties. These can be met, in the end, by devaluation. A succession of devaluations completely undermines confidence in any currency. ... It is clear that a very difficult problem faces a country such as ours, which wishes to maintain full employment and yet to avoid the undoubted evils of rising prices and balance of payments difficulties abroad."

"In recent years, hours of work have been reduced, holidays have been increased, the age of entry into employment has gone up, and above all, our general health and expectation of life as a people have markedly improved. It is a natural corollary of these changes that we should work longer and retire later."

"I am not easily roused to anger but I must say that this latest cry to cut back the spending of worse off people to cure a crisis mostly caused by too much spending by better off people is intolerable."

"I just cannot share this Gandhi outlook... If people have more money to spend they may, it is true, gamble or smoke or drink it away. But a lot of them will also enjoy nicer holidays, which is a very good thing for them. We really must keep under control, and pretty strict control, the area within which "the man in Whitehall knows best"."

"I am a Socialist and have been for some 30 years. I became a Socialist quite candidly not so much because I was a passionate advocate of public ownership but because at a very early age I came to hate and loathe social injustice, because I disliked the class structure of our society, because I could not tolerate the indefensible differences of status and income which disfigure our society...because I hated poverty and squalor... Pay people more if they do harder, more dangerous, and even more responsible work; pay people more if they have larger families. But the rewards should not be, as they still are, dependent upon the accident of whether you happen to be born of wealthy parents or not... I am a Socialist because I want to see fellowship, or if you prefer it, fraternity...[while preserving] the liberties we cherish. I want to see all this not only in our country but over the world as a whole. These to me are the Socialist ideals. Nationalisation...is a vital means, but it is only one of the means by which we can achieve these objects."

"We cannot forget that Colonel Nasser has repeatedly boasted of his intention to create an Arab empire from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf. The French Prime Minister, M. Mollet, the other day quoted a speech of Colonel Nasser's and rightly said that it could remind us only of one thing—of the speeches of Hitler before the war."

"The fact is that this episode must be recognised as part of the struggle for the mastery of the Middle East. That is something which I do not feel that we can ignore. One may ask, "Why does it involve the rest of the Middle East?" It is because of the prestige issues which are involved here. ... [P]restige has quite considerable effects. If Colonel Nasser's prestige is put up sufficiently and ours is put down sufficiently, the effects of that in that part of the world will be that our friends desert us because they think we are lost, and go over to Egypt."

"I have no doubt myself that the reason why Colonel Nasser acted in the way that he did, aggressively, brusquely, suddenly, was precisely because he wanted to raise his prestige in the rest of the Middle East. ... He wanted to challenge the West and to win. He wanted to assert his strength. He wanted to make a big impression. Quiet negotiation, discussion around a table about nationalising the Company would not produce this effect. It is all very familiar. It is exactly the same that we encountered from Mussolini and Hitler in those years before the war."

"All I can say is that in taking this decision the Government, in the view of Her Majesty's Opposition, have committed an act of disastrous folly whose tragic consequences we shall regret for years. [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh."] Yes, all of us will regret it, because it will have done irreparable harm to the prestige and reputation of our country."

"I don't believe the present Prime Minister can carry out this policy. His policy this last week has been disastrous and he is utterly, utterly discredited in the world. Only one thing now can save the reputation and honour of our country. Parliament must repudiate the Government's policy. The Prime Minister must resign."

"It is wholly untrue that I deplored the strategy of the [general] strike. I did not honestly think a great deal about it. I knew that once the chips were down my part was on the side of the strike. I considered the Government had behaved badly to the miners and that was that."

"You can be assured of this. There will be no increase in the standard or other rates of income tax under the Labour Government so long as normal peacetime conditions continue."

"I conclude that we should make two things clear to the country. First, that we have no intention of abandoning public ownership and accepting for all time the present frontiers of the public sector. Secondly, that we regard public ownership not as an end in itself but as a means—and not necessarily the only or the most important one to certain ends—such as full employment, greater equality and higher productivity. We do not aim to nationalise every private firm or to create an endless series of State monopolies. While we shall certainly wish to extend social ownership, in particular directions, as circumstances warrant, our goal is not 100% State ownership. Our goal is a society in which Socialist ideals are realised. Our job is to move towards this as fast as we can. The pace at which we can go depends on how quickly we can persuade our fellow citizens to back us. They will only do this if we pay proper attention to the kind of people they are and the kind of things they want."

"Clause Four] lays us open to continual misrepresentation... It implies that we propose to nationalise everything, but do we? Everything?—the whole of light industry, the whole of agriculture, all the shops—every little pub and garage? Of course not. We have long ago come to accept...a mixed economy... [the]... view of 90 per cent of the Labour Party—had we not better say so instead of going out of our way to court misrepresentation?"

"It was on account of the [General] Strike that I first came to know Douglas and Margaret. I had been reading some socialist theory as well as economics—Tawney, the Webbs, Marx (about half of volume i of Das Kapital), J. A. Hobson, Hugh Dalton, but I did not at that time follow day-to-day politics at all closely. Thus for me, as I think for many others, the impact of the Strike was sharp and sudden, a little like a war, in that everybody's lives were suddenly affected by a new unprecedented situation, which forced us to abandon plans for pleasure, to change our values and adjust our priorities. Above all we had to make a choice. And how we chose was a clear test of our political outlook. The vast majority of undergraduates [at Oxford University] went off to unload ships and drive trams or lorries. For me this was out of the question. All my sympathies were instinctively on the side of the miners, the unions, the Labour Party, and the Left generally. It was their cause I wanted to help."

"For my part, I hold that the central idea of British Socialism is the brotherhood of man. It is this rather than public ownership which surely inspires all our aims in foreign, colonial, social, and economic policies alike. It is this which inspires our protests about Suez and Hola and Cyprus. It is this which is the common link between our hatred of racial discrimination, our opposition to sabre rattling jingoism, our support for a world order and for aid from richer to poorer countries, our belief in social justice and a classless society, our hopes of building a community based on something better than acquisitiveness and rivalry, our respect for the freedom of the individual."

"We may lose the vote today, and the result may deal this party a grave blow. It may not be possible to prevent it, but there are some of us, I think many of us, who will not accept that this blow need be mortal: who will not believe that such an end is inevitable. There are some of us who will fight, and fight, and fight again, to save the party we love. We will fight, and fight, and fight again, to bring back sanity and honesty and dignity, so that our party – with its great past – may retain its glory and its greatness."

"[D]oes [the Prime Minister] realise that it is precisely because of our admirable record in converting a former colonial empire into a free Commonwealth that we ought to welcome and support anti-colonial resolutions in the United Nations, and that to fail to do so inevitably gives the impression that we still support colonialist régimes?"

"Let us not forget that our object here is to try ultimately to bring about full democracy in Northern Rhodesia. We know that that will take a little time. We know that it must involve an acceptance by the white minority themselves of an African State which will be under the control of the African people. We believe that the white minority have an important part to play there, but they must accept the fact that we must get over this hump or past this watershed—whatever the metaphor may be—and that with the pace of events moving as it is in Africa, the time has long since gone when white supremacy can possibly be a viable policy."

"It can hardly be denied—can it?—that the theory and practice of apartheid—the advocacy of a permanent division of men according to the colour of their skin, and involving, in practice, different rights, opportunities and status—is a continuous affront to the vast majority of the inhabitants of the Commonwealth."

"[T]he common ideals of racial equality, political freedom, extending the right of self-government to the rest of the Commonwealth, non-aggression in international affairs, economic co-operation, and aid between nations. These ideals may be imperfectly realised in many instances, but, nevertheless, they, and they alone, give the Commonwealth its real justification today, just as the extraordinary variety in terms of geography, race and religion of the Commonwealth provides a wonderful opportunity to advance these ideals in a practical form in the world as a whole."

"[W]e cannot draw a line between freedom in one place and freedom in another. Freedom, like peace, is indivisible. If we believe in freedom in Hungary, and in East Germany, then we must believe in it in Angola and in Rhodesia. Detention without trial is just as bad whether in Ghana or Hungary or Rhodesia."

"It is, in my opinion, an utter and complete myth that there is the slightest danger or prospect of millions and millions of brown and black people coming to this country. Anyone who is trying to put that across is only trying to frighten people into believing that. ... We do not believe that the Bill is justified by the facts. We think that probably it will not work at all. But at the same time we think that it will do irreparable harm to the Commonwealth. ... It is a plain anti-Commonwealth measure in theory and it is a plain anti-colour measure in practice."

"It has been said that the test of a civilised country is how it treats its Jews. I would extend that and say that the test of a civilised country is how it behaves to all its citizens of different race, religion and colour. By that test this Bill fails, and that is fundamentally why we deplore it. Of course, there are some people who will be glad. I have no doubt that there will be some Fascists who will claim this as the first victory they have ever won. ... I beg the Government now, at this last minute, to drop this miserable, shameful, shabby Bill. Let them think, consult and inquire before they deal another deadly blow at the Commonwealth."

"I don't believe in faith. I believe in reason and you have not shown me any."

"Of course after the conference a desperate attempt was made by Mr. Bonham-Carter to show that of course they weren't committed to federation at all. Well I prefer to go by what Mr. Grimond says; I think he's more important. And when he was asked about this question there was no doubt about his answer; it was on television. And the question was [laughter] I see what you mean, I see what you mean. Yes was the question: "But the mood of your conference today was that Europe should be a federal state. Now if we had to choose between a federal Europe and the Commonwealth, this would have to be a choice wouldn't it? You couldn't have the two." And Mr. Grimond replied in these brilliantly clear sentences: "You could have a Commonwealth linked, though not of course a direct political link, you could have a Commonwealth link of other sorts. But of course a federal Europe I think is a very important point. Now the real thing is that if you are going to have a democratic Europe, if you are going to control the running of Europe democratically, you've got to move towards some form of federalism and if anyone says different to that they're really misleading the public." That's one in the eye for Mr. Bonham-Carter. [laughter] Now we must be clear about this, it does mean, if this is the idea, the end of Britain as an independent nation-state. I make no apology for repeating it, the end of a thousand years of history. You may say: "All right let it end." But, my goodness, it's a decision that needs a little care and thought. [clapping] And it does mean the end of the Commonwealth; how can one really seriously suppose that if the mother country, the centre of the Commonwealth, is a province of Europe, which is what federation means, it could continue to exist as the mother country of a series of independent nations; it is sheer nonsense."

"Mr Hugh Gaitskell, who took over from Cripps in the autumn of 1950, probably understood his job better than any Chancellor before or since... His officials had a great respect for him, but they complained that he insisted on doing other people's work for them—a complaint that may simply mean that he wanted to run his own policy."

"‘Butskellism’...was, of course, a term compounded by The Economist out of Gaitskell's name and mine. ... [E]ach of us would, I think, have repudiated its underlying assumption that, though sitting on opposite sides of the House, we were really very much of a muchness. I admired him as a man of great humanity and sticking power, and was to regard his untimely death in 1963 as a real loss to the Labour party, to the country and to the tone of public life. But I shared neither his convictions, which were unquenchably Socialist, nor his temperament, which allowed emotion to run away with him rather too often, nor his training which was that of an academic economist. Both of us, it is true, spoke the language of Keynesianism. But we spoke it with different accents and with a differing emphasis."

"He was a man of passion and emotion which he did not often show. He had a deep sense of personal responsibility, a strong sense of duty from which he could not be deflected when he had made up his mind, and a steely will which was a source of his courage... Compromise did not come easily to him although later, when he became Leader of the Party, he recognised the need for accommodation. And in the Shadow Cabinet he would sometimes allow a contrary view to his own view to prevail, letting it pass with a deep, deep sigh at the irrationality of his colleagues. But, on certain issues, notably immigration and the rights of West Indians to come to this country, he was unshakeable, whether his views were popular or not. On all important matters of policy he radiated the assurance that if you and he shared the same beliefs they would be safe in his care and he would not betray them, even if under pressure you yourself weakened. He was therefore a source of strength to his friends and admirers, with a personal kindliness and a sense of fun whenever he relaxed. His loss was a great tragedy. He would have been a strong Prime Minister if he had lived."

"Like many others, I admired his exceptional qualities of honesty and courage. They were to cause him trouble during his leadership, especially his determination to change the Party's constitution on public ownership and his bitter fight against unilateral disarmament. But by the time of his death he was leading a united Party that seemed poised for victory at the approaching general election. I am sometimes asked what kind of Prime Minister he would have been... his penetrating and informed mind would have shown itself in a clear vision of the direction in which he wanted to take a socialist Britain. He had formed strong views about equal opportunity and abhorred racialism, and he possessed a passionate belief in Britain's future... His deep sense of Britain's history and greatness would have led him as Prime Minister to offer a strong lead on world issues. He was pro-Europe but anti-Common Market because, like others among us, he was a strong believer in the Atlantic Alliance. And he cared deeply about the Commonwealth. Perhaps, had he lived to see our former colonial territories in the Commonwealth forming other alliances and in the process growing away from Britain, together with our lessening importance in the eyes of the United States, he might have changed his mind about membership of the European Community."

"Whether he was a sufficiently radical leader for a left-wing party is another question. But he was a leader. You had complete confidence in him. You trusted him. You knew absolutely where you were with him, and of how many other politicians in Britain at the moment could you say the same? Most of the others are dwarfs and pygmies beside him ... My last thought of this man is of his huge vitality, because he was immensely vital, he was as strong as an ox, he was as gay as a child, and it simply seems to me wrong that now he should be dead."

"Hugh's policy on the nuclear deterrent was clear. He said the independent nuclear deterrent was absolute nonsense. We could neither afford it nor was it necessary to make it ourselves."

"Once he made up his mind there no was calculation of the consequences to himself... Integrity, absolute integrity, this was the essential quality of Hugh Gaitskell's character... He knew...that Clause Four was an article of faith to me and my generation. When I reminded him of this he replied sternly: "Maybe, but you know that we do not intend, any of us, to implement Clause Four fully, and I regarded it as my duty to say so to the party and the country." When he considered it was his duty to say or do something nothing could change him. The sharp edge of intellectual integrity would cut through all barriers."

"He had the best political manners of anyone I have known and they flowed from deep conviction and a thoroughly generous nature. He kept the level of political discussion very high."

"I was worried by a streak of intolerance in Gaitskell's nature; he tended to believe that no one could disagree with him unless they were either knaves or fools. Rejecting Dean Rusk's advice, he would insist on arguing to a conclusion rather than to a decision. ... Gaitskell took my views on foreign policy seriously. I think I helped to form his position on Suez, the Common Market, Russia, and the atomic bomb. Most of his Godkin lecture on disengagement was written by me. If he had become Prime Minister I would probably have become his Foreign Secretary, after Harold Wilson had held the job for a year or two; and he told close friends that he thought I would be the best person to succeed him as Party leader. Nevertheless, I have always doubted whether the fierce puritanism of his intellectual convictions would have enabled him to run a Labour Government for long, without imposing intolerable strains on so anarchic a Labour movement."

"His humanism, his respect for other people's enjoyment of life, his civilized egalitarianism, made him deeply suspicious of those who preferred slogans to power. ... [H]is attitude on this [the EEC] or on anything else was never one of uncomprehending insularity. It was India, not Little Englandism, which fought in his breast with European social democracy. ... He saw the world, and particularly the Western community, as interdependent; and he saw the great responsibility on this fortunate segment to try to ameliorate the grinding poverty of the poor two-thirds. His devotion to racial equality was absolute."

"He would not have been a perfect Prime Minister. He was stubborn, rash, and could in a paradoxical way become too emotionally committed to an over-rational position which, once he had thought it rigorously through, he believed must be the final answer. He was only a moderately good judge of people. Yet when these faults are put in the scales and weighed against his qualities they shrivel away. He had purpose and direction, courage and humanity. He was a man for raising the sights of politics. He clashed on great issues. He avoided the petty bitterness of personal jealously. He could raise banners which men were proud to follow, but he never perverted his own leadership ability: it was infused by sense and humour, and by a desire to change the world, not for his own satisfaction, but so that people might more enjoy living in it. ... He was that very rare phenomenon, a great politician who was also an unusually agreeable man."

"This does not mean that Hugh Gaitskell, who would have been nearly seventy-five when the SDP was formed, would have left the Labour Party. I do not personally believe he would have done so, if for no other reason than, had he lived, I suspect the need for a creation of the SDP would never have existed."

"I soon came to regard Hugh Gaitskell...as an outstanding man. His fight against the unilateralists made a deep impression on me. The whole stand against CND within the Labour Party with his famous 'Fight, and fight again' speech made me think: 'This man has principles'."

"When facing some of the more difficult choices of my career, I have asked myself how would Hugh Gaitskell have handled a similar situation."

"One of the greatest if more intangible achievements of the late Mr. Hugh Gaitskell was to raise the whole level of political discourse in Britain."

"Political integrity was the most precious quality which Hugh Gaitskell brought to the service of the Labour movement. ... In particular it endowed him with the courage to master the crisis which came to him in October, 1960, when the party conference rejected the official policy on defence and declared for the unilateral renunciation of nuclear weapons. His resolve "to fight and fight and fight again", to rescue the movement from what he deemed to be perilous courses awoke sharp conflict within it, offering a serious challenge to his leadership. He emerged from the struggle with his authority unassailably established within a party to which he had restored cohesion and confidence. The drift to disintegration was halted. His skill and patience were rewarded by the steady reversal of the unilateralist trend... The climax came at the 1961 party conference. The earlier decision was overturned by almost a ten-fold majority, a victorious testimony to the transformation which Gaitskell had wrought. In the process he had immensely enhanced his reputation and had made a powerful impact on the public consciousness as a man possessing the authentic attributes of leadership—resolute will, robust courage, resilient spirit and wise judgment."

"Hugh Gaitskell was that rare creature, a passionate intellectual. Rationality was his creed. His limited patience was strained almost beyond endurance by the the stolid prejudices of the trades union leaders he depended upon, and the colourful sophistries of his left-wing critics. Born in India of Civil Service parents, he was as much a liberal as a socialist. He cherished liberty, detested racism, and believed in the redistribution of income and wealth to achieve social justice. He was never attracted to the European Community, for as a political entity it threatened to eclipse the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth embodied Gaitskell's deepest convictions, including internationalism and interracialism, and it had developed out of Britain's imperial history with which his family had had close connections."

"Nye called Hugh “a desiccated calculating machine”, thinking him cold and unemotional. It was a serious misjudgement, which proved Nye's undoing. Hugh was passionate in the cause of reason. He loved the Labour Party and wanted to make it something like the German Social Democratic Party was then: free of ideological bitterness and hatred, strong for prosperity and justice and equality, the determined but moderate natural party of government which Harold Wilson foolishly thought he had achieved while actually destroying it."

"Undoubtedly the notional leader of British Jewry."

"So, to borrow the phrase Tony Blair used about himself during the first row over New Labour's funding, I regard Lord Levy as 'a pretty straight sort of guy'."

"There is a general feeling, and it is increasingly sensitive, that this is all about 'get the Jew'. I do not play the anti-Semitic card. But within my immediate community, and the Jewish community generally, they are sensitive to the fact that this is becoming all about one Jew."

"The object of Socialism is not to render the individual capable of living on his personal resources. That is the theory of radical individualism. Its object is to create in him a greater and greater sense of his dependence upon the state, and, at the same time, to inculcate in him the conviction that he is a part of it and that he has a duty and responsibility toward the state; and that only in so far as he fulfils this duty can he benefit by the advantages of a complete personal and social life."

"Truth," it has been said, "is the first casualty of war."

"It is no part of my job as Chancellor of the Exchequer to put before the House of Commons proposals for the expenditure of public money. The function of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, as I understand it, is to resist all demands for expenditure made by his colleagues and, when he can no longer resist, to limit the concession to the barest point of acceptance."

"I would like to see the word 'nationalization' banned from the socialist vocabulary."

"I hope you have read the election programme of the Labour Party...this is not socialism. It is Bolshevism run mad."

"They were told that Cobdenism was dead. ... Cobdenism was never more alive throughout the world than it was to-day. ... To-day the ideas of Cobden were in revolt against selfish nationalism. The need for the breaking down of trade restrictions, which took various forms, was universally recognized even by those who were unable to throw off those shackles."

"To every outworn shibboleth of 19th-century economics he clung with fanatic tenacity. Economy, Free Trade, Gold — these were the keynotes of his political philosophy, and deflation the path he trod with almost ghoulish enthusiasm."

"He was really a tender-hearted man, who would not have hurt a gnat unless his party and the Treasury told him to do so, and then only with compunction. ... We must imagine with what joy Mr. Snowden was welcomed at the Treasury by the permenant officials. All British Chancellors of the Exchequer have yielded themselves, some spontaneously, some unconsciously, some reluctantly to that compulsive intellectual atmosphere. But there was the High Priest entering the sanctuary. The Treasury mind and the Snowden mind embraced each other with the fervour of two long-separated kindred lizards, and the reign of joy began. He was a preaching friar with no Superior to obey but his intellect. ... The British democracy should be proud of Philip Snowden. He was a man capable of maintaining the structure of Society while at the same time championing the interests of the masses."

"It is always difficult for an administration or party which is founded upon attacking capital to preserve the confidence and credit so important to the highly artificial economy of an island like Britain. Mr. MacDonald’s Labour-Socialist Government were utterly unable to cope with the problems which confronted them. They could not command the party discipline or produce the vigour necessary even to balance the budget. In such conditions a Government, already in a minority and deprived of all financial confidence, could not survive. The failure of the Labour Party to face this tempest, the sudden collapse of British financial credit, and the break-up of the Liberal Party, with its unwholesome balancing power, led to a national coalition. It seemed that only a Government of all parties was capable of coping with the crisis. Mr. MacDonald and his Chancellor of the Exchequer, on a strong patriotic emotion, attempted to carry the mass of the Labour Party into this combination. Mr. Baldwin, always content that others should have the function so long as he retained the power, was willing to serve under Mr. MacDonald. It was an attitude which, though deserving respect, did not correspond to the facts. Mr. Lloyd George was still recovering from an operation – serious at his age; and Sir John Simon led the bulk of the Liberals into the all-party combination."

"When perhaps any Government would have been broken by economic events beyond the control or even the influence of this country—but when the outdated Treasury views of the pre-Keynes era, reinforced by the Puritan Cobdenism of Snowden, prevented any expansionist action to relieve unemployment. Men were sacrificed and left to rot under the Treasury doctrine that the way to deal with unemployment caused by chronic deficiency of demand was to add to that deficiency by cruel retrenchment."

"It was better to have a somewhat harsh Budget, which would cure inflation, rather than a generous, popular Budget which would merely undermine the purchasing power of the pound."

"Future nationalisations will be more concerned with equality than with planning, and this means that we can leave the monolithic public corporation behind us and look for more intimate forms of ownership and control."

"Neutrality is essentially a conservative policy, a policy of defeat, of announcing to the world that we have nothing to say to which the world will listen. ... Neutrality could never be acceptable to anyone who believes that he has a universal faith to preach. And those countries which have successfully adopted it in the past have paid the price of becoming little islands full of frustrated hedonists. Switzerland and Sweden are as ideologically sterile as they are physically undevastated."

"It is quite impossible to advocate both the abolition of great inequalities of wealth and the acceptance of a one-quarter public sector and three-quarters private sector arrangement. A mixed economy there will undoubtedly be, certainly for many decades and perhaps permanently, but it will need to be mixed in very different proportions from this."

"The first duty of a party of the left is to be radical in the context of the moment, to offer the prospect of continuing advance, and to preserve the loyalty of those whose optimistic humanism makes them its natural supporters."

"Representative democracy demands a clear division of function between the electors and the elected. The former choose their representatives and retain the essential right of sacking them, if they are not satisfied with their work, at the end of a fixed period. But in the meantime the elected representatives, whether they are members of Parliament or city councillors, should be given full freedom to do their jobs. Any form of referendum is an infringement of this freedom, and the more complex and detailed the issue upon which it is held the more absurd an infringement it becomes."

"It is hard to understand why an attempt to get more of the national product for those who at present get least is to be dismissed as pandering to envy, while an attempt to tilt it the other way by securing more concessions for the discontented Conservative electors of Tonbridge is not denounced as rapacity, and why the one is manifestly more worthy than the other."

"The chief danger for a country placed as we are is that of living sullenly in the past, of believing that the world has a duty to keep us in the station to which we are accustomed, and showing bitter resentment if it does not do so. This was the mood of Suez; and it is a mood absolutely guaranteed, not to recreate our past glories, but to reduce us to a level of influence and wealth far lower than that which we need occupy. ... Our neighbours in Europe are roughly our economic and military equals. We would do better to live gracefully with them than to waste our substance by trying unsuccessfully to keep up with the power giants of the modern world."

"Suez was a totally unsuccessful attempt to achieve unreasonable and undesirable objectives by methods which were at once reckless and immoral; and the consequences, as was well deserved, were humiliating and disastrous."

"Let us be on the side of those who want people to be free to live their own lives, to make their own mistakes, and to decide, in an adult way and provided they do not infringe the rights of others, the code by which they wish to live; and on the side of experiment and brightness, of better buildings and better food, of better music (jazz as well as Bach) and better books, of fuller lives and greater freedom. In the long run these things will be more important than the most perfect of economic policies."

"There is also the point, put by my hon. Friend the Member for Grimsby yesterday, that if we are to devote absolute priority constantly to shrinking the total of public expenditure as a proportion of our national income, what sort of community are we to live in? Do hon. Members opposite really want to see, in Professor Galbraith's striking phrase, "Public squalor in the midst of private affluence", as the future for this country? Let hon. Members make no mistake about it: that is what this involves, and our hospital, education and public services will become even more inadequate than they are at present if we devote our attention primarily and exclusively to the task of shrinking the proportion of public expenditure."

"We exist to change society. We are not likely to be very successful if we are horrified at any suggestion of changing ourselves. One of the things from which we are suffering is a misplaced national complacency: a belief that we do things better than anyone else. Do not let us be too afraid, as a Labour Party, of learning from some of our friends abroad. Parties all over the world have been modernizing themselves. There are only two unreconstructed socialist parties in the world—the French and the Australian. Do not let us be too conservative, complacent, and insular."

"I am myself convinced that the existing law on abortion is uncertain and is also, and perhaps more importantly, harsh and archaic and that it is in urgent need of reform. I certainly shall have no hesitation in voting for the Second Reading of the Bill. I take this view because I believe that we have here a major social problem. How can anyone believe otherwise when perhaps as many as 100,000 illegal operations a year take place, that the present law has shown itself quite unable to deal with the problem? I believe this, too, because of the danger which exists at present to those who are forced to resort to back-street abortionists and to the misery which is caused to some of those who fail to get an abortion. I believe it also because we all know...that the law is consistently flouted by those who have the means to do so. It is, therefore, very much a question of one law for the rich and one law for the poor."

"It would be a mistake to think...that by what we are doing tonight we are giving a vote of confidence or congratulation to homosexuality. Those who suffer from this disability carry a great weight of loneliness, guilt and shame. The crucial question, which we are nearly at the end of answering decisively, is, should we add to those disadvantages the full rigour of the criminal law? By its overwhelming decisions, the House has given a fairly clear answer, and I hope that the Bill will now make rapid progress towards the Statute Book. It will be an important and civilising Measure."

"No one contemplating the present position and looking back at the whole series of vicissitudes which has beset the British economy throughout the past 20 years can find the prospect other than very difficult at present. But I believe that there is also a great opportunity at present. There is certainly no quick, easy road to prosperity for this country, but the changes which must be made are fairly marginal. They must be made with absolute determination, but if they are so made, and accepted by the people, the whole outlook can change. The Government can only provide the right framework. Unless they do that, our national energies will be misdirected, but once they have done it the opportunities for export and growth and efficiency must be seized by everyone. There will still be two years of hard slog ahead. But at the end of it we could have a more securely-based prosperity than we have known for a generation."

"It is not some malevolent quirk of international bankers which makes the balance of payments surplus necessary. It is the hard facts of life. Quite a few of the resolutions mention the need to get rid of the shackles of international finance. These shackles can be exaggerated. If you want less to do with bankers and fewer International Monetary Fund visits the answer is straightforward: Help us to get out of debt. It is no good urging independence and denying policies to that end."

"In these circumstances it is essential we should be able to speak with sanity and authority in world monetary affairs. You cannot do this from a position of perpetual deficit."

"[The "permissive society" had been allowed to become a dirty phrase.] A better phrase is the 'civilized society', based on the belief that different individuals will wish to make different decisions about their patterns of behaviour and that, provided these do not restrict the freedom of others, they should be allowed to do so within a framework of understanding and tolerance. ... And the idea that our moderate progress towards giving the individual greater freedom from the law in matters of social conduct is responsible for the troubles of modern society is plain nonsense."

"One of the central purposes of democratic socialism was to extend throughout the community the opportunity of freedom of choice which used to be the prerogative of the few."

"Three years ago it [public opinion] was strongly in favour of entry [into the EEC]. It may change again...and in any case I do not believe that it is always the duty of those who seek to lead to follow public opinion."

"At conference the only alternative [to the EEC] we heard was 'socialism in one country'. That is always good for a cheer. Pull up the drawbridge and revolutionize the fortress. That's not a policy either: it's just a slogan, and it is one which becomes not merely unconvincing but hypocritical as well when it is dressed up as our best contribution to international socialism."

"In spite of half a century of effort, our society—and still more our world—is still disfigured by gross unfairness. ... Concern is indivisible and so is selfishness. A society which says 'to hell with famine and disease in Bangladesh, it's all their own fault, isn't it?' is extremely unlikely to balance this with compassion and justice for its own pensioners and its own low-paid."

"The next Labour Government can be content with nothing less than the elimination of poverty as a social problem. ... The Labour movement was created to fight against a wealthy minority on behalf of a poor majority. Now it has a more complex and demanding task. It has to enlist the majority in a struggle on behalf of a poor minority, who on grounds of age or health or family circumstances or disgracefully low pay are unable to help themselves. No one has a right to expect a fair deal for himself unless he is prepared to work for one for others too."

"We have to persuade men and women who are themselves reasonably well off that they have a duty to forgo some of the advantages they would otherwise enjoy for the sake of others who are much poorer. We have to persuade car workers in my constituency that they have an obligation to low-paid workers in the public sector. We have to persuade the British people as a whole that they have an obligation to Africans and Asians whom they have never seen. Our only hope is to appeal to the latent idealism of all men and women of good will, irrespective of their income brackets, irrespective of their class origins. In place of the politics of envy, we must put the politics of compassion; in place of the politics of cupidity, the politics of justice; in place of the politics of opportunism, the politics of principle. Only so can we hope to succeed. Only so will success be worth having."

"What is more likely [if there were a referendum]...is that party loyalties would be strongly mobilized and that in order to frustrate the government of the day the Opposition would form a temporary coalition of those who, whatever their political views, were against the proposed action. By this means we would have forged a more powerful continuing weapon against progressive legislation than anything we have known in this country since the curbing of the absolute powers of the old House of Lords. Apart from the obvious example of capital punishment, I would not in these circumstances fancy the chances, to take a few random but important examples, of many measures to improve race relations, or to extend public ownership, or to advance the right of individual dissent, or to introduce the planning restraints which will become increasingly necessary if our society is to avoid strangling itself."

"There has been a lot of talk about the formation of a new centre party. Some have even been kind enough to suggest that I might lead it. I find this idea profoundly unattractive. I do so for at least four reasons. First, I do not believe that such a grouping would have any coherent philosophical base...A party based on such a rag-bag could stand for nothing positive. It would exploit grievances and fall apart when it sought to remedy them. I believe in exactly the reverse sort of politics...Second, I believe that the most likely effect of such an ill-considered grouping would be to destroy the prospect of an effective alternative government to the Conservatives...Some genuinely want a new, powerful anti-Conservative force. They would be wise to reflect that it is much easier to will this than to bring it about. The most likely result would be chaos on the left and several decades of Conservative hegemony almost as dismal and damaging as in the twenties and thirties. Third, I do not share the desire, at the root of much such thinking, to push what may roughly be called the leftward half of the Labour Party...out of the mainstream of British politics...Fourth, and more personally, I cannot be indifferent to the political traditions in which I was brought up and in which I have lived my political life. Politics are not to me a religion, but the Labour Party is and always had been an instinctive part of my life."

"It is not much good talking about fundamental and irreversible changes in our society and being content with a 38 per cent Labour voting intention. ... Democracy means that you need a substantially stronger moral position than this to govern effectively at all, let alone effecting a peaceful social revolution. The programme we put forward must be capable of being carried out in what may well be difficult economic circumstances."

"[Roy Jenkins] agreed with many of the criticisms levelled against the performance of private industry and he agreed that the country needed a sharp change. There was a case for a significant extension of public ownership. (Applause.) But public ownership must be related directly to the ordinary Labour voters and the potential Labour voters in their day to day lives, particularly in development areas, to inflation, housing, and land use. "It is no good taking over a vast number of industries without a clear plan as to how and by whom they are going to be run. It is no good pretending that a transfer of ownership in itself solves our problems.""

"The sense of shame that the Chancellor should have felt is far more personal. It is a sense of shame for having taken over an economy with a £1,000 million surplus and running it to a £2,000 million deficit. It is a sense of shame for having conducted our internal financial affairs with such profligacy that our public accounts are out of balance as never before. It is a sense of shame for having presided over the greatest depreciation of the currency, both at home and abroad, in our history. It is a sense of shame for having left us at a moment of test far weaker than most of our neighbours...There is, I believe, a greater threat to the effective working of our democratic institutions than most of us have seen in our adult lifetimes. I do not believe that it springs primarily from the machinations of subversively-minded men, although no doubt they are there and are anxious to exploit exploitable situations. It comes much more dangerously from a widespread cynicism with the processes of our political system. I believe that the Chancellor contributed to that on Monday. I believe that it poses a serious challenge to us all...None of us should seek salvation through chaos. There is a duty too to recognise that we could slip into a still worse rate of inflation and a world spiral-ling downwards towards slump, unemployment and falling standards, with our selves, temporarily at least, well in the vanguard. What is required is neither an imposed solution nor an open hand at the till. The alternative to reaching a settlement with the miners is paralysis...The task of statesmanship is to reach a settlement but to do it in a way which opens no floodgates for if they were opened, it would not only damage everyone but it would undermine the differential which the miners deserve and which the nation now needs them to have."

"...one should not doubt that there is in Britain a great body of moderate, rather uncommitted opinion, and that unless substantial sections of such opinion can feel happy in supporting one or other of the major parties the result will be an intolerable strain upon the traditional pattern of politics. ... The stalemate will not be broken unless and until we can move over to the Labour Party a sizable part of this potentially progressive, but non-extreme opinion. I do not think that has happened yet."

"If we are to get through the immense problems of the next few years we need to heal and not to deepen the wounds of the nation. That can, I believe, be done upon the basis of party government. ... But it cannot be done upon the basis of ignoring middle opinion and telling everyone who does not agree with you to go to hell."

"...we are a party dedicated to the rule of law and to parliamentary democracy. What the law says, even if we don't like it, is what we have to accept until we can change it by constitutional means. No one is entitled to be above the law. If we weaken on that principle we can say goodbye to democratic socialism, because what is sauce for the goose will be sauce for the gander, and there are plenty of right-wing elements who if given the excuse would gain momentum in defying future measures of social progress which they would not like. That is and will be my policy as long as I am at the Home Office."

"...it must be clear that a future Labour Government intends to keep Britain fully part of the Western community of nations. ... Today there is a greater danger of that community falling apart than at any time since 1947. ... I myself believe that the threat of such a breakup would be greatly exacerbated by our withdrawal from Europe. ... There is no future for an isolationist Britain. If anyone wants a Britain poised uneasily between the Western alliance and the Communist block they can in the immortal words of Mr Sam Goldwyn "include me out"."

"But this is not merely a question of our political and military posture. It also affects our economic policy. We have to live and trade in an open world. We cannot make ourselves a closed society in which we can only keep men and capital by erecting a ring fence around ourselves so that they have to stay. ... To sustain it [our overseas deficit]—and the only alternative would be a drastic cut in our standard of living and a considerable contribution to the dislocation of world trade—we shall have to borrow and go on borrowing a great deal from abroad. To pretend that you could get this money in while retreating into a siege economy would be to live in a world of dangerous phantasy."

"I am in favour of sensible, well argued extensions of public ownership. ... But I am also in favour of a healthy, vigorous and profitable private sector. We do and shall depend upon it to provide a great part of our jobs, our exports and our production. And if we allow a mood of sullen uncertainty to build up in that sector we shall lose more than we shall gain by the sensible and necessary extension of the public sector."

"...we must recognise that the greatest threat to the cohesion of our society today is the still increasing rate of inflation. ... We are approaching a new threshold...which is a rate with which hardly any democratic system in the world has so far survived. ... No country can accept this rate of inflation for more than a very short period. ... Its effects will be unfair, divisive, unsettling and in the last resort destructive. ... No one will be able to plan ahead. The country will not for long put up with it. If we cannot solve it by tolerable and civilized methods, then someone within a few years will solve it by intolerable and uncivilized ones."

"We must restore some stability and be prepared, if necessary, to make some sacrifices, both of dogma and materialism, to achieve it. There is no point in pretending that we are not facing an economic crisis without precedent since the growth of post-war prosperity."

"What makes you think I care about my political career? All that matters to me is what is happening in the world, which I think is heading for disaster. I can't stand by and see us pretend everything is all right when I know we are heading for catastrophe. It isn't only Europe. It is a question of whether this country is going to cut itself off from the Western Alliance and go isolationist."

"[I] could not stay in a Cabinet which had to carry out withdrawal [from the EEC]."

"It is the police who are our main protection against terrorism and it is to the police that we must give our sustenance and support. It cannot be without reluctance that we contemplate powers of the kind proposed in the Bill, involving as they must some encroachment—limited but real—on the liberties of individual citizens. Few things would provide a more gratifying victory to the terrorists than for this country to undermine its traditional freedoms in the very process of countering the enemies of those freedoms. This we must keep in mind not only today but in the future as we persevere in what may not be a short struggle to eradicate terrorism from this country...the Bill proposes strengthened powers in four broad areas. First, it proscribes the IRA and makes display of support for it illegal. Second, the Bill makes it possible to make exclusion orders against persons who are involved in terrorism. Third, the Bill gives the police wide powers to arrest and detain, within limits, suspected terrorists. Fourth, it gives the police powers to carry out a security check on all travellers entering and leaving Great Britain and Northern Ireland."

"Inflation in Britain is at an unacceptable level. It is now mostly home-induced and wage-induced. It is moving well out of line with that of the rest of the world. If it goes on doing so it will ruin us as a nation, both economically and politically. It is of a different order from any of our other difficulties. It is, quite simply, our biggest menace since Hitler."

"Let there be no doubt that our present rate of inflation is the main cause of our economic difficulties. There never has been a more mistaken piece of economic analysis than the view that we should accept inflation to avoid unemployment. Inflation today, so far from being an alternative to unemployment, is its main cause. If our rate of cost increase is allowed to continue close to twice that of the average for the developed world it will increasingly price us out of world markets. Employers...will have to restrict their activities and still more their labour force in response to mounting and uncontainable wage and salary bills."

"Not to have gone into Europe would, in my view, have been a misfortune. But to come out would be on an altogether greater scale of self-inflicted injury. It would be a catastrophe. ... I care very much about the influence of Britain in the world, and also about our capacity to control our own destiny. To me, that is much more important than the legalistic definition of sovereignty."

"Were we to leave [the EEC], the worst damage would be done to ourselves. But not only damage. Western unity, at a time of great international danger, is under greater strain than at any time since it was put together in the aftermath of the war a generation ago. Were we to start to disengage, the whole delicate but precious structure might begin to fall apart."

"The myths about the evils of the [European] Community grow ever more manifold as day passes day. We are told that it would prevent any advance of public ownership. What happened to British Leyland during the past two days? The truth is almost the reverse. It is not the change of ownership which is threatened by staying in, it is the basic plan for buttressing and rejuvenating British Leyland and saving the jobs which go with it which would be fatally undermined by coming out."

"He could not regard the question of sovereignty as the ark of the covenant of socialism. It was neither socialist nor realistic to think one could have sovereignty in the world of today. "We live in an integrated world and our duty is to play our part in that with our neighbours. I distrust people who proclaim their love for humanity but illustrate it by being unable to get on with those around them.""

"I find it increasingly difficult to take Mr Benn seriously as an economics minister."

"[Britain outside the EEC would go into] an old people's home for fading nations. I do not believe in premature senility, either for nations or for individuals. And I do not even think it would be a comfortable or agreeable old people's home. I do not much like the look of some of the prospective wardens. I do not think the food or heating supplies would be very secure. There would be nobody much to pay for renovations. Our old friends would not much want to come and see us (the axis of power would run increasingly from Washington to Bonn or Brussels). We would find it increasingly difficult to afford to go and see them; and even if we got there we might find ourselves greeted on the doorstep with more embarrassment than welcome."

"If Reg Prentice is cut down it is not just the local party that is undermining its own foundations by ignoring the beliefs and feelings of ordinary people, the whole legitimate Labour Party, left as well as right, is crippled if extremists have their way. ... If tolerance is shattered formidable consequences will follow. Labour MPs will either have to become creatures of cowardice, concealing their views, trimming their sails, accepting orders, stilling their consciences, or they will all have to be men far far to the left of those whose votes they seek. Either would make a mockery of parliamentary democracy. The first would reduce still further, and rightly reduce, respect for the House of Commons. It would become an assembly of men with craven spirits and crooked tongues. The second would, quite simply, divorce the Labour Party from the people."

"I do not think you can push public expenditure significantly above 60 per cent [of GNP] and maintain the values of a plural society with adequate freedom of choice. We are here close to one of the frontiers of social democracy."

"...be prepared first to look at the evidence and to recognize how little the widespread use of prison reduces our crime or deals effectively with many of the individuals concerned. [The rule of law does not mean] our own pet prejudices. It means, in a democratic society, the law as passed by an elected Parliament and applied by impartial courts. You cannot have a rule of law while dismissing with disparagement Parliament, the courts and those who practise in them. That is not the rule of law. It is exactly what the pressure groups you complain about seek to achieve by demonstration."

"I respect your right to put them to me. You will no doubt respect my right to tell you that I do not think all the points in sum amount to a basis for a rational penal policy."

"Our determination to ensure good community relations is unswerving. There is no room for racial hatred in our crowded island. We cannot afford not to make a success of a multi-racial society. A moving speech was made the other day in the other place by Lord Pitt, himself a distinguished citizen of London of West Indian origin. In that speech, he looked forward hopefully to a harmonious multiracial Britain setting an example to the world. He spoke on a high level of moral seriousness, but reminded us too that our self-interest is also served by racial harmony and tolerance. I agree with that view, and would share Lord Pitt's hope, but I do not see it as an easy or even a certain outcome, at any rate in this generation. Its accomplishment will depend on the minority community accepting that this country will not take, in Lord Pitt's own words, a "large and unending stream" of dependants, and on the majority community accepting that tolerance is one of the greatest and most traditional of British virtues and that if that tradition is broken we shall all of us suffer deeply, both minority and majority, and suffer for many years to come."

"My wish is to build an effective united Europe. Now I've never sought absolutely to define exactly what I mean by this, but I've got an absolute clear sense of direction. I've never been frightened about the pace being too fast, I have been frightened about the pace being too slow. I do not think it's terribly useful to lay down blueprints as to whether one will be federal or confederal in the year 2000 and beyond. I want to move towards a more effectively organized Europe politically and economically and as far as I am concerned I want to go faster, not slower."

"I think that British politics, as at present constituted do make it difficult for people who are essentially men of the centre—I am a man of the left centre, but I've never pretended to be terribly far away from the centre of British politics. ... The gladiatorial nature of the House of Commons, with two sides lined up against each other, puts a premium on disagreement rather than upon agreement. This is inclined on both sides to give a greater strength to the wings rather than to the centre. ... there are appalling economic problems facing this country at the present time...I don't think it's terribly useful, terribly relevant or terribly convincing just to engage in an endless game of tu quoque. You've got to think of something better than 'It's your fault',—'No, it's not, it's your fault'. There's a sterility in this which is a danger to the country."

"There has always been a left, an extreme left, in the Labour Party. ... there is now more of an attempt, patchy, but an attempt by extremist organizations to infiltrate and work through the Labour Party at the present time—the phrase is 'entryism'. It is something which is certainly there and which one certainly has to beware of."

"If one looks at the evolution of Europe, you can say we've got a customs union, we've got the common agricultural policy, we've got certain other forms of integration and cohesion, but many of the hopes of the founding fathers are still very far from being realized."

"Those who had most insistently demanded the innovation of the referendum, because they thought it would produce exactly the opposite result, were temporarily stunned by the sudden revelation that they were populists without the support of the people. Now they have recovered from their concussion and seek to reopen the issue. ... Even if they had a coherent alternative policy, which they do not, it would wreck itself upon the rock of inconstancy. ... No one any longer expects us to be a rich country. But with an almost touching faith they still hope that we will be consistent and reliable. It is exactly this store of remaining national credit which the false democrats who first demanded and now deny the referendum seek to undermine."

"We must relaunch with a newly defined relevance to the circumstances of the late 1970s the drive towards economic and monetary union. We must find ways of avoiding recourse to the danger of psuedo-solutions of national protectionism to threats to sensitive sectors of the economy."

"[The effect of the Suez Crisis on the French was quite different.] We turned across the Atlantic. They turned across the Rhine, and Europe was built without us. There is room for argument about the causes of what followed. There is no doubt about what happened. Over the first 13 years of the [European] Community's life national income per head increased by 72 per cent in the Six and by 35 per cent in Britain. The result was that from being almost the richest country in Western Europe we became one of the poorest. France for the first time since the industrial revolution surpassed us in economic strength. The German economy achieved nearly twice our weight."

"Do we really believe that we have been more effectively and coherently governed over the past two decades than have the Germans, with their very sensible system of proportional representation? The avoidance of incompatible coalitions? Do we really believe that the last Labour Government was not a coalition, in fact if not in name, and a pretty incompatible one at that? I served in it for half its life, and you could not convince me of anything else."

"You also make sure that the state knows its place, not only in relation to the economy, but in relation to the citizen. You are in favour of the right of dissent and the liberty of private conduct. You are against unnecessary centralization and bureaucracy. You want to devolve decision-making wherever you sensibly can. You want parents in the school system, patients in the health service, residents in the neighbourhood, customers in both nationalized and private industry, to have as much say as possible. You want the nation to be self-confident and outward-looking, rather than insular, xenophobic and suspicious. You want the class system to fade without being replaced either by an aggressive and intolerant proletarianism or by the dominance of the brash and selfish values of a 'get rich quick' society. ... These are some of the objectives which I believe could be assisted by a strengthening of the radical centre."

"During this conversation she vouchsafed her only awareness of Dimbleby. The Belgian Prime Minister was justifying his hesitancy about cruise missiles by citing his coalition difficulties. Mrs Thatcher turned to me with a mixture of belligerence, good humour and total self-satisfaction and announced to a slightly bewildered table – none of them elected by the British system – "And that is all your great schemes would amount to.""

"[A]lmost without a struggle, we have just witnessed a major lurch to the left in policy-making. The supreme authority of the Labour Party committed itself nine days ago to...a near neutralist and unilateralist position, which would make meaningless our continued membership of NATO...a commitment to practical non-cooperation with the European Community, leading in all likelihood to a firm proposal for complete withdrawal...a massive further extension of the public sector, despite the manifold unsolved problems which beset our nationalised industries, and mounting evidence from all over the world that full-scale state ownership is more successful in producing tyranny than in producing goods. Capitalism has its crisis today, but so too does estate socialism. There is now no economic philosopher's stone. But more successful nations are those which embrace a mixed economy and follow it with some consistency of purpose, not forever changing the frontiers. What remains of the private sector is to have enterprise squeezed out of it by being subjected to a straightjacket far tighter than in any other democratic country in the world. This is not by any stretch of the imagination a social democratic programme. Nor do I believe that it is the way to protect Britain's security, help the peace of the world, revitalise our economy, or represent the views of the great majority of moderate left voters."

"I therefore believe that the politics of the left and centre of this country are frozen in an out-of-date mould which is bad for the political and economic health of Britain and increasingly inhibiting for those who live within the mould. Can it be broken? ... There was once a book, more famous for its title than for its contents, called the Strange Death of Liberal England. That death caught people rather unawares. Do not discount the possibility that in a few years time someone may be able to write at least equally convincingly of the strange and rapid revival of liberal social democratic Britain."

"The two main parties feared the SDP more than they feared each other. Their narrow dogmas had alienated more and more people and would never achieve a widening appeal across classes, regions and occupations. They had replied by trying to pretend that the SDP was all things to all men and women. It was not true. ... It had no place for class warriors or for those who wanted to fight outdated ideological battles; no place for little Englanders; for those selfishly concerned with their own problems and not with those of their neighbours and the nation as a whole. The Labour Party went increasingly into its chauvinist bunker and the Conservative Party showed little or no concern for the problems of the developing and poor nations."

"Many of the early nationalisation measures were right. They have remained part of the social fabric. I favour measures of that type."

"Oh, Socialism! I haven't used that word for years. If you mean nationalizing the means of production, distribution and exchange... That leads to disaster. I mean, just look at Poland!"

"We had our liberal hour, when we passed the Sexual Offences Act which stopped all homosexuals being criminals. I'm not ashamed of that. We mustn't slip back into illiberal attitudes. You see, there are two strands in the Labour Party. The libertarian strand and the authoritarian puritan strand. By and large, the libertarians have come with us and the others have stayed behind."

"The whole spirit and outlook of the [SDP] party, its leaders and its members must be profoundly opposed to Thatcherism. It could not go along with the fatalism of the Government's acceptance of massive unemployment."

"A rolling back of the frontiers of State surveillance is necessary. ... I have come to the conclusion that this side of MI5 has become more trouble than it is worth. It falls over its own feet too often. It arouses more suspicion and complaint than is justified by the results its achieves. ... On grounds of utility I would now close down the political side of its activities."

"First, there is really no sign at all of any significant reduction in unemployment without a major change in policy...Unemployment has probably levelled out but at a totally unacceptable figure. Secondly, contrary to what the Secretary of State said, the post-oil surplus prospect—not merely the post-oil prospect, because the oil will take a long time to go, but the surplus, the big balance of payments surplus, which is beginning to decline quite quickly—still looks devastating...our balance of payments is now overwhelmingly dependent on this highly temporary and massive oil surplus. Our manufacturing industry is shrunken and what remains is uncompetitive...We have a manufacturing trade deficit of approximately £11 billion, all of which has built up in the past three to four years. This is containable by oil and by nothing else. Invisibles can take care of about £4 billion or £5 billion but they cannot do the whole job. As soon as oil goes into a neutral position we are in deep trouble. Should it go into a negative position, the situation would be catastrophic...To sell off a chunk of capital assets and to use the proceeds for capital investment in the rest of the public sector might just be acceptable. However, that is not what is proposed, and what is proposed cannot be justified on any reputable theory of public finance; and when it is accompanied by a Minister using the oil—which might itself be regarded as a capital asset; certainly it is not renewable—almost entirely for current purposes, it amounts to improvident finance on a scale that makes the Prime Minister's old friend General Galtieri almost Gladstonian."

"Several fallacies have been accepted too freely recently about the position of our manufacturing industry in the balance of our economy. The biggest fallacy is the view that salvation lies in services, and only in services. The corollary to that is that it is inevitable and desirable that over the past two decades there has been a reduction of nearly 3 million in employment in manufacturing industry. That is a massive reduction and represents nearly 40 per cent. of the total in manufacturing industry over that time. I do not believe that that should have been the case. That has been precipitate and dangerous and it has not been associated with an increase in productivity which has led to our maintaining our relative manufacturing position...I have come increasingly to the view that the Government stand back too much from industry. In my experience, they do so more than any other Government in the European Community. They do so more than the United States Government. We have to remember the vast US defence involvement in industry. They certainly stand back more than do the Japanese Government. To some extent, the motive is the feeling that we have had an uncompetitive and rather complacent industry which must be exposed to the full blasts of competition, and if that means contracts, even Government contracts, going overseas, we should shrug our shoulders and say that the wind should be stimulating. That process has been carried much further in Britain than in any other comparable rival country. I am resolutely opposed to protectionism. I am sure that it diminishes the employment and wealth-creating capacity of the world as a whole. That would be the result of plunging back into that policy. I also believe, however, that this totally arm's-length approach in the relationship between Government and industry is something that no other comparable Government contemplate to the extent that we do. It is not producing good results for British industry and it is a recipe for a further decline in Britain's position in the Western world. The Government should examine it carefully and reverse it in several important respects."

"The combined efforts of Government policy since 1979 have been not to improve but substantially to worsen our competitive position. We have gone from a huge manufacturing surplus of £5.5 billion in 1980 to a 1986 third quarter deficit of £8 billion a year...Even with oil production continuing for some time, the current account has gone from a £3 billion surplus to a deficit predicted by the Chancellor of £1.5 billion...Sadly, the Government's great contribution, having refused to stimulate the economy by more respectable means, is a roaring consumer boom, which there is not the slightest chance of their moderating before an election. A roaring consumer boom does not, to any significant extent, mean more employment. In our competitive position, worsening under the Government, it means overwhelmingly higher imports, a still worse balance of payments position and a classic path to perdition. To have produced, after seven and a half years, the combination of total monetary muddle, a worsened competitive position, a widespread doubt in other countries as to how we are to pay our way in the future, a desperately vulnerable currency and the prospect of an unending plateau of the highest unemployment in a major country in the industrialised world is a unique achievement over which the Chancellor is an appropriate deputy acting presiding officer."

"We have Mr. Wright's allegation that a surveillance operation was mounted against Lord Wilson of Rievaulx when he was Prime Minister in the mid-1970s...Many criticisms can be made of Lord Wilson's stewardship—I have made some in the past and I have no doubt that I may make some more in future—but the view that he, with his too persistent record of maintaining Britain's imperial commitments across the world, with his over-loyal lieutenancy to Lyndon Johnson, with his fervent royalism, and with his light ideological luggage, was a likely candidate to be a Russian or Communist agent is one that can be entertained only by someone with a mind diseased by partisanship or unhinged by living for too long in an Alice-Through-the-Looking-glass world in which falsehood becomes truth, fact becomes fiction and fantasy becomes reality. The result of the allegation has been substantially to fortify the view that I expressed in a letter to The Times 18 months ago, which is that MI5 should now be pulled totally out of its political surveillance role."

"It is the duty of the state to lean firmly but unvindictively in favour of greater equality."

"They [the Government] argue that if the rich are made rich enough, some wealth will spill over to make the poor less poor. There is no sign of that happening. On the contrary, the gap has widened. The number of those below the poverty line and with little hope of rising above it has grown inexorably. Connected divides become deeper and wider—that between the employed and the unemployed, that between the north and south, and that between those who share prosperity and those to whom it looks like a closed fortress. The Budget...does nothing to counteract that. ... If I were the Chancellor, I would be deeply apprehensive for the future cohesion of our society under his policies."

"I therefore think that our negotiations have achieved a satisfactory prospectus for an electable left-of-centre alternative to Thatcherism. And that was what the SDP was always intended to be: a party which was free alike of proletarian sullenness or of bourgeois triumphalism and which challenged both the old arrogance that the establishment always knows best (particularly if it can use secrecy to prevent anyone judging whether it really does) and the new heresy that the mystical entity of "the market" can run everything. A controlled economy is not much good at producing consumer goods. But "the market", in terms of protecting the environment or safeguarding health, schools, universities or Britain's scientific future, cannot run a whelk-stall. And if asked which is under greater threat in Britain today, the supply of consumer goods or the nexus of civilized public services, I unhesitatingly answer the latter."

"Undoubtedly, looking back, we nearly all allowed ourselves, for decades, to be frozen into rates of personal taxation which were ludicrously high...That frozen framework has been decisively cracked, not only by the prescripts of Chancellors but in the expectations of the people. It is one of the things for which the Government deserve credit...However, even beneficial revolutions have a strong tendency to breed their own excesses. There is now a real danger of the conventional wisdom about taxation, public expenditure and the duty of the state in relation to the distribution of rewards, swinging much too far in the opposite direction...I put in a strong reservation against the view, gaining ground a little dangerously I think, that the supreme duty of statesmanship is to reduce taxation."

"We have been building up, not dissipating, overseas assets. The question is whether, while so doing, we have been neglecting our investment at home and particularly that in the public services. There is no doubt, in my mind at any rate, about the ability of a low taxation market-oriented economy to produce consumer goods, even if an awful lot of them are imported, far better than any planned economy that ever was or probably ever can be invented. However, I am not convinced that such a society and economy, particularly if it is not infused with the civic optimism which was in many ways the true epitome of Victorian values, is equally good at protecting the environment or safeguarding health, schools, universities or Britain's scientific future. And if we are asked which is under greater threat in Britain today—the supply of consumer goods or the nexus of civilised public services—it would be difficult not to answer that it was the latter."

"In retrospect we might have been more cautious about allowing the creation in the 1950s of substantial Muslim communities here, although when one observes the, in some ways, greater problems which France and Germany have in this respect, it is an illusion to believe that in the integrated world of today any major country can remain exclusively indigenous."

"My broad position remains firmly libertarian, sceptical of official cover-ups and uncompromisingly internationalist, believing sovereignty to be an almost total illusion in the modern world, although both expecting and welcoming the continuance of strong differences in national traditions and behaviour. I distrust the deification of the enterprise culture. I think there are more limitations to the wisdom of the market than were dreamt of in Mrs Thatcher's philosophy. I believe that levels of taxation on the prosperous, having been too high for many years (including my own period at the Treasury), are now too low for the provision of decent public services. And I think the privatisation of near monopolies is about as irrelevant as (and sometimes worse than) were the Labour Party's proposals for further nationalisation in the 1970s and early 1980s."

"...my natural prejudices, such as they are, are much more green than orange. I am a poor unionist, believing intuitively that even Paisley and Haughey are better at dealing with each other than the English are with either."

"...the basic fact of Tony Blair's election does make it, in my view, the most exciting Labour choice since the election of Hugh Gaitskell in December 1955. ... The most fundamental presentation issue for the Labour Party is one of openness or inwardness. Nothing does the party more harm than when it turns in on itself in a mood of proletarian sullenness. Tony Blair epitomises the reverse of this. ... I hope he will use this opportunity in favour of sticking to a constructive line on Europe, in favour of sensible constitutional innovation...and in favour of friendly relations with the Liberal Democrats. ... I hope Mr Blair will not lead the Labour Party further in a free-market direction. Good work has been done in freeing it from nationalisation and other policies. But the market cannot solve everything and it would be a pity to embrace the stale dogmas of Thatcherism just when their limitations are becoming obvious."

"I have three great interests left in politics, a single currency, electoral reform, and the union of the Liberals with Labour. And all three are languishing."

"My central belief is that there are only two coherent British attitudes to Europe. One is to participate fully in all the main activities of the Union and to endeavour to exercise as much influence and gain as much benefit as possible from inside. The other is to recognise that Britain's history, national psychology and political culture may be such that we can never be other than a foot-dragging and constantly complaining member. If so, it would be better, and certainly would produce less friction, to accept this and to move towards an orderly and, if possible, reasonably amicable withdrawal."

"My view is that the Prime Minister [Tony Blair], far from lacking conviction, has almost too much, particularly when dealing with the world beyond Britain. He is a little too Manichaean for my perhaps now jaded taste, seeing matters in stark terms of good and evil, black and white, contending with each other, and with a consequent belief that if evil is cast down good will inevitably follow. I am more inclined to see the world and the regimes within it in varying shades of grey. The experience of the past year, not least in Afghanistan, has given more support to that view than to the more Utopian one that a quick "change of regime" can make us all live happily ever after."

"I am in favour of courage—who is ever not in the abstract?—but not of treating it as a substitute for wisdom, as I fear we are currently in danger of doing."

"He is a superb debater, skilful in his deployment of argument, sensitive to the mood of the House, sometimes commanding in his use of language. However harshly his Budgets may hit the pocket, at least they should fall pleasantly on the ear... [H]e has today a more committed personal following than any other senior Labour politician... [T]he impression being built up of him as an intelligent, liberal, idealistic figure has won him some support even on the left, in addition to his firm adherents among the younger men of the centre and right."

"As a parliamentary performer...Mr Jenkins is a class apart from the rest of either front bench... He not only looks superior: he is superior."

"Roy Jenkins has risen fully and magnificently to the occasion. Yesterday's Budget was really everything that was economically needed. It should give devaluation a virtually certain guarantee of success."

"He may not be a Socialist but at least he is a radical. Jim is neither."

"Roy's drawl always lengthens when he is angry, which heightens the effect of contempt."

"The trouble with Roy is that he is so damned civilized. If only he could remain civilized and have an injection of red blood as well."

"Rousseau's educational theories had persuaded teachers] to dispense with the structured systems of learning which have been so successful in the past. [The result is] the belief, taught by Mr Roy Jenkins, that a permissive is a civilised society... A facile rhetoric of total liberty and of costless, superficial universal protest has really been a cover for irresponsibility. Our loud talk about the community overlies the fact that we have no community. We talk about neighbourhoods and all too often we have no neighbours. We go on about the home when we only have dwelling places containing television sets. It is the absence of a frame of rules and community, place and belonging, responsibility and neighbourliness that makes it possible for people to be more lonely than in any previous stage in our history. Vast factories, huge schools, sprawling estates, sky-scraping apartment blocks; all these work against our community and our common involvement one with another."

"The "Council of Social Democracy" seems an awfully dull name. I was going to suggest that the Jenkins–Williams group should be called the League of Agweeable Fellows Incommoded by Tiresome Extweemism – or Lafite for short... Mr Jenkins himself is possibly the most over-rated figure in British politics, a competent administrator but an uninspiring speaker and an irritating writer. He gave his political testament in the Dimbleby Lecture the November before last: "You want the class system to fade without being replaced either by an aggressive and intolerant proletarianism or by the dominance of the brash and selfish values of a 'get rich quick' society." In other words, as Ferdinand Mount glossed at the time, you want to keep the yobs away from the best claret."

"A socialite rather than a Socialist."

"I wholly agree that Mr. Jenkins' saying that a permissive society is a civilised society is something that most of us would totally reject. Society must have rules if it is to continue to be civilised. Those rules must be observed and upheld by Government and by all leaders throughout the community."

"[T]his much-loved, gracious figure who is to the liberal classes what the Queen Mother is to the rest of us."

"[B]efore the Argentine action he was the subject of all our attention. He had won Hillhead. He had taken his seat. He has put a notably incomprehensible, but no doubt distinguished, maiden question to the Prime Minister about micro-chips. All things seemed possible for him. But within days Dr David Owen had seized the SDP controls and was roaring away on the subject of submarines, frigates, and vertical take-off. Dr Owen is at home with such matters. Mr Jenkins is not. Like Switzerland, he is prosperous, comfortable, civilized and almost entirely landlocked. His only previous contact with the high seas has been in various good fish restaurants."

"I went to the BBC for Question Time... Roy Jenkins was going on about Militant being a "cancer in the Labour Party", so when it came to me I turned on him and the SDP. "You talk about cancer! Everything you have achieved in your life has been on the backs of the working class. Your father was a miner; he was imprisoned in 1926; and every office you have ever held was because of the Labour Party, and then you kick away the ladder." I thought he was going to have a stroke. His face went absolutely scarlet. He is used to being buttered up as a man of principle."

"He was not a good Chancellor. He was really responsible for the inflation which began in 1970 and continued in the years after and it was his fault."

"I thought it was horrifying that they threw him out at Hillhead. A man of such great distinction and stature. It was dreadful. It tells you something about the Scots."

"In Bruce Anderson's Sunday Telegraph...article he writes about the idea that Roy Jenkins might have become Chancellor of the Exchequer in her (Mrs Thatcher's) first government... We had discussed it quite frequently and she was very interested in it, having some doubts about Geoffrey Howe at the time and recognizing how good Roy Jenkins had been at cutting expenditure."

"In my view, Roy's best period in office was as Home Secretary in the Cabinet of 1966; he then succeeded in stamping his liberal humanism on a department not notorious for that quality. He was not well suited to the politics of class and ideology which played so large a role in the Labour Party. His natural environment was the Edwardian age on which he wrote so well... His appearance had the sleek pomposity of Mr Podsnap; behind it there was a sharp and unsentimental mind... Above all, he was never satisfied with second place in any field; he always wanted to be top. I believe this explains much in his career after his poor showing in the election for Labour Party leadership in 1976."

"Callaghan resigned as Chancellor after devaluation. His place was taken by Roy Jenkins who was, in my judgment, the ablest of the four Chancellors I served. He listened to advice, but made up his own mind, explaining to his advisers the grounds for his decision. He was at times able to foresee contingencies of which his staff had not warned him, such as the possible devaluation of the French franc, and was judicious in assessing such contingencies and deciding what measures were appropriate to the circumstances. He was not afraid to take extreme measures to overcome major dangers, adding more to taxation and cutting more from public expenditure than his advisers suggested and showing a sound judgment of what was at stake. This resoluteness in the circumstances in which he took office enabled him to carry the Cabinet with him after three years in which they had shrunk from much milder action."

"A. J. P. Taylor told me in 1970, in one of those impromptu addresses to individuals that made the Beaverbrook Library so entertaining a place, that Wilson was transparently Lloyd George redivivus and Roy Jenkins an aspirant Asquith."

"[H]e is the second most successful British politician of modern times. The first is Margaret Thatcher... Roy Jenkins is one of those characters, best portrayed by Trollope, who is thoroughly worldly and yet has integrity. Power and glamour and party (and parties) all matter to him, but they matter only in a context that is, though he would avoid the phrase, morally serious. Despite his accent and demeanour (only his pronunciation of the word "sitooation" discloses the Welsh background), Jenkins has deep roots in the Labour movement. His opponents say that he severed them for snobbish reasons, but it is more likely that he did so because of a principled preference for the liberal over the tribal."

"And in persona, though clearly self-regarding and de haut en bas, he is also amused, self-critical, unbitter and detached. He is one of the few retired senior politicians who do not seem warped or broken by the career they have chosen. Perhaps this is because Jenkins knows that he has striven for what he believed in most of the time, and achieved a good deal of it. We are a "liberal" society in the sense in which he meant it. We are in the European Union. We have a Labour government in which the power of the labour movement has been weakened beyond Roy's wildest hopes. It's thanks to him more than any other single person. True, the whole thing is pretty ghastly, and far from the "civilised" polity he wanted. But that is not because of any personal failing: it is simply because he is, by and large, in the wrong."

"One of the outstanding statesmen of his era."

"As a founder of the SDP he was probably the grandfather of New Labour."

"One of the most remarkable people ever to grace British politics. He was a friend and support to me."

"An outstanding British statesman and a great European. He will be remembered with great esteem for his historic role in the birth of the euro."

"Roy Jenkins was both radical and contemporary; and this made him the most influential exponent of the progressive creed in politics in postwar Britain. Moreover, the political creed for which he stood belongs as much to the future as to the past. For Jenkins was the prime mover in the creation of a form of social democracy which, being internationalist, is peculiarly suited to the age of globalisation and, being liberal, will prove to have more staying power than the statism of Lionel Jospin or the corporatist socialism of Gerhard Schröder."

"Roy Jenkins was the first leading politician to appreciate that a liberalised social democracy must be based on two tenets: what Peter Mandelson called an aspirational society (individuals must be allowed to regulate their personal lives without interference from the state); and that a post-imperial country like Britain could only be influential in the world as part of a wider grouping (the EU)."

"He [James Callaghan] also rightly sensed that though the years of Roy Jenkins at the Home Office had been stellar in their action on discrimination – and he was fully supportive of that – liberalism was not necessarily the correct response to the growing disrespect and lawlessness that in the 1960s and 1970s saw crime rise... In this instance, we need less Jenkins and more Callaghan."

"Roy Jenkins made a classic speech, which I contributed to, in which among other things he defined integration not as a flattening process which would turn everybody out in some kind of mould of a stereotyped Englishman but would be a combination of equal opportunities accompanied by cultural diversity in an atmosphere of tolerance."

"I learned to admire his unflinching commitment to liberalism and his fastidiousness when it came to the corruption of language and ideas in modern public life. He was unquestionably a great man, and his biographies, as much as his political record, ensure that he will be remembered."

"The model we had was that everyone would share the broad values of being British. What we did not expect was there would be those who unwisely suggest that, for example, Sharia Law should be applied in this country, or that punishment of stoning for adultery might be looked at depending on the kind of stoning ... It never occurred to us that there would be those kind of unwise challenges to the broad values of a liberal democratic society. And I remember towards the end of Roy Jenkins' life him saying to me that we just didn't realise that in the struggle for race equality we would also have to struggle for a secular society and for the universal value of human rights."

"[Roy Jenkins] was one of the great figures in the Liberal and Social Democratic tradition in British politics. A great reforming home secretary, a much-admired chancellor, a great European and somebody whose values and life that in many ways I have followed"

"This was the era of Mary Whitehouse, an attempt to restore old fashioned values ... there was this enormous sort of mood, particularly amongst young people to sweep away all the rather old fashioned values which seemed to exist at that time ... and he, more than anybody else, lifted the barriers. It changed the face of the country, it modernised it, in a way that we would regard as perfectly normal today."

"The trend of employment is towards a high level, and a recurrence of chronic mass unemployment is most unlikely. The Keynesian techniques are now well understood, and there is no reason to fear a repetition of the New Deal experience of a government with the will to spend its way out of a recession, but frustrated in doing so by faulty knowledge. The political pressure for full employment is stronger than ever before; the experience of the inter-war years bit so deeply into the political psychology of the nation that full employment, if threatened, would always constitute the dominant issue at any election, and no right-wing party could now survive a year in office if it permitted the figures of unemployment which were previously quite normal."

"I am...wholeheartedly a Galbraith man."

"If it's the last thing I do, I'm going to destroy every fucking grammar school in England. And Wales. And Northern Ireland."

"To say that we must attend meticulously to the environmental case does not mean that we must go to the other extreme and wholly neglect the economic case. Here we must beware of some of our friends. For parts of the conservationist lobby would do precisely this. Their approach is hostile to growth in principle and indifferent to the needs of ordinary people. It has a manifest class bias, and reflects a set of middle and upper class value judgements. Its champions are often kindly and dedicated people. But they are affluent and fundamentally, though of course not consciously, they want to kick the ladder down behind them. They are highly selective in their concern, being militant mainly about threats to rural peace and wildlife and well loved beauty spots: they are little concerned with the far more desperate problem of the urban environment in which 80 per cent of our fellow citizens live ... As I wrote many years ago, those enjoying an above average standard of living should be chary of admonishing those less fortunate on the perils of material riches. Since we have many less fortunate citizens, we cannot accept a view of the environment which is essentially elitist, protectionist and anti-growth. We must make our own value judgement based on socialist objectives: and that judgement must...be that growth is vital, and that its benefits far outweigh its costs."

"The great service of Keynes to recent history is that we now know, in the way that governments did not know in the 1930s, how full employment can be maintained."

"Nationalisation ... does not in itself engender greater equality, more jobs in the regions, higher investment or industrial democracy. The public knows this perfectly well, and so do the workers who have suffered from pit closures, steel redundancies and the run-down of the railways. It is idiotic to try to bamboozle them."

"Much more should have been achieved by a Labour Government in office and Labour pressure in opposition. Against the dogged resistance to change, we should have pitted a stronger will to change. I conclude that a move to the Left is needed."

"As a democratic Socialist profoundly committed to the rule of law, I could not condone, let alone encourage, defiance of the law."

"For the next few years times will not be normal. Perhaps people have used the words 'economic crisis' too often in the past. They have shouted 'wolf, wolf' when the animal was more akin to a rather disagreeable Yorkshire terrier. But not now. The crisis that faces us is infinitely more serious than any of the crises we have faced over the past 20 years...With its usual spirit of patriotism and its tradition of service to the community's needs, it is coming to realize that, for the time being at least, the party is over...We are not calling for a headlong retreat. But we are calling for a standstill."

"[T]o withdraw now would create in this country a mood of poor man's inchoate chauvinism, reviving old dreams of Empire and special relationships that have had such disastrous effects on British policy-making since 1945."

"I do not believe there is a long-term future for the privately rented sector in its present form."

"Unless the Arab states give Israel formal recognition, within secure, recognised and mutually agreed boundaries, as a permanent feature of the geography and politics of the Middle East. But if Israel is to obtain this recognition, she must, in a settlement, put an end to the territorial occupation which she has maintained since the war of 1967; the nine members of the European Community have declared that this is an essential element in a settlement. On behalf of the British Government I underline that need today."

"We conceive the function of Tribune to be the expression in popular form, and to as large a public as possible, of the views of the Left and Marxist wing of social democracy in this country. Its policy must be that of those who believe that the present leadership of the Labour Party is not sufficiently Socialist."

"We believe that the developing crisis in the capitalist system, by which we mean both economic stagnation, and the social and political conflicts to which it gives rise, makes it possible to think in terms of developing a sizeable and serious revolutionary socialist party in a way that was not possible 20 or even 10 years ago."

"I am sure that a definite limit exists to the degree of equality which is desirable. We do not want complete equality of incomes, since extra responsibility and exceptional talent require and deserve a differential reward. We are not hostile, as our opponents sometimes foolishly suggest, to 'detached residences in Bournemouth where some elderly woman has obviously more than a thousand a year'. I do not myself want to see all private education disappear; nor the Prime Minister denied an official car, as in one Scandinavian country; nor the Queen riding a bicycle; nor the House of Lords instantly abolished; nor the manufacture of Rolls-Royces banned; nor the Brigade of Guards, nor Oxford and Cambridge, nor Boodle's nor (more doubtfully) the Royal Yacht Squadron, nor even, on a rather lower level, the Milroy Room, lose their present distinctive character; nor anything so dull and colourless as this."

"We still retain in Britain a deeper sense of class, a more obvious social stratification, and stronger class resentments, than any of the Scandinavian, Australasian, or North American countries."

"Militant leftism in politics appears to have its roots in broadly analogous sentiments. Every labour politician has observed that the most indignant members of his local Party are not usually the poorest, or the slum-dwellers, or those with most to gain from further economic change, but the younger, more self-conscious element, earning good incomes and living comfortably in neat new council houses: skilled engineering workers, electrical workers, draughtsmen, technicians, and the lower clerical grades. (Similarly the most militant local parties are not in the old industrial areas, but either in the newer high-wage engineering areas or in middle-class towns; Coventry or Margate are the characteristic strongholds.) Now it is people such as these who naturally resent the fact that despite their high economic status, often so much higher than their parents’, and their undoubted skill at work, they have no right to participate in the decisions of their firm, no influence over policy, and far fewer non-pecuniary privileges than the managerial grades; and outside their work they are conscious of a conspicuous educational handicap, of a style of life which is still looked down on by middle-class people often earning little if any more, of differences in accent, and generally of an inferior class position.”"

"Objectively, class differences in accent, dress, manners, and general style of life are very much smaller; and one cannot, strolling about the street or travelling on a train, instantly identify a person’s social background as one can in England. Subjectively, social relations are more natural and egalitarian, and less marked by deference, submissiveness, or snobbery, as one quickly discovers from the cab-driver, the barman, the air-hostess and the drug-store assistant."

"(The) pattern of consumption is markedly more equal than in Britain. ‘Prestige-goods’ are widely distributed, and there is less conspicuous contrast between the standard of living of different income-groups. To take the most obvious example, almost every family owns a car; and this is significant not only because a car is the most conspicuous of all consumption goods, but also because universal car-ownership leads to the universal consumption of other conspicuous or semi-luxury goods – holidays, hotels, middle-class habits of shopping, etc. But the lack of external class-distinctions can be observed in many other spheres: e.g. clothes, eating-habits, drug-stores, the ownership of consumer durables, and so on."

"A high proportion of the population enjoys many of the ‘luxuries’ which until recently were considered the prerogative of the rich; and the ordinary worker lives at what even two decades ago would have been considered in Britain a middle-class standard of life."

"Your proposals are in fact far more revolutionary in their effects than an electoral promise to nationalise ICI and most of engineering. If I was perverse, I would say that they are diabolically and cunningly left-wing and Nye [Bevan] should have been clever enough to think them up. But you put them forward as ways of ensuring a calm evolution towards higher living standards and more personal freedom."

"Crosland died in February 1977, not living to see the disproof of all his doom-laden economic prophecies. He had never appreciated that an economy increasingly open to the world was inconsistent with the comfortable message of The Future of Socialism. The ideas that had provided the background to The Future of Socialism, that a high rate of growth could be relied on and that the problem of unemployment had been solved, were already at a discount. Contrary to The Future of Socialism, the economic problem had not been solved. The Keynesian techniques in which Crosland had deposited so much confidence had failed. It had proved impossible to reconcile full employment with stable prices."

"He had a mind of high perspective, yet cared little in a personal, as opposed to an aesthetic sense, about the past. He had practically no sense of nostalgia. He believed in applying highly rational standards to decision-making (he always thought me hopelessly intuitive) but he was full of strong emotions."

"Our friendship persisted on an intense but fluctuating basis for nearly four decades. Not only was his character engaging, his personality was dazzling and his intellect was of very high quality. He had maddening streaks of perversity, was in my view not at his best as a minister, but was the most exciting friend of my life."

"Each term we had a lively debate with the other political clubs at the Oxford Union, particularly the Labour Club, which at the time was very left wing and included some famous names like Anthony Crosland – who even in those days could condescend to a Duchess – and Tony Benn."

"The upper classes in every country are selfish, depraved, dissolute and decadent. The struggle for socialism in Europe...has been hard, cruel, merciless and bloody. The penalty for participation in the liberation movement has been death for oneself, if caught, and, if not caught oneself, the burning of one's home and the death by torture of one's family. ... Remember that one of the prices paid for our survival during the war has been the death by bombardment of countless thousands of innocent European men and women."

"Britain's economic problem is fundamentally far greater than France's since France is much less dependent on foreign trade and imported raw materials. Moreover Britain has economic relations with her Commonwealth whose importance outweighs the potential benefits of economic co-operation with Europe. For example, by 1952 over half Britain's foreign trade will be with the Commonwealth as against 22 per cent with Europe. Also Britain's imports from the Commonwealth are mainly indispensable raw materials, whereas her imports from Europe are less essential."

"By his conduct of the campaign against the Labour Government Aneurin Bevan has destroyed a good chance of succeeding the Party's leadership. Whereas Bevan's proletarian virility has always hypnotised many middle-class intellectuals, the trade unionists tend to see in him the familiar figure of the self-seeking agitator... Bevanism is essentially a flight from reality into dogma. But its opponents have had little to offer as a positive alternative. The Great Debate in British Socialism has so far consisted in one side talking nonsense and the other side keeping mum. The Labour Party may hope to carry the Welfare State and planning further than the Tories, but for a long time physical and psychological factors will fix rigid limits. Further 'soaking the rich' will no longer benefit the poor to any noticeable extent. Further nationalisation no longer attracts more than a tiny fringe of the Labour Party itself; it positively repels the electorate as a whole. Even among Labour economists there is a growing revolt against physical controls in favour of the price mechanism. A policy based on class war cannot have a wide appeal when the difference between classes is so small as Labour made it."

"Nye [Bevan] thinks that the best way to win friends and influence people is to kick them in the teeth... But there is in the country and in the Party a great deal of real anti-Americanism and in my view it is a disgrace to Socialism and a menace to peace. A lot of it is just jingoism with an inferiority complex, trying to make foreigners a scapegoat for everything that goes wrong in this country. We are Socialists; we are supposed to believe...in the brotherhood of man, and we cannot say all men are brothers except Americans... I ask you to throw away the stale mythology of these political Peter Pans... We cannot solve the problems of foreign policy on a diet of rhetorical candy-floss."

"'The owl of Minerva only flies abroad when the shades of night are gathering.' Speaking for Conservatism, Hegel was right. And nothing proves it better than the post-war crop of Tory intellectuals, sprouting like mushrooms in the damp cellars of Abbey House. Not until the stimuli which originally conditioned Conservative reflexes have finally disappeared can the intellectual emerge to provide a rationale for Conservative behaviour. So Conservative theory must always base itself on some form of historical restorationism. The moderate seeks the world of Joseph Chamberlain—or if he is daring, of Disraeli. The really advanced radical looks still further back, to Prince Rupert, or the Middle Ages, particularly if he is a Catholic."

"Hugh Gaitskell was absolutely right when he said yesterday that what gets cheers at this conference does not necessarily get votes at elections. If it did we would have won Devonport [the seat which Michael Foot had just lost]. There are far too many people who...want to luxuriate complacency in moral righteousness in Opposition. But who is going to pay the price for their complacency? You can take the view that it is better to give up half a loaf if you cannot get the whole loaf, but the point is that it is not we who are giving up the half loaf. In Britain it is the unemployed and old age pensioners, and outside Britain there are millions of people in Asia and Africa who desperately need a Labour Government in this country to help them. If you take the view that it is all right to stay in Opposition so long as your Socialist heart is pure, you will be 'all right, Jack'. You will have your TV set, your motor car and your summer holidays on the Continent and still keep your Socialist soul intact. The people who pay the price for your sense of moral satisfaction are the Africans, millions of them, being slowly forced into racial slavery; the Indians and the Indonesians dying of starvation. We are not just a debating society. We are not just a Socialist Sunday School. We are a great movement that wants to help real people living on this earth at the present time. We shall never be able to help them unless we get power. We shall never get power unless we close the gap between our active workers and the average voter in the country."

"I think the Services can be rightly very upset at the continuous series of defence reviews which the Government has been forced by economic circumstances—and maybe economic mistakes too—to carry out..."

"I warn my hon. Friends...that once we cut defence expenditure to the extent where our security is imperilled, we have no houses, we have no hospitals, we have no schools. We have a heap of cinders."

"We did not want middle class Robespierres."

"Do we really want to nationalise Marks and Spencers to make it as efficient as the Co-Op?"

"We are all agreed on a massive extension of public ownership...We are all agreed on establishing comprehensive planning control over the 100 or so largest companies in Britain. We are all agreed on the need for a national enterprise board to organise and extend public ownership in the profitable manufacturing industries."

"We shall increase income tax on the better off so that we can help the hundreds of thousands of families now tangled helplessly in the poverty trap by raising the tax threshold and introducing reduced rates of tax for those at the bottom of the ladder. I warn you, there are going to be howls of anguish from the rich. But before you cheer too loudly let me warn you that a lot of you will pay extra taxes too."

"Squeeze property speculators until the pips squeak"

"It has never been my nature, I regret to admit to the House, to turn the other cheek."

"It is far better that more people should be in work, even if that means accepting lower wages on average, than that those lucky enough to keep their jobs should scoop the pool while millions are living on the dole. That is what the social contract is all about."

"We are spending 6 per cent more than we are earning... You can also bankrupt a nation by excessive wage demands... That is why I said that it is better to have a lower standard of life for all workers than for some of them to be unemployed."

"The fact is that she [Margaret Thatcher] emerged in this debate as La Pasionaria of privilege."

"The borrowing requirement was 'terrifying'. He just had to cut back public expenditure. The Social Contract wasn't working. Inflation was getting out of control."

"I fully understand why I have been urged by so many friends both inside and outside the House to treat unemployment as the central problem and to stimulate a further growth in home consumption, public or private, so as to start getting the rate of unemployment down as fast as possible. I do not believe it would be wise to follow this advice today. As I have said, I did last July and November adopt reflationary measures whose full effect would only be felt this year. I cannot afford to increase demand further today when 5p in every £ we spend at home has been provided by our creditors abroad and inflation is running at its current rate. I do not believe anyone in Britain would thank me for producing an even larger deficit on our balance of payments and injecting a further massive dose of inflation through price and wage increases. Moreover a Rake's Progress of this nature could not last for long. The patience of our creditors would soon be exhausted. We would then face the appalling prospect of going down in a matter of weeks to the levels of public services and personal living standards which we could finance entirely from what we earned. I do not believe that our political or social system could stand that strain."

"The Budget I have presented today is a hard one for all of us in Britain. It is dictated by the harsh reality of the world we live in. A severe Budget is a necessary element in any strategy for improving the overall performance of our economy, which has been lagging increasingly behind most industrial economies for more than a single generation. Added to the need for measures to produce the essential structural changes in the balance of our economy are the burdens we carry with other countries because the explosion of world prices has cut our real income by 4 per cent. But in this situation the key to our immediate success is the rate of inflation inside Britain, and it is our failure here which is responsible for the special severity of this Budget. So long as pay and prices increase at their present rates, no Chancellor of the Exchequer who puts his country first would act otherwise than I have done this afternoon."

"No country would suffer more than Britain from an international trade war, since we depend more on world trade than any of our competitors. That is why we cannot accept the proposal made in some quarters that we should seek to solve our problems through imposing import controls for a long period over a whole range of manufactured consumer goods."

"He must be out of his tiny Chinese mind."

"By the end of next year, we really shall be on our way to that so-called economic miracle we need."

"If we can keep our heads—and our nerve—the long-awaited economic miracle is in our grasp. Britain can achieve in the Seventies what Germany and France achieved in the Fifties and Sixties."

"The alternative to getting help from the IMF would be economic policies so savage I think they would produce riots in the streets, an immediate fall in living standards and unemployment of three million."

"I am going to negotiate with the IMF on the basis of our existing policies, not changes in policies, and I need your support to do it. (Applause) But when I say "existing policies", I mean things we do not like as well as things we do like. It means sticking to the very painful cuts in public expenditure (shouts from the floor) on which the Government has already decided. It means sticking to a pay policy which enables us, as the TUC resolved a week or two ago, to continue the attack on inflation. (Shout of, "Resign".)"

"No Government can produce an economic miracle. An economic miracle depends on people on the shop floor, in the board room, in the sales office, working a bit harder and more efficiently than they have worked in the past."

"Keynesianism has failed."

"The central problem of our economy for more than a generation has been that, although our productivity has grown more slowly than that of our competitors, we have seen annual wage increases of the same order as theirs. So our inflation has risen faster than in other countries and we have been able to maintain price competitiveness and full employment only by a series of devaluations which have further added to inflation and increased the pressure for excessive wage increases. In the era of North Sea oil it will be more difficult to devalue our currency to maintain price competitiveness. So unless we can keep wage increases close to the level of productivity increase we shall face rising unemployment and a further erosion of our industrial base."

"I start with the measures which the Government announced last Thursday, and which are the immediate occasion of today's debate, and to which the right hon. Gentleman finally came round - a trifle nervously, I thought - after ploughing through that tedious and tendentious farrago of moth-eaten cuttings presented to him by the Conservative Research Department. I must say that part of his speech was rather like being savaged by a dead sheep."

"Austria came to terms with its political and economic disadvantages after the war, jettisoned those parts of its Marxist ideological inheritance which were obviously no longer relevant, and turned a country which in the inter-war years had been suffering from an ex-imperial hangover into a model welfare state, without sacrificing any of its cultural attractions in the process. [I am offering no New Jerusalem], simply a country with stable prices, jobs for those who want them and help for those who need it."

"Our party can't be united unless it remains what it always has been till now: a broad coalition of men and women from all sections of our society, supporting many different approaches to democratic socialism, who tolerate their disagreements with one another, and defend the right of minorities to fight for changes in the policies they disagree with."

"I don't believe the party gains when a member of the last two Labour governments stumps round the country blackguarding the record of the governments as a betrayal of the British working class, and describing the Prime Ministers through whom he accepted office as medieval monarchs who turned Labour MPs into their puppets. What nonsense! Tell that to Eric Heffer or Jeff Rooker or any of the many Labour MPs who've made my life as Chancellor so difficult from time to time, and I never objected to that. No! Those who betray the working class of Britain are those who forced us for two whole years to fight one another when we should have been fighting the Tories and through a sort of ideological narcissism are helping to keep in power the most brutal government in living memory, a government which has commit itself to destroy our trade union movement. We didn't lose the last election because we failed to follow the advice of these elitists. It was Maggie Thatcher who won the last election, not Mick McGahey. And we're losing votes today not to the Socialist Workers Party or the IMG but to David Steel and Roy Jenkins."

"NATO's nuclear strategy is an essential part of that balance [between East and West]. To threaten to upset it by refusing to let America base any of her nuclear weapons in Britain would make war more likely, not less likely."

"I would fight to change the policy before the General Election. If I failed then I wouldn't accept office in a Labour Government."

"Faced with the difficulties of unilateral reflation, some socialists are tempted to seek salvation through trade restrictions or competitive devaluation. But such beggar-my-neighbour policies, if pursued on the scale required...are more likely to lead to a trade and currency war than to insulate their sponsors from the recession in the outside world."

"We will unilaterally get rid of Trident and cruise, and we will put Polaris into the arms talks with the Soviet Union and hope to phase it out in multilateral negotiations. If the Russians...fail to cut their nuclear forces accordingly it would be a new situation that we could consider at that time."

"[Margaret Thatcher] wraps herself in the Union Jack and exploits the sacrifices of our soldiers, sailors and airmen in the Falkland Islands for purely party advantage – and hopes to get away with it. It wasn't a very credible approach from the word 'go' because this Prime Minister, who glories in slaughter, who has taken advantage of the superb professionalism of our armed forces, is at this very moment lending the military dictatorship in Buenos Aires millions of pounds to buy weapons – including weapons made in Britain – to kill British servicemen. That is an act of stupefying hypocrisy."

"What almost halved the support for the Labour Party was the feeling that it has lost its traditional common sense and its humanity to a new breed of sectarian extremism."

"[W]ho is the Mephistopheles behind this shabby Faust? The answer to that is clear. The handling of this decision by—I quote her own Back Benchers—the great she-elephant, she who must be obeyed, the Catherine the Great of Finchley, the Prime Minister herself, has drawn sympathetic trade unionists, such as Len Murray, into open revolt. Her pig-headed bigotry has prevented her closest colleagues and Sir Robert Armstrong from offering and accepting a compromise. The right hon. Lady, for whom I have a great personal affection, has formidable qualities, a powerful intelligence and immense courage, but those qualities can turn into horrendous vices, unless they are moderated by colleagues who have more experience, understanding and sensitivity. As she has got rid of all those colleagues, no one is left in the Cabinet with both the courage and the ability to argue with her. I put it to all Conservative Members, but mainly to the Government Front Bench, that to allow the right hon. Lady to commit Britain to another four years of capricious autocracy would be to do fearful damage not just to the Conservative party but to the state."

"So long as the Soviet Union has nuclear weapons there have to be nuclear weapons somewhere in NATO to deter them from using them."

"The reason we were defeated in so far as defence played a role is that people believe we were in favour of unilaterally disarming ourselves. It wasn't the confusion. It was the unilateralism that was the damaging thing."

"We are going through a period of uncertainty, but we are in a good position to strengthen ourselves and win back a majority. We have already got rid of much deadwood and Kinnock is winning back younger voters. He is politically intelligent, has character and courage; but he has never been a minister, lacks experience, and people know it. In troubled times, the electorate looks for a strong leader and Mrs Thatcher is seen as one."

"The US, whether we like it or not, has nuclear weapons. The US is a member of NATO. Possession by the US of nuclear weapons is obviously a deterrent."

"No. Absolutely not. I think that the Russians are praying for a Labour victory...praying is perhaps an unfortunate choice of words. I think that they would much prefer a Labour government and that the idea that they would prefer a Tory government, I think is utter bunkum, and they [the Soviets] authorized me to say so."

"I am a socialist who believes that the Labour Party offers the best hope for Britain's future."

"I wouldn't object strongly to leaving the EU. The advantages of being members of the union are not obvious. The disadvantages are very obvious. I can see the case for leaving – the case for leaving is stronger than for staying in."

"The trouble about Europe is what I call the Olive Line, the line below which people grow olives. North of the Olive Line people pay their taxes and spend public money very cautiously. South of it they fail to pay their taxes at all, but spend a lot of public money."

"[Referring to the "Olive line"] That division makes federation impossible – inconceivable, in my opinion."

"Denis Healey was a great champion for social justice, in and out of government, a stalwart of the Labour Party, a true patriot who fought for and cared deeply about his country and an extraordinary and vibrant character. ... He steered the Labour government and the country through some of the most difficult economic times; and in winning the deputy leadership of the Labour Party in 1981, he probably saved the Labour Party as an instrument of government and social change. All of us in the Labour Party owe him a huge debt. Britain has lost a dedicated and faithful public servant."

"I always had a sneaking affection for Denis Healey, even at his most outrageous. I liked his rumbustiousness, a quality which adds richness to politics provided it is combined with intellectual insight and personal incorruptibility, as it was in Denis's case. He is an instinctive bully, but bullies always bring out the best in me and I enjoyed our clashes in Cabinet. His autobiography is a masterly piece of work and, as I read it, I chuckled over the cunning way he skates over his confessions of past mistakes, leaving the impression that they did not adversely affect events, though of course they did."

"Denis Healey was a giant of the Labour Party whose record of service to his party and his country stands as his testament. ... His wit and personality transcended politics itself, making him one of the most recognisable politicians of his era. Speaking personally, we had many interesting conversations when I was first elected to Parliament in 1983 and I found him a decent and very knowledgeable man who I enjoyed engaging with, particularly in his work as shadow foreign secretary."

"The art of John Dryden would be required to encompass the complex personality of the ambitious and many-sided politician who, in 1974, became Chancellor of the Exchequer. The most cultured of Chancellors, he could also be the greatest bully. Perhaps the most brilliant of Chancellors intellectually, he was possessed also of a common touch which attracted a wider public even when it most disliked his actions. His various disguises could confuse. A friendly commentator might attribute to him a deep seriousness worn lightly, sometimes perhaps flippantly. The flippancy could have been diagnosed as a defence mechanism for a man whose outward ebullience concealed inner doubts. Or it could have been interpreted as an expression of total self-confidence. The friendly commentator would have detected great courage, normally kept in reserve, as though courage was only for the decisive moment and it would be tedious to fight too hard when the issues appeared not of the first importance. A less friendly commentator might have criticised the flippancy, encountered not just in words but in deeds, as indicative of irresponsibility. Certainly it was not always to the taste of those who worked for him. By civil servants in the Treasury, he came to be admired for the excitement he generated and feared for his penetration of official work less than first class. But by those, Ministers and officials, who could not take his dismissive rudeness, he might even be hated. He came to dominate the international community of Finance Ministers by his intellectual brilliance and his committee skills."

"He had a clear idea of the objectives he wanted to secure, and mostly, from a socialist point of view, they were good ones. He would listen; he could be endlessly patient in negotiations, which is the only way to negotiate with would-be friends or allies; he had an irrepressible intellectual curiosity deriving partly from his interest in matters which touched only the fringe of politics."

"The greatest interest to economists of the Budget strategy will be in the way the Chancellor [Healey] has finally and totally broken with postwar economic orthodoxy, abandoned full employment as the sovereign purpose of the Budget, and decided that future stability of both prices and the foreign balance depended on achieving a better balance of the Budget itself."

"He has long carried light ideological baggage on a heavy gun carriage."

"He didn't suffer fools gladly or, indeed, at all. That partly explains why he was never leader of the party despite having rich political talent. He was brilliant in the Commons, an ebullient campaigner in the country, and his piano-thumping performances in by-election sing-songs were – like him – loud, lively, and uplifting. ... To know Denis Healey was to enjoy him."

"Healey is a strong fighter. He is intellectually gifted and capable of prodigious acts of endurance, but his aggressive approach is said to have alienated some of his potential supporters. In the 1976 leadership election he came a poor third behind Michael Foot and Jim Callaghan. By 1980, after a year of conflict and division within the Labour Party, he was portrayed by the left as one of those principally responsible for ignoring party policy. He looked increasingly, as one correspondent said, like a whale stranded on a beach being attacked by minnows."

"After the 1980 conference, at which the electoral college was accepted in principle, Healey refused to join the Gang of Three in meeting the left head on. He is a politician of the old school who prefers dining with, and talking to, trade union general secretaries and other leading figures in the Labour movement, in the hope that they will control the votes of their members, to involving himself directly in the day-to-day battle within the constituencies... Healey appeared to be in a safe position to hold the deputy leadership and stay above the battle. David Owen, Shirley Williams and William Rodgers seemed increasingly likely to start a new political party, but Healey appeared to have accepted his defeat [in the 1980 leadership election] and gave no indication that he would be prepared to join them. He also seemed unwilling to take on the left within the party, and his fighting instincts were not roused until Tony Benn began to make unexpected headway in the attempt to win the deputy leadership from him [in the 1981 deputy leadership election]."

"The only hope was Denis Healey. ... But my hopes were shortlived. Soon after the party conference in October [1980], it became evident that Denis Healey, whether he became leader or not, was not going to fight head-on the unilateralist and anti-European policy of the Labour Party. He was not going to make the party face up to the electoral incredibility of being both in effect anti-Nato and anti-European. ... So, Denis Healey was not going to fight the left. That became clear. Denis does not have good political judgement. In that sense he is not a good politician. He has a first-class brain, he is extremely well informed and he's got good judgement about many things, but he's not been a very good judge of feelings and moods within the Labour Party. I think he calculated that by taking the soft approach, the emollient approach, he could woo the left and win the leadership and, having secured it, would then fight for his policies. But he wasn't going to fight beforehand."

"We wanted Denis Healey to win, and Bill and I voted for him to win, but we wanted the right policies to win too. If he had fought for those policies and had lost we would have been bound to stick with him for a while and to have gone on fighting for them within the party. No question about it. Well, Denis did not heed our message. He stood as a ‘Peace’ candidate. It was just ludicrous. Everybody knew perfectly well, I think, that he didn't agree with a word of what he was supporting. His position was totally unconvincing. If he had fought on, so to speak, a ‘war ticket’, he would have probably lost, but I have no doubt that he would have been the leader of the Labour Party within two years. In retrospect that was the moment when the SDP was created."

"Of all the senior politicians I have known, Denis was by far the most loyal to decisions he did not like, to colleagues he served or who served him, to Labour Party policy he disliked and above all to his wife Edna and his family. This quality of his, more than any other, means that I have always measured Denis by a stringent but more generous yardstick than I use for any other politicians. He also has great style. I can hear him, as if it were yesterday, getting up from a dinner at Admiralty House and announcing with chuckle that he was off "to vote for the people against privilege". It was not just a joke. There was always a hint of "Denis the Menace" against privilege, and justly so. For all his faults he is a big man and I have been lucky to learn from him and to know him."

"On Wednesday 10 March [1976] members of the Tribune group of left-wing MPs launched their attack by abstaining on a motion from the Chancellor to 'level off' total public expenditure from April 1977... There were bitter exchange among MPs... Tribunites hurled vulgar abuse. Denis Healey...responded with characteristic vigour. 'Stalinist! Stalinist!' Eric Heffer shouted at him. 'Bastard! Bastard!' echoed Russell Kerr. Healey's own version is that, returning to the Chamber from the voting lobby, 'one of the rebels used demotic language to cast aspersions on my paternity, so I praised his virility in similar language several times.' According to one witness, the Chancellor's precise words to his critics were: 'Go and fuck yourselves.'"

"The Chancellor of the Exchequer has been—I know this because I have watched him over the years—a monetarist much longer than anyone has ever suspected of him. I used to listen with enjoyment to his speeches in the years 1972 to 1974, and I would shake my head and say to myself, "He will be a good Chancellor of the Exchequer, for he understands the real causes of inflation." Oh, he understands them all right."

"The right hon. Gentleman will be known for ever as the only Chancellor in the post-war period who brought this country to the brink of bankruptcy."

"[T]he defence budget is one of the very few elements of public expenditure that can truly be described as essential. The point was well-made by a robust Labour Defence Minister, Denis (now Lord) Healey, many years ago: ‘Once we have cut expenditure to the extent where our security is imperilled, we have no houses, we have no hospitals, we have no schools. We have a heap of cinders.’"

"Denis is a colourful, ebullient personality, combative and life-loving, with an unusually rich hinterland outside politics. He is an exceptionally gifted photographer...and is immensely knowledgeable about music... Yet he was never a serious candidate for the leadership. He was unpredictable, behaving rather like a strongly served tennis ball hitting a soft spot and then bouncing sideways. You could never be sure what he might do. He was a loner, enjoying his family and a few close friends, mainly not politicians, so predictions about his behaviour from colleagues were not particularly helpful. He had been brusque with many of them, or scorched them with his brilliant, brutal humour. He was not a popular figure in the Commons tea room. I liked him very much."

"He said things the way they were and you couldn't stop him from doing so. ... He was a mixture of incredible courage, lack of tact and not very good at playing in a way that would give him the advantage as distinct from party or the country. It was an impressive performance and I shan't forget it."

"The army of brokers, jobbers and other quaintly named parasites."

"Devolutionary reform will not provide a factory, a machine or jobs, build a school, train a doctor or put a pound on pensions."

"The House of Lords must go - not be reformed, not be replaced, not be reborn in some nominated life-after-death patronage paradise, just closed down, abolished, finished."

"[T]he only reason why I espouse centralism now, the central organisation and co-ordination and government of our resources in this country, and would like to see much more of that co-ordination and organisation and control and democracy of resources in a Socialist country, is that I think that it is a structure that can give the best advantage to the people—the people I think I am here to represent, working-class people, irrespective of their nationality."

"In my right hon. Friend's reply to the right hon. Lady the Leader of the Opposition, was he not rather unsympathetic, especially now that she appears to be the last pro-Marketeer in Britain? Is not this disturbance manifested by her use of the word "abrasiveness"? For the right hon. Lady to protest a dislike of abrasiveness is rather like Count Dracula professing a distaste for blood. Will my right hon. Friend give an undertaking to increase his abrasiveness until he rubs out altogether the common agricultural policy?"

"We live in a country afflicted by a senile and selfish capitalist system...where families are homeless, sick people unattended, children untaught whilst building workers, nurses and teachers are unemployed"

"[Labour has] always believed that the community as a whole should have a greater control over these “commanding heights of the economy”."

"[Labour's] socialist argument recognised that the system of economic gambling, commercial whim, speculative profiteering and profligate waste of the earth's resources that is dignified by the title 'private enterprise' is increasingly demonstrating its inability to meet human needs for food, employment, security and fulfilment."

"We must not look for some kind of Messiah."

"By emphatically pressing the view that it is only possible to support radical Labour policies by supporting Tony Benn, Tony's associates have turned the contest into a gamble with policies, [yet any] disagreement with those claims has been slandered as 'opportunism', 'careerism' and evidence of every kind of departure from socialist conviction and purpose. That is the truly dangerous product of these months of contest."

"Heckler: At least Mrs Thatcher has got guts. Neil Kinnock: It's a pity that other people had to leave theirs on the ground at Goose Green to prove it."

"If Margaret Thatcher is re-elected as prime minister on Thursday, I warn you. I warn you that you will have pain – when healing and relief depend upon payment. I warn you that you will have ignorance – when talents are untended and wits are wasted, when learning is a privilege and not a right. I warn you that you will have poverty – when pensions slip and benefits are whittled away by a government that won’t pay in an economy that can't pay. I warn you that you will be cold – when fuel charges are used as a tax system that the rich don't notice and the poor can't afford.I warn you that you must not expect work – when many cannot spend, more will not be able to earn. When they don't earn, they don't spend. When they don't spend, work dies. I warn you not to go into the streets alone after dark or into the streets in large crowds of protest in the light. I warn you that you will be quiet – when the curfew of fear and the gibbet of unemployment make you obedient. I warn you that you will have defence of a sort – with a risk and at a price that passes all understanding. I warn you that you will be home-bound – when fares and transport bills kill leisure and lock you up. I warn you that you will borrow less – when credit, loans, mortgages and easy payments are refused to people on your melting income.If Margaret Thatcher wins on Thursday, I warn you not to be ordinary. I warn you not to be young. I warn you not to fall ill. And I warn you not to grow old."

"The roots of defeat which were put down by some of the elements of our party in the two or three years after 1980 made victory difficult to achieve."

"I don't believe that the policies on which we fought the [1983] election ought to be ejected like some sort of spent cartridge."

"I didn't come to it intellectually, I came to it pragmatically. What intellectual appeal there was came initially entirely from Bevan mainly because of the way in which Bevan, in speech and writing, articulated exactly what I was feeling."

"When I started to encounter Marxism at 16, the elementary truths of the surplus value theory and more than anything else, the logical argument that he produced that labour was the source of all wealth, gave me a political and intellectual justification for what I believed in a way that nothing else did."

"Someone up there likes me."

"If anyone wants to know why we must conduct ourselves [with commonsense and realism], just remember at all times, with all temptations, how you, each and every one of you sitting in this hall, each and every Labour worker watching this conference, each and every Labour voter, yes, and some others as well, remember how you felt on that dreadful morning of the tenth of June. Just remember how you felt then, and think to yourselves: 'June the ninth, 1983, never ever again will we experience that.'"

"We support the efforts to keep the pits open until exhausted."

"[Margaret Thatcher is a] stubborn Salome who wants the miners' heads on a plate."

"I'll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with far fetched resolutions. They are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and you go through the years sticking to that, out-dated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council—a Labour council—hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers. I'm telling you - and you'll listen - you can't play politics with people's jobs and with people's services. The people will not abide posturing."

"We believe there should be reforms in the EEC which would benefit all the members. If these were not achieved, our policy is to preserve the ultimate option of withdrawing Britain. That option would not, this time, need a referendum, as it did before."

"I'm a father. And no matter how much I try to convince myself towards the course of 'enlightenment' I know damn well that, put to the test, I'm what people would call a reactionary. I know it. I try and rationalize it but it's no good. I come to the same conclusion all the time. My children stand a chance of being hurt in the forseeable future by what's called permissiveness."

"Those who have the immense dishonesty to fight with a ballot box in one hand and a rifle in the other have no place in democratic politics."

"That sort of fundamentalism which treats possession of private property not as a desirable economic and personal asset but as a condition of liberty is a form of primitive religion."

"Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Why is Glenys the first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get to university?Was it because our predecessors were thick? Does anybody really think that they didn't get what we had because they didn't have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment? Of course not. It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand."

"David Frost: If you haven't got nuclear weapons, the choice in that situation would be to subject your forces to an unfair battle. Neil Kinnock: Yes, what you're suggesting is that the alternatives are between the gesture, the threat, or the use of nuclear weapons, and surrender. In these circumstances the choice is posed, and this is a classical choice, between exterminating everything you stand for and the flower of your youth, or using all the resources you have to make any occupation totally untenable."

"What has happened is that there are people who, for reasons best known to themselves, have voted for maintaining division in our country."

"In the years between our defeat in 1979 and our defeat in 1983 Labour was increasingly seen to be a party slipping towards impossiblism, succumbing to fads, riven by vicious divisions, speaking the language of sloganised dogma – and usually voicing it in the accents of menace. It was almost as if sections of the party measured the purity of their socialism by the distance which they could put between it and the minds of the British people."

"[A]lterations in policy had to be made with continual reference to the need to be elected in order to be able to put principles into power. I repeatedly had to reinforce the message that the real penalty for our defeat was paid by the unemployed, the poor, the sick, the young and the old that the Labour Party existed to help."

"I manifest no paranoia when I say that there has been in the Labour Party an element which has treated realism as treachery, regarded appeals to party unity as an excuse for suppression of liberties and scorned any emphasis on the importance of winning elections as a contaminating bacillus called 'electoralism'."

"Oh I detest him. I did then, I do now, and it's mutual. He hates me as well. And I'd much prefer to have his savage hatred than even the merest hint of friendship from that man."

"I celebrated this by going to the PLP meeting [and saying], "I'd like to congratulate the parliamentary party on this real step forward for proper recognition of women in politics. And nobody's willy has dropped off.""

"Never mistake the enthusiasm of the minority for the support of the majority."

"Wankers and whingers."

"In the Financial Times this morning Mrs Thatcher was reported as saying that two more terms of office would exterminate socialism. I saw Clare Short, who asked if I had seen it, and I replied, "Yes, but I think she'll have a job to outdo Kinnock.""

"It has been one of Mr Kinnock's themes that Labour has to modernise itself, that it has to appeal not only to the man on the dole but to the man with a mortgage, not only to a manual labourer, but to a computer expert; it has to redefine its idea of class to accommodate social trends."

"If it is the case that one Department of this Government deliberately organised a leak to frustrate a Minister in the same Government, that is not only dirty tricks but a habit that is inimical to the practice of good government in this country."

"In the course of a few weeks the one policy with which the Prime Minister was uniquely and personally associated, the contribution to policy of which he appears to have been most proud, has been blown apart, and with it has gone for ever any claim by the Prime Minister or the party that he leads to economic competence. He is the devalued Prime Minister of a devalued Government."

"The fundamental flaw in the individualism of the classical writers, and their modern counterparts in today's Conservative Party, is, I believe, their assumption that human beings conduct their lives on the basis of self-interested decisions taken in radical isolation from others. This thesis grotesquely ignores the intrinsically social nature of human beings and fails to recognize the capabilities that all people have to act in response to commitments and beliefs that clearly transcend any narrow calculation of personal advantage."

"We ought, therefore, in the battle of ideas which is at the centre of the political struggle, to be confident in the strength of our intellectual case. But I believe we must also argue for our cause on the basis of its moral foundation. It is a sense of revulsion at injustice and poverty and denied opportunity, whether at home or abroad, which impels people to work for a better world, to become, as in our case, democratic socialists."

"In response to the plummeting popularity of the Administration itself, revealed at Newbury and in the shire county elections, we have the Prime Minister's botched reshuffle. If we were to offer that tale of events to the BBC light entertainment department as a script for a programme, I think that the producers of "Yes, Minister" would have turned it down as hopelessly over the top. It might have even been too much for "Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'em". The tragedy for us all is that it is really happening—it is fact, not fiction. The man with the non-Midas touch is in charge. It is no wonder that we live in a country where the Grand National does not start and hotels fall into the sea."

"The opportunity to serve our country—that is all we ask."

"The Scots are a more moral people [than the English]."

"He performed a completely different function from Neil Kinnock – he healed the wounds of the Party."

"Smith would have been a better leader than Tony Blair. It would have been a completely different party."

"It can fairly be said of John Smith that he had all the virtues of a Scottish presbyterian, but none of the vices."

"John was essentially a fudge leader. Tony Blair was the linear descendant of Neil Kinnock as a modernising Labour leader. John Smith was not."

"He is ready to embrace whatever changes are necessary, whether it be in policy or the party's internal structures. But his core values – a very Scottish species of practical Christian socialism – are not negotiable."

"[I]f John Smith had lived I think it would have been a very great advantage for the party. I think he had a better understanding of the Labour movement than others do."

"[Smith's death was] one of the greatest tragedies to beset the Labour Party...the country was robbed of a great Prime Minister."

"John was a product of the Labour Party of Gaitskell, Wilson and Callaghan, and he had a deep commitment to preserving it, realising that certain things had to be done, like introducing OMOV in order to secure that kind of Party. In that sense, he was a moderniser, but it had to be done in a way that would not offend the traditional principles of the Party. He liked the way the Labour Party did things. New Labour felt that they couldn't make that old system work, and made significant changes – like Clause IV – wholesale reform of which John had rejected."

"John unified and therefore massively strengthened the Party by being completely unsectarian. Because he knew himself and was at ease with himself he treated everyone with respect."

"John gave the Party a feeling of what we were about. The best and only way of achieving Labour's values was through social justice. Social justice was what drove him, and he gave it back to the Labour Party."

"He is hesitant about what they will do on the unions. I say, "You owe Mrs Thatcher a great deal. She has made it possible for unions to become led by moderates who will support the Labour leadership and you will hold the Conference and stop them passing dotty things." He agreed."

"I talked to John Smith... I asked him whether Labour would raise the top rate of forty per cent [in income tax] if they became the government and he was the Chancellor. He said, "No, not exactly, but we would have it graded upwards as they do in Germany and other countries. But we would not go back to the old penal rates.""

"I talked to John Smith. He said, "I don't know if it has percolated down to people like you yet but we would run a very tough government, not a reckless one as there was before.""

"If the workers see themselves faced with defeat through starvation, they will prefer to go down fighting rather than fainting — and whether or not we leaders agree."

"The most conservative man in the world is the British Trade Unionist when you want to change him."

"What I say is this, and I am not afraid of saying it. I sit on a Colonial Development Committee under an Act passed by the Labour Government, and I see the expenditure of millions of pounds going on for the development of areas where native races have not yet begun to be industrialised. You talk about the coal trade. Ought there not to be some control against the possible development of coal in Tanganyika and in East Africa, which might come into competition with your coal here at a time when the world does not want it?"

"It is placing the Executive and the Movement in an absolutely wrong position to be taking your conscience round from body to body asking to be told what you ought to do with it."

"From the day Hitler came to power, I have felt that the democratic countries would have to face war... I cannot see any way of stopping Hitler and the other dictators except by force."

"The kind of middle-class mentality which actuates both those responsible for strategy and government has little knowledge of the new psychology and organizing ability of the totalitarian States. The forces we are fighting are governed neither by the old strategy nor follow the old tactics."

"They say Gladstone was at the Treasury from 1860 to 1930. I'm going to be Minister of Labour from 1940 to 1990."

"If anyone asks me who was responsible for the British policy leading up to the war, I should, as a Labour man myself, make a confession and say: "All of us". We refused absolutely to face the facts. When the issue came of arming or rearming millions of people in this country...we refused to face the real issue at a critical moment. But what is the good of blaming anybody? We cannot make our action retrospective whatever we do. We have to start from now and try to do the best we can."

"The fact of it is that all of us agreed to save 6d. in the Income Tax by breaking up the Army in peace-time and not having it prepared when war broke out...I will never be a party to it again."

"So long as I have any power at all I will never be a party to treating the Army in the future as it has been treated in the past. They broke up in peace-time the very foundations of the Army structure, and expected to build it up during war-time with the enemy at the gates."

"We need 720,000 men continuously employed in this industry... This is where you boys come in... [O]ur fighting men will not be able to achieve their purpose unless we get an adequate supply of coal."

"There should be a study of a house directly elected by the people of the world to whom the nations are accountable."

"I think that in the little argument going on now in New York and the differences that have arisen there are emerging three very fundamental principles. One is that it is improper to negotiate or attempt to negotiate or attempt to gain concessions by a great Power out of a little Power by means of occupying that country with your forces. It is the tradition — and I am not saying of one or other country only they have done it — but it is nineteenth-century imperialism that really must be left behind, and I believe that a solution will be found and the principle accepted that those of us who represent the great Powers will not do that."

"If I may again refer to the different political concepts, there is, I think rather unfortunately, running through all the speeches and writings of our Soviet friends the theory that they alone represent the workers — that they alone are democratic."

"I come now to the question of diplomatic personnel... It is said that I am admitting to the service Eton and Harrow. I am not one of those who decry Eton and Harrow. I was very glad of them in the Battle of Britain—by God, I was!—those fellows paid the price in the Royal Air Force on those fatal days. If the Universities are to be criticized, well, put up a vote of censure on Harold Laski, because it is the product of the Universities I have got to accept."

"That won't do at all .. we've got to have this .. I don't mind for myself, but I don't want any other Foreign Secretary of this country to be talked to or at by a Secretary of State in the United States as I have just had in my discussions with Mr Byrnes. We've got to have this thing over here whatever it costs .. We've got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it."

"His Majesty's Government have thus been faced with an irreconcilable conflict of principles. There are in Palestine about 1,200,000 Arabs and 600,000 Jews. For the Jews the essential point of principle is the creation of a sovereign Jewish State. For the Arabs, the essential point of principle is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine."

"[T]his Pact is a purely defensive arrangement for the common security of the countries who join it, and it is not directed against anyone. If we are accused of ganging up against any country or group of countries I should say simply: "Examine the text. There is no secrecy about it, and there are no secret clauses. You will not find in the text any provision which threatens the security or the well-being of any nation." No nation innocent of aggressive intentions need have the slightest fear or apprehension about it."

"[T]he Pact must be regarded as a concrete expression of the identity of view long held among the Western nations. It recognises the common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law between nations. It is not elaborate; its simplicity is apparent, but I can assure the House that it is based on an understanding and determination to preserve our way of life."

"(b) Under existing policy, however, we cannot agree to any proposals which mean our getting involved in the economic affairs of Europe beyond the point at which we could, if we wished, disengage ourselves. There are no grounds for abandoning this policy. (c) Any surrender of political sovereignty in matters of vital importance would jeopardise our ability to maintain the policy at (b). We must therefore maintain a very strict reserve in regard to schemes for the pooling of sovereignty or the establishment of European supra-national machinery."

"Our relationship with the rest of the Commonwealth and, almost equally important, our new relationship with the United States ensure that we must remain, as we have always been in the past, different in character from other European nations and fundamentally incapable of wholehearted integration with them."

"My policy is to be able to take a ticket at Victoria station and go anywhere I damn well please!"

"I should like to see in any reconstructed Government a strong Labour leader like Bevin."

"There is no doubt that the continuity of foreign policy—which caused one Labour man to remark of Ernest Bevin, "Hasn't Anthony Eden grown fat?"—blunted the blood-letting edge of party warfare during much of the Attlee government's tenure. Bevin was among several prominent Labour politicians who in the 1945 election had promised that Anglo-Russian relations would be better with a left-wing British Government: "Left can speak to left in comradeship and confidence", he had claimed. In office he proved a man big enough to eat his own unguarded words, and will rank high in history as one of the chief organisers of Western resistance against the advance of revolutionary Communism from the East. Particularly in the latter part of the 1945–50 Parliament I spoke with some frequency on foreign affairs against Bevin―or, rather, with Bevin; for, not only was our private relationship friendly, but on the major public issues arising from the "cold war" there was rarely much between us save a difference of emphasis or detail. I remember his taking me into the Smoking Room one evening and saying, "’Ave a beer, Rab, I'm worried about the A-rabs.""

"Bevin will, I think, do well. He knows a good deal, is prepared to read any amount, seems to take in what he does read, and is capable of making up his own mind and sticking up for his (or our) point of view against anyone. I think he's the best we could have had. He effaces Attlee, and at Big 3 meetings he does all the talking while Attlee nods his head convulsively and smokes his pipe."

"[Bevin is] far the most distinguished man the Labour Party have thrown up in my time."

"Ernest Bevin had many of the strongest characteristics of the English race. His manliness, his common sense, his rough simplicity, sturdiness and kind heart, easy geniality and generosity, all are qualities which we who live in the southern part of this famous island regard with admiration."

"Tizard was fond of describing an incident round a conference table at which the technical pros and cons of Britain starting her own nuclear power industry were being debated. It appeared that the cons were winning when Bevin suddenly intervened: “What!” he said. “Do you mean to say that our kids are going to have to grow up without the benefits of nuclear energy?” Tizard, explaining that no-one could really avoid answering such blunt questions, would add: “Fine man, Bevin.”"

"[T]he [Labour] Party's success electorally has depended upon its historical identification with working-class interests. Sidney and Beatrice Webb helped, but it was the trade unions that made Labour a major party of state. Ernest Bevin, not Methodism or Marxism, is Labour's heritage."

"Ernest Bevin died in April. I was deeply moved. By then I had come to regard him, as I still do, as one of the two greatest democratic politicians this century; the other is Franklin Roosevelt. The American patrician and the British trade unionist had two things in common – a powerful sense of direction which was rooted in moral principle, and a street-wise pragmatism in choosing the best route forward. Both men, too, had a constructive approach to politics. They were builders, not destroyers."

"In him [Winston Churchill] Bevin found at least one Minister willing to treat the trade unionists on an equal footing with the employers. It must be stressed that the readiness of the trade unions to support the Government and to set aside their old quarrels with Churchill was due in large measure to the fact that in Bevin they had a personality who could meet the Prime Minister on level terms. Bevin, as Minister of Labour, was a necessary condition for the partnership which, despite all strains, lasted until the Nazis were defeated."

"Hitherto I had regarded him with great admiration: from now onwards, I regarded him with great affection. He was intensely human, warm-hearted, simple and brave, and his common sense was as massive as his shoulders. He threw his whole heart and soul into the war, and no Englishman of any political party had a deeper love for his country, a greater pride in her past, or a surer faith in her future. At the same time he loved his fellow men the world over, and was very internationally minded. As Foreign Secretary in the years of Soviet expansion westwards he was one of the principal architects of the North Atlantic Alliance."

"[H]e was in every sense a big man, who concerned himself only with essentials. "You know my mind" meant that one could go away and take the necessary action without any further reference to him. If the subsequent telegrams and despatches did not quite meet his views, he never complained so long as they conformed broadly to his instructions. This made him very easy and pleasant to work for. He was equally magnanimous in negotiation. When dealing with the Russians he never pulled his punches, but he showed the utmost consideration for his Western associates... But he never allowed himself to be bounced into doing anything against his better judgement. Indeed it was misguised to try to bounce him into anything at all. "I will not be rushed", was his reply. He required time to read the files and to subject his experts to a penetrating cross-examination. Since he had the memory of an elephant, it behoved the expert to be careful. "That's not what you told me a year ago", might be his retort to an ill-considered piece of advice."

"He was interested in his predecessors in office and particularly Lord Curzon. He saw clearly that what hampered him most in the field of foreign affairs was the precarious state of our economy. So he envied his predecessors and he often asked me: "What would Lord Curzon do if he were in my shoes?" This led to reminiscences of the old Foreign Office, and I once told him a story of Lord Curzon's witty reply to an inappropriate telegram from an Ambassador abroad. More than a year later I went to see him on some Nato problem, but before I could broach my subject he said with a wicked grin: "I behaved like Lord Curzon this morning." "Oh, indeed," I replied. "What did you do?" "I saw a telegram from our Ambassador in Ruritania, reporting that reputable people in Ruritania were criticising the King's matrimonial antics. So I telegraphed back, 'Where have you found reputable people in Ruritania?'""

"In general his attitude was robust and British; and one could foretell exactly what it would be in any given circumstance. He was a rock."

"One thing which left its mark upon him was the bellicose attitude of the German Social Democrats in 1914, for which he never forgave them. He felt betrayed and it made him more anti-German than anything else the Germans ever did. His post-war experience confirmed him in his gloomy view of German Social Democracy and he found Dr. Adenauer much less difficult than Dr. Schumacher. But to the end he remained just as suspicious and resentful of Germany as he had ever been, although he never allowed his feelings on this subject to take command of his head."

"He is a powerful fellow, with a bull neck and a huge voice – a born leader...if there is trouble, mark my words! You will hear more of Bevin!"

"Some of us do not think that passports are the same since they were introduced by the words, "We, Ernest Bevin"."

"Putting all this together during March 1945, British and American leaders detected a fundamental and sinister shift of Soviet policy. Why it had happened, however, seemed less clear. Most attempts at explanation took as their premise the continued good faith of Stalin himself: that seemed to be one of the lessons of Yalta, indeed of wartime summitry as a whole. Therefore the change of heart was presumed to lie with his advisors—those sinister forces supposedly swirling around in the shadowy recesses of the Kremlin. British Cabinet Minister Ernest Bevin (soon to become foreign secretary) suggested that blame for the turnaround should be ascribed to Molotov. Alternatives postulated by the Foreign Office were the “Party bosses behind the scenes” or “Army marshals at the front” who were throwing their weight about amid the chaos of Eastern Europe. Churchill was similarly unwilling to blame Stalin. On 5 April he wrote darkly to FDR about “the Soviet leaders, whoever they may be.”"

"Churchill could therefore leave the Home Front, the organisation of the total man-power of the country, of its industrial and war production and supplies, the rationing of food, the financing of it all, to his colleagues. In all this, the most Churchillian figure among Labour leaders, Ernest Bevin, played a part second only to Churchill in winning the war."

"Both [Ernest Bevin and Winston Churchill] were as English as the oak and neither was afflicted with the tiresome form of intellectualism which is the curse of many of the younger Socialists."

"One of the biggest surprises the Soviets got in 1945 was the Labour Party victory in the British general election. Stalin may have distrusted Winston Churchill and seen in him the embodiment of British upper-class rule, but Winston was the devil he knew, just as he knew, through his spies, that the old Conservative had formed a bit of a sentimental relationship with Stalin as a fellow survivor and victor in World War II. Besides, there was already bad blood between British Labour and Soviet Bolshevism. The leaders of the Labour Party—Clement Attlee, who now became prime minister, and Ernest Bevin, who became foreign secretary—detested the Communists within their own trade union movement; Moscow’s supporters were responsible, both thought, for splitting the movement in the 1920s and 1930s. Bevin, an unskilled worker who had come to prominence as the head of the biggest of the British trade unions, the Transport and General Workers’ Union, had fought Communist influence there and elsewhere relentlessly. In his postwar dealings with Stalin and Molotov, Bevin saw many of these battles repeated on an international scale. Molotov, said Bevin later, was like a Communist in a local Labour Party branch: if you treated him badly, he made the most of the grievance, and if you treated him well, he put up the price next day and abused you. A cabinet colleague viewed Bevin as “full of bright ideas, as well as earthy sense, but dangerously obsessed with Communists.""

"One of the main purposes of university is to encourage people to think. But education for its own sake is a bit dodgy, too. The idea that you can learn about the world sitting in your study just reading books is not quite right... If we had less people studying philosophy, that would be unfortunate. I feel very less occupied by classics."

"I don't mind there being some medievalists around for ornamental purposes, but there is no reason for the State to pay for them."

"I am not in any way opposed to medieval studies (or for that matter Latin)."

"The fact is, we're looking for a very small number of very evil needles in a very large haystack, which is the city of London."

"Unless during the first five years so great a degree of change has been accomplished as to deprive Capitalism of its power, it is unlikely that a Socialist Party will be able to maintain its position of control without adopting some exceptional means, such as the prolongation of the life of Parliament for a further term without an election."

"The [Labour] Government's first step will be to call Parliament together at the earliest moment and place before it an Emergency Powers Bill to be passed through in all its stages on the first day. This Bill will be wide enough in its terms to allow all that will be immediately necessary to be done by ministerial orders. These orders must be incapable of challenge in the Courts or in any way except in the House of Commons."

"In 1919 we pledged our honour as a country that we would disarm as soon as possible, and other countries did the same. In the face of that Germany accepted the Treaty of Versailles. We had done nothing. We had offered a Disarmament Conference which might well make the gods laugh if they desired the destruction of the human race. We had got to realize the extraordinary gravity of the European situation—the pass to which the National Government had brought the world. The worst Foreign Secretary for 200 years had led this country into folly after folly in the international field. They ought to warn the Government that in no circumstances would they break any of the pacts they had made not to go to war. There was only one effective way in which they could make that threat effective...and that was to call a general strike. It was for the people of this country, in answer to that call, to put themselves behind the trade unions and to compel the trade unions to draw up plans immediately for that great resistance."

"I do not believe in private armies but if the Fascists started a private army it might be for the Socialist and Communist Parties to do the same. When the Labour Party come into power they must act rapidly, and it will be necessary to deal with the House of Lords and the influence of the City of London. There is no doubt that we shall have to overcome opposition from Buckingham Palace and other places as well...There must not be time to allow the forces outside to gather and to exercise their influence upon the Legislature before the key-points of capitalism have been transferred to the control of the State, and I look upon these two key-points myself as being the land and finance. If other people become revolutionary, then the Socialist Government, like any other Government, must take steps to stamp out the revolution. The Socialist Government must not be mealy-mouthed about saying what they mean. They must make it perfectly clear that it is their intention to carry out the mandate they have been given by the people."

"The problem of dealing with the armed forces of the Crown is the most difficult one we will have to face when we do get into power. The Labour Party will have to face the fact that it is a class Party...It has to be prepared to take steps more forceful than even the steps taken at the time of the Ulster Rebellion."

"But it is a fallacy, if one is examining the methods by which security can be attained, to start upon the assumption, as so many hon. Members do, that we get security by an increase of air armaments or an increase of any other form of armaments."

"I cannot imagine the Labour Party coming into power without a first-rate financial crisis. That is why we ask for full emergency measures."

"It must be the duty of the next Labour Government in power to make an immediate challenge to the capitalist system and take the banks and the land into the custody of the people. The time had come to drop all hesitancy and to be bold. If they returned a Socialist Government next time, it was going to "do things," whatever it cost."

"We will have nothing to do with Imperialist or capitalist wars. If the time comes, as we hope it will, when the workers of this country own England as they do not own England to-day; if their policy is a policy of international socialism, then it may be that we may have to defend the system and the country against the marauders of some capitalist Power...the majority of the workers would be prepared to defend the system, but so long as they were being asked to defend something with which they profoundly disagreed, something which they believed to lie at the root of the dangers of the world to-day, then it was their duty to say that they would have nothing to do with the armed forces or with war. It was no exaggeration to say that to-day we were far more in danger of a holocaust than we were in 1913...in 1931 Lombard Street determined that it was time to finish the life of the Labour Government. It was finished not by the traditional method of a hostile vote in the Commons, but by means which [I] dared to mention in Nottingham—and caused a considerable uproar in the Press—the Buckingham Palace influence."

"You have only got to look at the pages of British imperial history to hide your head in shame that you are British."

"It is fundamental to Socialism that we should liquidate the British Empire as soon as we can."

"The National Government's only remedy for a difficult national problem was to arm and arm and arm, regardless of the lessons of history and the proved fact that armament racing could only end in war. ... If we are plunged in war I devoutly hope that the workers of this country will use it for the purpose of revolution. I hope that the present government can be made to understand that that will happen. It will be a very healthy thought for them to have in the back of their mind."

"Every possible effort should be made to stop recruiting for the Armed Forces. This may, and probably would, lead to some form of conscription being proposed or introduced. Thus would be provided a most favourable political platform upon which to fight the National Government."

"I do not believe it would be a bad thing for the British working-class if Germany defeated us. It would be a disaster for the profit-makers and capitalists, but not necessarily for the working-class."

"All sorts of excuses were being given why we should uphold rearmament, including the old-fashioned "For God, King and Country" patriotism, assisted by all the tomfoolery of jubilees and coronations."

"The reactionaries of our Movement are keen to prevent Socialists from coming into it. The last thing anyone should do is to pander to the reactionaries by staying out. James Maxton and Harry Pollitt should be the Leaders of the Labour Movement today"

"Money cannot make armaments. Armaments can only be made by the skill of the British working class, and it is the British working class who would be called upon to use them. To-day you have the most glorious opportunity that the workers have ever had if you will only use the necessity of capitalism in order to get power yourselves. The capitalists are in your hands. Refuse to make munitions, refuse to make armaments, and they are helpless. They would have to hand the control of the country over to you."

"The workers must now make it clear beyond all doubt that they will not support the Government or its armaments in its mad policy which it is now pursuing."

"I want to see the end of the British Empire in the world."

"Emphatically no, and I never have been."

"...we must avoid a competitive raising of wages and conditions in a scarce labour market, which raises prices. ... If we allow prices to rise because of internal costs rising, we shall lose and not gain our overseas markets, or at least not be able to gain new ones in the competition. Therefore, incentives must be strictly limited to increased production so that more earnings mean more production. We cannot in any circumstances afford to pay more for the same or less production. We must await the further raising of the levels of earnings until we can provide the goods upon which those earnings can be spent. In the same way, let me point out, that large profits drawn from industry today are just as inimical because they, too, raise the price levels and, furthermore, they offer an immediate temptation for the demand for greater salaries."

"We must bring home to the people the seriousness of the country's present plight and the future problems that we face. We must convince them of their power to overcome all difficulties by common effort. We must draw out from people that courage and determination which have always been the hallmarks of the British character."

"Production, and production alone, can find us relief in our immediate situation. It is no part of the British character to resign ourselves to such difficulties or to fail to take the measures, however hard, to overcome them. It has been truly said that by our faith we can move mountains. It is by our faith in ourselves, in our country, in the free democratic traditions for which the people of this country have for centuries fought and battled, and for which they must fight again as willingly on the economic front as upon the oceans, on the land and in the air, it is by our faith in the deep spiritual values that we acknowledge in our Christian faith, that we shall be enabled and inspired to move the present mountains of our difficulties, and so emerge into that new and fertile plain of prosperity which we shall travel in happiness only as the result of our own efforts and our own vision."

"...we do not contemplate taking any action to alter the rate of sterling in relation to other currencies, as we do not believe that this will be rendered necessary or advisable."

"[In the case of sterling devaluation was] neither necessary nor will it take place."

"Though we have achieved considerable success in our policy of increasing production and maintaining full employment, this has been accompanied by constant pressure for higher wages resulting in higher prices. We have not yet found out how we can maintain full employment in combination with stable or decreasing costs and prices."

"His Majesty's Government have not the slightest intention of devaluing the pound."

"The Government decided...to reduce the dollar exchange value of the pound sterling. In the last few days we have settled what the new rate should be and now I have to tell you of that decision; it is that in place of the present rate, fixed in 1946, of $4 3c. for the pound the rate will in future be $2 80c. to the pound."

"Our position is such that we could not 'integrate' our economy into that of Europe in any manner that would prejudice the full discharge of these other responsibilities. At the same time, Britain regarded herself as bound up in western Europe, not only in economic, strategic and political interests, but in our culture and indeed in our participation in the heritage of Christian civilization."

"He was a man the greatness of whose intellectual and practical abilities was matched by his nobility of character and high idealism. ... I believe he did immense service to this country."

"As one who has been a nationalist leader and worker for India's independence, though now my activity is no longer in the political but in the spiritual field, I wish to express my appreciation of all you have done to bring about this offer. I welcome it as an opportunity given to India to determine for herself, and organise in all liberty of choice, her freedom and unity, and take an effective place among the world's free nations. I hope that it will be accepted, and right use made of it, putting aside all discords and divisions.... I offer my public adhesion, in case it can be of any help in your work."

"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire."

"There, but for the grace of God, goes God."

"Stafford Cripps was a man of force and fire. His intellectual and moral passions were so strong that they not only inspired but not seldom dominated his actions. They were strengthened and also governed by the workings of a powerful, lucid intelligence, and by a deep and lively Christian faith. He strode through life with a remarkable indifference to material satisfactions or worldly advantages. I suppose there are few hon. Members in any part of the House who have not differed violently from him at this time or that, and yet there is none who did not regard him with respect and with admiration, not only for his abilities, but for his character."

"Cripps seems quite unable to see the argument that he is damaging the party electorally. It is all ‘misreporting’, or picking sentences out of their context. He has become very vain and seems to think that only he and his cronies know what Socialism is or how it should be preached. His gaffes cover an immense range – Buckingham Palace – League of Nations – ‘compelling’ Unions to declare a General Strike – prolonging Parliament beyond five years...‘seize land, finance and industry’ (without compensation?) – Emergency Powers Bill in one day, giving ‘all necessary powers’...I make a violent – perhaps too violent – speech asking that this stream of oratorical ineptitudes should now cease...It is the number of these gaffes which is so appalling. Our candidates are being stabbed in the back and pushed onto the defensive. Tory HQ regard him as their greatest electoral asset...Attlee says I am like a pedagogue addressing a pupil. I wish the pupil were a bit brighter."

"We mourn today the passing of a fine Christian knight, a dauntless spirit, a devoted public servant, a noble character whose life, whose integrity, and whose work are an example and an inspiration to us all, whose shining faith never faltered in the face of difficulties, however mountainous."

"Cripps, a man without roots, a demagogue and a liar, would pursue his sick fancies although the Empire were to crack at every corner. Moreover, this theoretician devoid of humanity lacks contact with the mass that's grouped behind the Labour Party, and he'll never succeed in understanding the problems that occupy the minds of the lower classes."

"By the time I stood for Parliament I was already carrying a walking stick, and the combination of my illness and my sense of withdrawal from a belief in a kind of Britain I would have preferred to see meant that I was no longer satisfied with such a (political) role: it wasn't creative enough, it didn't satisfy me. I simply didn't fit the bill in the end. Although I was a Labour candidate I didn't even vote in that election. I was probably the only candidate who didn't vote for his party."

"You cannot make a pair of croak-voiced Daleks appear benevolent, even if you dress one of them in an Armani suit and call the other Marmaduke."

"As a writer you will know that one of the favourite fantasy plots of a writer is, a character's told 'you've got three months to live,' and who would you kill? I call my cancer Rupert, so I can get close to it. Because that man, Murdoch, is the one who, if I had the time (I've got too much writing to do...) I would shoot the bugger if I could. There is no one person more responsible for the pollution of what was already a fairly polluted press. And the pollution of the British press is an important part of the pollution of British political life, and it's an important part of the cynicism and misperception of our own realities that is destroying so much of our political discourse."

"My only regret is to die four pages too soon."

"The blossom is out in full now, it’s plum tree, it looks like apple blossom but it’s white. It’s the whitest, frothiest blossomest blossom that ever could be, and I can see it. Things are both more trivial than they ever were and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn’t seem to matter. But the now-ness of everything is absolutely wondrous."

"Nigel Barton: Eh dad, why do you always walk in the middle of the road? Harry Barton: I don't know. Nigel Barton: What do you think the pavement's for? Harry Barton: Dogs to poop in, by the looks of things!"

"Harry Barton: Clever sod, aren't you? I expect they think the sun shines out of you down at Oxford. Nigel Barton. Up. Harry Barton: What? Nigel Barton. Up, dad. Up. Harry Barton: Aye, and up you, too! Nigel Barton: Everyone says 'Up at Oxford'. You come 'down' when you've finished there. Harry Barton: Well, what's this then? Does bloody Oxford move up and down the bloody map then?"

"Georgie Pringle: The word of the LORD came again unto me, saying, Son of man, there were two women, the daughters of one mother: And they committed whoredoms in Egypt; they committed whoredoms in their youth: there were their breasts pressed, and there they bruised the teats of their virginity."

"Miss Tillings: Stand up, Nigel Barton! Well, Nigel, do you know anything about this? I can't believe it was you! Nigel Barton: No, Miss! Miss Tillings: Then what do you know about it? Nigel Barton: I think - I think I might have had the daffodil, Miss— Miss Tillings: You might have had it? What do you mean, boy? Speak up! Nigel Barton: The stem was all broke and somebody gave it to me, Miss. Miss Tillings: Who gave it to you? Nigel Barton: Ooh, I don't like to say, Miss. Miss Tillings: You better had, Barton, and quick about it. Nigel Barton: Georgie Pringle, Miss."

"Nigel Barton (On TV): I feel I don't belong here, that's my trouble. Interviewer (on TV): Well, where do you belong? At home? Harry Barton: Of course! Nigel Barton (on TV): No, I'm afraid I don't. Now it hurts to say this, of course, but it's the truth. Back at home, in the village, in the workingmen's club, with people I went to school with, I'm so much on the defensive, you see. They suspect me of making qualitative judgments about their environment, you understand, but it's not that I wish to do so. Yet I even find my own father looking at me oddly some times, waiting to pounce on some remark, some expression in my face, watching me like a hawk. I don't feel at home in either place. I don't belong. It's a tightrope between two different worlds, and I'm walking it. Harry Barton: You're a bloody liar, Nigel!"

"Jack: (to camera) My office! (indicates mess) I'm sorry about all this, but we in the Labour Party link drabness with idealism, see. I'm a paid agent of the party, but whenever I need to know anything I have to ring up Conservative Central Office. It's a very plush place, that - carpets plucking at your bleeding ankles. You see, they link drabness with idealism, too."

"Nigel: I don't regard clever as a dirty word. Jack: Rule one, it's never clever to appear to be clever. Long words actually hurt people, you know that? Rule two, speak slowly and clearly as though to a group of malignant kids. Rule three, keep it short. Very short. Half-truths take less time than whole ones, old mate. Oh and I see you've let your locks sprout a bit. Get 'em cut, there's a good chap. Rolling stones gather no votes."

"Jack: You'll have to compromise, smile, concern yourself with your public image, measure your words as carefully as possible... and turn yourself into a dutiful party hack! [chuckles] Never mind, Nigel, never mind."

"Jack: A potential Cabinet Minister if ever I saw one. Dishonest in a way which seems embarrassingly frank. Upright when creeping. And dignified when at his most stupid."

"Nigel: Why the cheap jokes? Jack: Cheap? When I was a kid, we were made to stay away from school on Empire Days so we wouldn't have to wave one of those little Union Jacks. We were the richest country in the world then, or so I'm told, and my old man bow-legged from malnutrition. Us kids nearly died laughing."

"Jack: I once had a candidate who was deeply concerned about the moral issues raised by myxomatosis. 'Look mate,' I said, 'Rabbits, as far as I'm aware, haven't yet had the vote.' Mind you, I'm an animal lover, too, you know. I've always advocated that the party that introduced family allowances for dogs would sweep the country. And it'll come, it'll come."

"To me [...] the term "costume drama" means something totally pickled. It doesn't interest me in the slightest. What first seized my imagination was the myth of Casanova. Everyone's heard of it. But what does it mean? You hear about the office Casanova, the small-town Casanova, the shop-floor Casanova. He was what we describe as a libertine; but he was concerned with religion and sexual freedom, and these are things we have to address ourselves in now. The libertine is the last possible hero. Traditional heroes are too derisory for words; but the libertine as hero persists. Malice and envy lap their gentle bile around him, but he is the last hero. Of course, I read his memoirs, and I simply don't believe them. They're vain and egotistical, but they are about a man who is hunted by what he is hunting—and that is freedom, expressed in sexual terms."

"Philip Marlow: Minute by minute we make the world. We make our own world."

"Philip Marlow: You're the girl in all those songs. De-dum. Nurse Mills: What songs? Philip Marlow: The songs, the songs, the bloody, bloody songs. Nurse Mills: I wish I knew what you were talking about. Philip Marlow: The songs you hear coming up the stair. Nurse Mills: Sorry? Philip Marlow: When you're a child, when you're supposed to be asleep. Those songs."

"Stephen Gilbert and John Cook (along with just about everyone else) would agree that Potter reached his reflexive nadir with Blackeyes, in which the story of the eponymous model based on the central character, Jessica, is related as a novel authored by Jessica's uncle, but rewritten by Jessica, both of whom, in the third episode, turn out to have been authored by a journalist called Jeff, who turns out himself, in the final scene, to have been the invented creature of a writer who is none other than 'Dennis Potter'."

"Potter was in hospital for three months last summer and he has been into hospital seven times in the last 10 years. He doesn't like to talk about his illness, just as he doesn't like to talk about how really well he gets along with the BBC. "I think it is a remarkable organisation," he says, "but I don't think this should be said too often in public." Potter also loves the idea of [[w:Mary Whitehouse|Mrs [Mary] Whitehouse]]. He sees her as standing up for all the people with ducks on the walls who have been laughed at and treated like rubbish by the sophisticated metropolitan minority. He likes Mr Ross McWhirter too. "The worst thing you can say in England is 'I'll get the law on you,' and here comes the man and he does it.""

"His characters are stretched out, beyond naturalism. People question the parts he wrote for women, but they were idealised rather than misogynistic. His strength was that he was able to pick out human characteristics and stretch them to make intellectual points."

"Some of you would prefer a Tory Government. We know our enemies. I have come across a coalition of Conservatives and Communists before. Tories have a very warm place in their hearts for Communists and so have the Communists for the Tories."

"It is a bright idea that when you get a National Government in office, a mixed and assorted Government, it is to be assumed that the opposition must suddenly cease to function, and that it must discharge the duties of the Opposition and carry the burden of the baby of the Government as well. This Bill is the Government's business, and it is for us to attack it and to tear it to pieces if we like, and we are going to do what we think proper in this respect."

"The good Socialist works with religious zeal for the redemption of mankind from the evils of poverty and ignorance. ... He is conscious of the beauty of the ideal ... he works on ... for the deliverance of the human spirit from the enslavement of material things."

"The bridge was not of such great importance or social significance, but it was symbolical that Labour was capable of decision, that the machinery of democratic public administration would work if the men and women in charge were determined that it should work."

"He would be prepared to say himself that no individual state should have Crown Colonies at all, and that French, Italian, and British colonies should be handed over to the League to administer under mandates controlled by the League itself. It did not follow that British Crown Colonies would no longer be under British administration. He hoped he was not a Jingo, but he still felt that the British were the best Colonial administrators of any government in the world. It would make a vital difference, however, if instead of being governed as Crown Colonies the possibility should be removed of their exploitation by British capitalism."

"A vote for the Tories is a vote for war."

"The Government leaders were all urging a policy of rearmament, and Mr. Chamberlain was ready and anxious to spend millions of pounds on machines of destruction. He had not money, however, for the unemployed, the depressed areas, and social services. He would spend on the means of death, but not on the means of life, and that was the sort of fellow he looked like, too."

"What the resolution does not contemplate being done is the lining up behind the government and voting for its rearmament programme."

"Work is the call. Work at war speed. Good-night—and go to it."

"Never again while the risk of war remained must we allow ourselves to neglect our land weapon."

"Our own British Communist Party – if it is our own and British – might at any time suffer a change of heart and go back to bloody revolution. For all I know it may there already, underground. Anything is possible for a party which at one and the same time shouts for a United Front and puts up candidates against us with a view to splitting the Labour vote. All this is alien to our honest, straightforward, native, Socialist thought. ... But you can't all the time say 'No, No, No' to the Communists. The real answer to the Communists is a positive answer. We have to show more vigorous fighting enthusiasm, more faith, more sense of high adventure."

"It is because I have confidence in the reasoned appeal the Socialist Party can make to all sections of the community – manual workers and black coats alike – that I have decided to go to East Lewisham, if I am selected, emphasizing by this action my conviction that the soundest socialist appeal is that which is most universal in its scope."

"We must not be rigid. We must not become conservative as is the unhappy state of some of our Liberal leaders to-day, as did the French Revolution of 1789, as has, in many respects, the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. We need the fresh air and free challenging thought of my favourite poet, Robert Burns, who was, I think, a Socialist agitator before an organised Socialist movement was born."

"You will see, therefore, that Socialism does not consist of nationalisation alone, important though that element is. It has other and very important aspects... The alternative is Tory reaction. And Tory reaction—as we have seen in other countries—breeds depression, muddle, Communism, and Fascism."

"The fact that the House of Lords has many irrational features is not, in itself, fatal in British eyes for we have a capacity for making the irrational work, and if a thing works, we tend to like it, or at any rate to put up with it."

"Socialism is what a Labour government does."

"Of all the colleagues I have lost, he is the one I am least sorry to see the last of. I hope that Lewisham will throw the intruder out. He only came here because he ran away from a communist."

"We are going to build the Tories out of London."

"I will be even briefer than Fabian, I thought I would creep in the back and I don’t have to say anything but what I would like to say and I came in when Eddy was 10 speaking and that was because we had a very constructive meeting with the High Commissioner yesterday and we made some decisions which is always good. Where I disagree sometimes with the Greek Cypriots is that I wanted to vote for Turkey never to be in the European Union! I have no interest in Turkey being in the EU until all, a whole host of problems are resolved and it is of course the Cyprus problem for me first on the agenda, but it is the Kurdish problem, its the military backing barracks, and all the rest of that, you know there are no human rights and many human rights violations in Turkey. So whether it takes 20 years or longer that makes me think that Turkey is using Cyprus as a lever to get as much out of it as is possible and of course the longer it takes for them not to be a member the longer that lever takes and the longer we will have 200,000 or 300,000 Turks settled in Cyprus and that becomes a very much bigger problem than it is now already and I think that I have said that at three or four meetings before rather than us talking about the problem of Cyprus which makes that it becomes a problem for the Republic as it is worldwide known we ought to talk about the problem of Turkey, it is really a 100% Turkish problem that they're not acting in the way in which they should be acting and if that’s the case well shove it to them! And I saw about 50 Turkish … [(A Turkish Cypriot member of the audience accused him saying "You are racist!" and returns his comments…. Many interruptions and heckling from the audience, some Greek Cypriots shouted for the Turkish Cypriot to get out if he didn’t like what he was hearing and three or four police officers arrived in the room.)] Well, it has certainly allocated my speech time and I would only say to the gentleman that we have nothing against honest straightforward Turkish Cypriots but Turkey is using the occupied territory to settle Turkish people they don’t necessarily want in Turkey, many are unemployed, that is not racism, that is a set of true facts and I don’t know whether you are a Turkish Cypriot or a Turkish person I have no disrespect for anybody in the world, but I have deep disrespect for the Turkish Government and the Turkish military and that is my last word on that!"

"It is ridiculous that British troops are here in Crossmaglen. The claim is that they're in Ireland keeping the peace between the two communities. But there is only one community in South Armagh, so what the heck are they doing here?"

"I should make it clear [...] that we do not accept that Britain has a special responsibility to meet the costs of land purchase in Zimbabwe. We are a new government from diverse backgrounds without links to former colonial interests. My own origins are Irish and, as you know, we were colonised, not colonisers."

"They say 10,000, double, treble and then think of another number. It will be golden elephants next. They have got to stop this game. It is bad governance. It's hysterica scaremongering, which is whipping people up."

"I also believe that US backing for Israeli policies of expansion of the Israeli state and oppression of the Palestinian people is the major cause of bitter division and violence in the world."

"She sounds like a mouthpiece for an old nineteenth-century colonial and Conservative government."

"Despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of people have died — and that is a tragedy — I still believe that it was the right thing to do."

"His Majesty's Government contemplate the inclusion in the R.A.F. contingent in the March of a representative party of 25 Polish airmen (including one officer) who fought in the Battle of Britain. There will he no separate representation of other Polish armed forces now in this country, since these do not form part of His Majesty's Forces, but the Polish Government have been invited to send a contingent of three high-ranking officers, three aides-de-camp or staff officers and a flag party of three men, followed by a detachment of.24 men representative of the Polish fighting services."

"I have noticed not only a change of emphasis but a distinct change of policy, and it may be that the Tories have been conducting some market research with the assistance of the advertising firm which they have engaged. It has a foreign-sounding name. It sounds a coloured name to me—Saatchi and Saatchi. Certainly it does not sound very English."

"Skinner: …it should be placed on record that, according to my hon. Friends who worked tirelessly in the Committee to oppose the provisions of the Bill, including this clause, the Liberal spokesman was not there half the time."

"David Alton: I do not know where the hon. Gentleman gets his facts from. If it is from one of his friends on the national executive committee of the Labour Party, I suspect that the information is probably as spurious and ridiculous as most of the other things said in that body. I can assure him that what he said is certainly not the case, and I hope that he will withdraw that comment immediately. [An exchange takes place between the pair and the speaker, who asks Skinner to keep on topic but not to withdraw the remark.]"

"Skinner: The hon. Member for Edge Hill seems a bit upset about my saying that he was not there half the time. Will he settle for my agreeing that he was there the other half? That is an advance."

"I bet he drinks Carling Black Label.."

"Is there not something even more sinister in people talking in abstract terms about Britain becoming part of this political union? People may have the impression that we, the 12 countries and perhaps more, are all pals together. The truth is that the real powerhouse of the Common Market lies in Germany. It has just annexed East Germany. It is central to the activities of all the nation states that are falling apart in eastern Europe. Political union spells something much more sinister, and that is German domination. We fought for six years against it in the second world war. If hon. Members allow this political union, they will allow the Germans to win now when they lost in 1945."

"When I called the Right Hon. Member for Plymouth, Devonport (Dr. Owen) a pompous sod, Mr. Speaker said to me, 'You had better withdraw that'. I said I would withdraw 'pompous', but said, Mr. Speaker 'That's not the word I'm looking for.' There was laughter in the House and everyone thought that I had hit the nail on the head. I thought that that was a real parliamentary triumph, but Mr. Speaker thought differently. He said, 'Off you go,' and I did not get a chance to reply."

"I have been kicked out of this place about seven times, but I did not have any chance to explain. No one said to me, "Dennis, will you explain why you said that the Right Hon. Member for Chingford (Mr. Tebbit) was lining his pockets when he picked up that non-executive directorship of British Telecom?" I would have loved to tell everyone all about that, but Mr. Speaker said, "On your bike - early bath," and off I had to go."

"I accused the noble Lord, Lord Pym, when he was a Member of this House, of being the Minister for Unemployment because there were nearly 2 million people on the scrap heap - that pile of human misery known as the dole queue. Again, I was not able to make a speech before Mr. Speaker sent me out."

"Those were all genuine statements that I had to make. The Hon. Member for Winchester (Mr. Browne) was kicked out for 20 days because he lined his pockets with about £50,000 and did not put it in the register as he is supposed to do, and now he is whingeing but I reckon he got away with blue murder!"

"The Hon. Gentleman is making pretty heavy weather of the fact that he was kicked out of this gentleman's club for 20 days. I call it a gentlemen's club."

"New Labour, New Black Rod."

"Tell the House of Lords to go to hell."

"Is my right hon. Friend aware that in the 1970s and a lot of the 1980s, we would have thanked our lucky stars in the coalfield areas for growth of 1.75 per cent.? The only thing growing then were the lines of coke in front of boy George and the rest of them."

"She has been let off because she is a Tory."

"Any Tory moles at the Palace?"

"Royal Expenses are on the way."

"When posh boys are in trouble they sack the servants"

"Jubilee year, double-dip recession, what a start."

"every now and then you see the arrogance of Cameron, and that comes through every so often. It is the Bullingdon Club. When they were sat down – him and Gideon [Osborne's birth name] – and he says: 'You know what we really want, Gideon? Every weekend, after we've roughed up one of those hotels, we need an army of volunteers to come in and clean it all up.' And Gideon says: 'Yeah, we could call it the Big Society'."

"Royal Mail for sale, Queen's head privatised."

"Coalition's last stand."

"Does the Prime Minister [then David Cameron] recall that at the time after he became Prime Minister under the coalition and at the time when he was dividing the nation between strivers and scroungers, I asked him a very important question about the windfall he received when he wrote off the mortgage of the premises in Notting Hill... I didn't receive a proper answer then. Maybe dodgy Dave will answer it now."

"Hands off the BBC."

"Skinner: "Half the Tories opposite are crooks.""

"Speaker: "Please retract that unparliamentary language.""

"Skinner: "OK, half the Tories opposite are not crooks.""

"Ireland is our struggle. Every defeat of the British state is a victory for all of us. A defeat in Northern Ireland would be a defeat indeed."

"You have to start from an understanding that all white people are racist."

"Ever since my colleagues and I have been in the house, there have been a series of incidents that give rise to concern. Our visitors are sometimes treated less than politely and deliberately misled … Visitors and we ourselves have been jostled. We have been challenged by attendants as to our identity in an unsubtle attempt to embarrass us. These occurrences are too frequent and have been going on for too long."

"Being an MP is the sort of job all working-class parents want for their children — clean, indoors and no heavy lifting."

"I am surprised that they chose to bring in blonde, blue-eyed girls from Finland, instead of nurses from the Caribbean who know the language and understand British culture and institutions. [...] Are Finnish girls, who may never have met a black person before, let alone touched one, best suited to nurse in multicultural Hackney?"

"On balance Mao did more good than harm."

"I’m a West Indian mum and West Indian mums will go to the wall for their children."

"I think the public sector cuts have the potential to set back race relations and black and ethnic minority communities by a generation."

"White people love playing ‘divide & rule’. We should not play their game."

"I put being a mother ahead of being a politician."

"Of course, sex is great. We don't have to pretend otherwise. But people shouldn't feel victimised by a pornified culture and girls shouldn't be forced to do things they don't feel comfortable with."

"There is a crisis of masculinity in Britain because of the pressures rapid economic and social change have placed on masculine identity. A generation of men are in transit and unclear of their social role. They are also under pressure to live up to pornified ideals."

"If you want people to participate and be interested, part of that is to have a political class that looks like the population as a whole."

"When I had been at primary school, I was very good at writing essays. It was a big thing. My essays were so good they would get pinned up on the wall and read out to the rest of the class"

"I want power. I suppose that's the story of my life - seeking power."

"I'm in politics to be a voice for people who don't have a voice."

"There's no question women politicians get a level of abuse online which men don't get. New media and the anonymity has unleashed a really quite violent misogyny which I didn't see when I started in politics, although consistently women always get more severe abuse in the media than men."

"I respect the result of the referendum and no-one wanted to thwart it in a perverse kind of way. But we need to be clear, this is not a Tony Benn Brexit, this is Donald Trump Brexit, and it's got a very ugly side."

"I receive racist and sexist abuse online on a daily basis. I have had rape threats, death threats, and am referred to routinely as a bitch and/or nigger, and am sent horrible images on Twitter"

"Sexism towards female MPs is sadly still commonplace"

"I do know my figures"

"I think politicians complaining about the media is like sailors complaining about the weather."

"I think that's what we were referencing when we talked about easy movement [of workers after the UK has left the EU's single market] - less bureaucracy; it's good for migrants but it's also good for business"

"The health service, they're very worried about a collapse in the number of EU migrants coming here. Social care would be in a terrible position.... finance, education. The reality is that business, the CBI, the Institute of Directors, but also health, education and social care; they say that they need these European migrants and we have to listen to them."

"I will argue for the right of the electorate to vote on any deal that is finally agreed."

"The Labour Party doesn't support a second referendum"

"We don't want to see the break-up of families from the EU in the way we currently do for non-EU families."

"In a global world, we need migration and migrants. They should not be subjected to a hostile environment."

"The disproportionate use of force is clearly discriminatory. This is not a recipe for good police-community relations."

"Migrants from outside the EU should be treated with the same fairness as EU migrants after Brexit."

"The referendum vote will be honoured and we will come out of the EU next spring"

"[We will table an amendment to reject the deal and] prevent the chaos of the UK crashing out of the EU"

"I hope ex-members will continue to work with Labour on issues like homelessness, the benefit system, the NHS and most of all fighting this Tory Brexit"

"The British people and British workers are paying a big price for chaotic Brexit"

"Another vote would be the democratic thing to do to move Brexit forward."

"[Remaining in the EU would be the] best option for the country and my constituents"

"Numbers are a polite way of expressing hostility to migration as a whole."

"To counter her argument that the "prejudice" experienced by Irish, Jewish and Traveller people is not a patch on the "racism" suffered by black people, I cannot improve on the letter from someone whose family left a city in Poland where more than 99% of Jews were exterminated for their race and whose experiences of British antisemitism includes having Nazi insignia brandished in their face. As the anonymous writer says: "To compare those experiences to the struggles of redheads is incomprehensible." Quite."

"Compare the blond Etonian [Boris Johnson] to Britain’s first black woman MP, and you see how racist and sexist 21st-century century Britain remains. No matter how great the sin, how brazen the deceit, how lethally complacent the politician, he gets to come back again and again, and fills his pockets while doing so. Abbott can't even enjoy an M&S mojito on the tube without it becoming a major scandal. She has faced racial bullying – including from within her own party – that would have broken others. Little of that is remembered, and none of it helps."

"Thanks Diane. I hope we can all agree that this debate should be about Syria not UK party politics"

"You're shadow international development secretary not an internet troll."

"images of children should only be considered pornographic if it could be proven the subject suffered"

"Not all civil servants admire strong political leadership. But if you want to change things for the better you need strong political leadership."

"He is demanding of his colleagues, but he is demanding of himself because he wants to change things for the better."

"Yes I did when I was at university 30 years ago, just for a short time."

"I am in the Labour Party because I am a feminist. I am in the Labour Party because I believe in equality."

"Hague: I'd like to congratulate the Leader of the House on being the first female Labour member ever to answer Prime Minister's Questions. She must be proud, three decades on, to be following in the footsteps of Margaret Thatcher, who we on this side of the House and the Prime Minister so admire. Harman: Well I thank him for his congratulations but I would ask him, why is he asking the questions today? Because he is not the Shadow Leader of the House - the Shadow Leader of the House is sitting next to him! Is this the situation in the modern Conservative Party; that women should be seen but not heard? And if I may, perhaps I could offer the Shadow Leader of the House a bit of sisterly advice: she should not let him get away with it! Hague: Turning to domestic issues, I was going to be nice to the Rt. Hon. Lady - she has had a difficult week and she had to explain yesterday that she dresses in accordance with wherever she goes; she wears a helmet to a building site; wears Indian clothes to Indian parts of her constituency; presumably, when she goes to a Cabinet meeting, she dresses as a clown. Harman: Well I would just start by saying that if I'm looking for advice on what to wear and what not to wear, the very last man I would look to for advice would be the man in the baseball cap!"

"It wouldn't be possible because there aren't enough airports for all the men who'd want to flee the country."

"Harman: Commenting on the question of Sarah Palin, I think that men in politics underestimate women in politics at their peril, and I think that - although I strongly, strongly disagree with very many of the policies she's putting forward - I think she's speaking to the fact that many women feel that they're working hard, they're bringing up their families, they've got a viewpoint on life and the political system excludes them and she has touched that nerve in America. I mean, I don't agree with her politics but I think that she has touched a nerve and I think that then places a big challenge to the Democrats to make sure that they, as a Party which has long championed equality and equality for women that they actually match them and gear up their act. David Dimbleby: You admire her? Harman: I think that she's tough, I don't agree with her politics, I wouldn't vote for her if I was in the States, but I think that she is impressive, yes. But I would rather see the Democrats getting, you know, an even more impressive woman right up at the front."

"The Labour Party is the sister Party for the Democrats and their progressive views are the ones that we are most aligned with."

"I am a very big admirer of Hillary's and I am an admirer of Obama as well."

"I don’t agree with all-male leaderships. Men cannot be left to run things on their own. I think it’s a thoroughly bad thing to have men-only leadership."

"While the happy couple are enjoying the thrill of the rose garden, the in-laws are saying that they are just not right for each other. We keep telling them that they cannot pay couples to stay together, and it is clear that it will take more than a three-quid-a-week tax break to keep this marriage together."

"This is a very crucial period and we have got five fantastic candidates. All of them would make excellent leaders of the Party."

"The Chancellor has delivered his first budget but it's the same old Tories; hitting hardest at those who can least afford it and breaking their promises. This is true to form for the Tories, but it includes things that the Liberal Democrats have always fought against. Surely they cannot vote for this."

"This reckless Tory Budget would not be possible without the Lib Dems. The Lib Dems denounced early cuts; now they are backing them. They denounced VAT increases; now they are voting for them. How could they support everything they fought against? How could they let down everyone who voted for them? How could they let the Tories so exploit them? Do they not see that they are just a fig leaf? The Liberal Democrat Chief Secretary is just the Chancellor's fig leaf. The Deputy Prime Minister is just the Prime Minister's fig leaf. The Lib Dems' leaders have sacrificed everything they ever stood for to ride in ministerial cars and to ride on the coat tails of the Tory Government. Twenty-two Liberal Democrat ministerial jobs have been bought at the cost of tens of thousands of other people's. The Liberal Democrats used to stand up for people's jobs, but now they only stand up for their own. Look at the Business Secretary, the right hon. Member for Twickenham. Mr Speaker,the House has noticed his remarkable transformation in the past few weeks from national treasure to Treasury poodle. They have no mandate for this Budget; this Budget has no legitimacy. Even if the Lib Dems will not speak up for jobs, we will. Even if they will not fight for fairness, we will, and even if they will not protest against Tory broken promises, we will."

"Although it was a very close election, I don't think it was a polarised election. It was a tough fought contest but it was not a divisive contest. Although he won by a whisker I think the party will unite behind Ed Miliband."

"Although he is disappointed, I know he will step forward and play a really important part in Labour’s future."

"Now, many of us in the Labour Party are conservationists - and we all love the red squirrel. But there is one ginger rodent which we never want to see again - Danny Alexander."

"If he votes against, that's the only principled position. If he abstains, it's a cop-out; if he votes for, it's a sell-out."

"I'm afraid you gave up the right to pontificate on social mobility when you abolished educational maintenance allowance [EMA], trebled tuition fees and betrayed a generation of young people."

"For many young people, social mobility now means a bus down to the job centre."

"Next he will be foxtrotting down to the Tory party's fundraising ball, auctioning City internships for the children of the highest bidder. Is that not the Government's idea of social mobility?"

"I'm sure nobody wants to know this, but my husband does all the cleaning - rather too much cleaning. It is too clean, the house!"

"You have been there and seen it with your own eyes [...] If I was going at 100mph, and saw the speedometer saying 100mph, it would be a bit odd, wouldn't it, if I said somebody assured me that I wasn't? Because it's what you've seen with your own eyes."

"[After an intervention by Jacob Rees-Mogg on her tweets, which he said had a "perception of bias": I] made it my business to find out whether or not it would mean that the government would not have confidence in me if I continued to chair the committee. [...] I was assured that I should continue the work that the House had mandated with the appointment that the House had put me into and so I did just that."

"Mr Johnson’s dishonesty if left unchecked would have contaminated the whole of government, allowing misleading to become commonplace and thus eroding standards which are essential for the health of our democracy. There is no impunity for wrongdoing. Even if you’re the prime minister – especially if you’re the prime minister – you must tell the truth to parliament."

"[Referring to women MPs] We're now up to 35 per cent and a lot of men find this objectionable and want to unleash misogyny. [...] The irony is that the more women you get, the more it triggers some men who whilst they can blot out of their ears a couple of women, somehow it feels like an assault on them to actually have to listen to a number of women in authority talking confidently, and they then do a backlash."

"She is one of certain, particular women who are of the opinion that they have a god-given right to be amongst the chosen."

"She is either thick or criminally disingenuous [...] Her only policy, her only raison d’être, is a particularly vacuous feminism dating from a sixth-form common room in about 1973. Were this a serious commitment and grounded in reality, one might respect her for it and even agree. But it never is grounded in reality. It is the perpetual shrieking of an idiot."

"Just as every human being has an ancestry, unknown to him though it may be; so every idea, every incident, every movement has in the past its own long chain of causes, without which it could not have been. Formerly we were glad to let the dead bury their dead: nowadays we turn lovingly to the records, whether of persons or things; and we busy ourselves willingly among origins, even without conscious utilitarian end. We are no longer proud of having ancestors, since every one has them; but we are more than ever interested in our ancestors, now that we find in them the fragments which compose our very selves."

"It need hardly be said that the social philosophy of the time did not remain unaffected by the political evolution and the industrial development. Slowly sinking into men's minds all this while was the conception of a new social nexus, and a new end of social life. It was discovered (or rediscovered) that a society is something more than an aggregate of so many individual units—that it possesses existence distinguishable from those of any of its components. A perfect city became recognized as something more than any number of good citizens—something to be tried by other tests, and weighed in other balances than the individual man. The community must necessarily aim, consciously or not, at its continuance as a community: its life transcends that of any of its members; and the interests of the individual unit must often clash with those of the whole."

"The capitalist is very fond of declaring that labour is a commodity, and the wage contract a bargain of purchase and sale like any other. But he instinctively expects his wage-earners to render him, not only obedience, but also personal deference. If the wage contract is a bargain of purchase and sale like any other, why is the workman expected to toff his hat to his employer, and to say ‘sir’ to him without reciprocity?"

"The constituency parties were frequently little unrepresentative groups of nonentities dominated by fanatics and cranks, and extremists, and that if the block vote of the Trade Unions were eliminated it would be impracticable to continue to vest the control of policy in Labour Party Conferences."

"Perhaps nothing illustrates better the diabolical character of the Stalinist regime than the 140-mile Belomor Canal, built at Stalin's instigation to link the Baltic Sea and the White Sea. Between September 1931 and August 1933, somewhere between 128,000 and 180,000 prisoners - most of them from Solovetsky, with Frenkel directing their efforts - hacked out a waterway, equipped only with the most primitive pick-axes, wheelbarrows and hatchets. So harsh were the conditions and so inadequate the tools that tens of thousands of them died in the process. This was hardly unforeseeable; for six months of the year the ground was frozen solid, while in many places the prisoners had to cut through solid granite. And, as so often, the net result was next to worthless economically: far too narrow and shallow to be navigable by substantial vessels. Yet when Shaw's fellow Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb were given a tour of the finished canal they were oblivious to all this. As they put it in their book Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? (1935), it was 'pleasant to think that the warmest appreciation was officially expressed of the success of the OGPU, not merely in performing a great engineering feat, but in achieving a triumph in human regeneration'."

"The Webbs explicitly rejected the 'naive belief that. . . Soviet] penal settlements are now maintained and continuously supplied with thousands of deported manual workers and technicians, deliberately for the purpose of making, out of this forced labour, a net pecuniary profit to add to the State revenue.' Such notions were simply 'incredible' to 'anyone acquainted with the economic results of the chain-gang, or of prison labour, in any country in the world'. Slavery always has its apologists, but seldom are they so ingenuous. The thirty-six Soviet writers who, under Gorky's direction, produced the hyperbolic book The Belomor-Baltic Canal Named for Stalin at least had the excuse that the alternative to lying might be dying. The Webbs wrote their rubbish in the safety of Bloomsbury."

"Over a period of 500 years the City has supported deregulation at every turn. The consequences of this are massive. You had fraudulent products – the cause of the crash – debt being repackaged as an asset and then being used as leverage. The assets they held and credit they generated were on a ratio of 50-1. There was no effective regulation of this, no effective oversight. They have been exposed by the bailout. They have refused more than ten years of requests from us [London Citizens UK organisation] and suddenly they agree to meet. I think they are concerned that the political parties will move to a more manufacturing, less financially-based economy."

"We must completely support the civil resistance throughout the Arab world. Corrupt secular nationalist rulers are as bad as corrupt undemocratic religious rulers. We must support the people all over the Muslim world with friendship and solidarity in support of democracy. We should be their partner in building mass popular trade unions to prevent them from exploitation in the market storm they are moving towards in their modernisation plans. Who on the left in Italy is working with the resistance to Gaddafi? I don’t know the answer to that but my suspicion is that there are not many. Again, you are on the wrong side of history on that. Support for democracy, for a democratic organised society, for resistance to capitalist domination and state despotism. That is the Blue Labour position. It goes without saying that China is the worst of all worlds, it combines market exploitation with state dictatorship. Blue Labour places unreserved solidity and support to the free democratic trade unions in China, and that is an important struggle for the Labour Movement all over the world."

"New Labour’s community development work was all private-sector driven, consultation-tinged regeneration that was done to poor people rather than being controlled by them. I found it, on the whole, a massive waste of money."

"Labour freed up enormous amounts of money for third sector initiatives, which was magnificent. But it also became too statist. Charities became very reliant on state funding to pursue their agendas, so charities became distant from local communities. Despite all the funding, there was no transformation of the lives of excluded poor people. The greatest gift of the big society will be the renewal of the Labour Party. If it takes civil society and people power seriously, and listens to people who have a following in their own communities, it will find that it has reconnected with its own political traditions."

"Blue Labour has complete disrespect for the managerialism of New Labour and has much more honour for the workforce. If you talk about schooling, we'd like to see parents have a third of the power, teachers have a third of the power and the funders – whether it's the state or local authority – a third of the power, and negotiate a common good. New Labour sought managerial solutions in the private sector and that's what led to the banking collapse; they sought managerial solutions in the public sector which led to the erosion of the public ethos – so we will put people first, relationships first and that's a very different thing."

"We've got to reinterrogate our relationship with the EU on the movement of labour. The EU has gone from being a sort of pig farm subsidised bloc to the free movement of labour and capital. Britain is not an outpost of the UN. We have to put the people in this country first."

"Cameron made the Hugo Young speech, where he claimed the co-operative movement, building societies, the mutuals, the early trade unions for the Conservatives, and we were completely silent. That's linked to the excessive statism of Brown. We had to reclaim Labour history. It was also a way of talking about capitalism again, and resistance to capitalism. And working [in London Citizens] with low-paid people, most of whom were women, had reminded me of their concern for their parents and their children, and their commitment to work and not wanting to be on welfare."

"I was involved with organising migrant worker nannies, domestic workers, in New York State with the IAF. We flew them to a hotel, got them together, and got them to talk to each other about what their issues were. What was incredible was that out of those 300 nannies all of them were prepared to pay a not insubstantial part of their wages to join a union that could articulate their concerns. They were getting sexual harassment, exploitation. It only grew out of them meeting each other, they had to have that initial investment to get them together. They came from all over the world but what they found when they got together was they had the same issues. If people knew you could join a union, get on, and protect each other it would be transformative – we’ve got to find a way, to put it bluntly, of supporting good work. There needs to be a complete transformation of the language and agenda of unions."

"What I've learnt is when you walk into a family argument and people tell you it's about principle don't get involved. There is more to life than principles."

"The big thing that happened in the early to mid-90s was the last big discussion about political economy. Roughly speaking we went for endogenous growth, for flexible labour markets and the financial sector, and that was considered modern. The book that I wrote at that time was arguing that the German system – which had worker representation on boards, very strong vocational training, regional banks, very strong federal forms of democratic government – was actually better suited to globalisation because it preserved knowledge, trust, institutions, skills … Now, I think the results of our experiment are in and we really got it wrong."

"I realised that over a few years through these London Citizens campaigns we’d developed a more radical political economy than the Labour Party. For me, it was catch up, catch up, catch up. I was always a Labour, secular, left-winger and this was all new. One of the big lessons for me was which people would turn up. If the mosque said 50 people, the Catholic church says 50 people, the local black church says 50 people, they turn up. When the trade unions said 50 people, no-one turns up. So suddenly the crisis of secular institutions and their reproduction came to me."

"One massive issue is that [in government] we did not promote regional flourishing. To put it bluntly there was not enough private sector growth in the north east, the north west, the midlands and south west, and the south east was financially driven which had its own problems. I share your disposition about capitalism, but I look at Tesco and think, it’s cheap, healthy food, and it has transformed the lives of the poor. Yet we hate them. When London Citizens did a living wage campaign against Tesco what we found was enormous middle class loathing while the working class had a love for Tesco. They love the fact that the food was fresh and cheap and the environment was safe. And when they bought a small package of mince they didn’t have a butcher going, ‘Ah, tough week, eh?’ They didn’t feel humiliated. That’s just a tough example I put out there to say we’ve got to build alliances and relationships with the powers. We’ve got to look at how we can get Tesco to foster regional diversity."

"On the face of it, these look like bad times for Labour and for Ed Miliband's leadership. There seems to be no strategy, no narrative and little energy. Old faces from the Brown era still dominate the shadow cabinet and they seem stuck in defending Labour's record in all the wrong ways: we didn't spend too much money, we'll cut less fast and less far, but we can't tell you how."

"Labour is apparently pursuing a sectional agenda based on the idea that disaffected Liberal Democrats and public-sector employees will give Labour a majority next time around. But we have not won, and show no signs of winning, the economic argument. We have not articulated a constructive alternative capable of recognising our weaknesses in government and taking the argument to the coalition. We show no relish for reconfiguring the relationship between the state, the market and society. The world is on the turn, yet we do not seem equal to the challenge."

"The institutional settlement of post-war West Germany has endured because it generated value. They retained pre-modern artisan organisations and turned them into the foundation of their contemporary economic success. They entangled and constrained capital in a myriad form of national, sectoral and localised arrangements and they emerge from the crash, virtually alone, with a productive economy and a functioning democracy, with greater equality than us and more meaningful work."

"I would argue for the establishment of unitary city parliaments in all our major cities. The entire population of Scotland could fit into North London and all of Wales into South London with something to spare and yet we fret over our national settlement. Of far more importance is the establishment and linking of institutional power for capital and citizens in a renewed framework of democratic cities and counties. That is one meaning of the Labour Commonwealth."

"I would suggest that we use 5% of the bailout money to endow the Banks of England, which would be established in the counties and cities of England and would be constrained to lend within the county or city. The principal of the endowment would be in trust to the people of that county or city, in perpetuity so that it could not be liquidated by its members, and the balance of power in its corporate governance will be held by a third being held by the Bank of England, a third by its workforce and a third by the civic institutions of the locality. These newly constituted ‘Banks of England’ are one of the essential feature of Blue Labour statecraft built upon endowment and institution building."

"Unfortunately, the comments were misconstrued. I was saying that we needed to speak to the supporters of the EDL, not, as some people made out, that we should speak to the EDL itself. The idea that we should speak to upset, angry and dispossessed people, to try build a better life together, must be addressed and historically the Labour movement has been the vehicle to do this. It is a broad-based approach. Where there are mass outpourings of discontent, you have two choices, either you demonise them or you break them."

"Regional Banks that are constrained to lend within a particular area are a necessary part of the institutional ecology in that they resist the centralising power of capital, allow a more stable access to credit for regional and smaller businesses and encourage relationships and reciprocity to constrain the demand for higher rates of return that have decimated the mutual bank sector in Britain. They also offer an alternative to usurious lending, one of the great growth areas in our economy. Any serious reflection on ‘employment policies’ must confront the centralisation of capital and the state and seek to constrain both through the endowment of decentralised regional and sectoral institutions that constrain centralisation and preserve and renew traditions of virtue within the economy through resisting the commodification of human beings, nature and knowledge demanded by the maximum return on investment. It allows initiative and enterprise to be oriented towards the future."

"Miliband has acted strategically in leading the changes required in the three areas over which he has control: party organisation, the policy review, and his own leadership. In party terms, there is a far stronger emphasis on leadership development, and a greater role for organisers in strengthening and brokering the relationships necessary to re-establish Labour as a vital political force in people's daily lives. This is a neglected tradition, but the old bones are beginning to walk again. And it is not just an effective ground game: organising aligns campaigning with a better political position."

"The defeat of Fascism, and the election of a majority Labour Government in 1945 was only possible because Labour had strong mainstream support among working class voters and organised labour. There was no serious Communist Party in Britain, and no serious fascist party either and the principle reason for this is that both were consistently defeated by Labour who maintained working class loyalty precisely because it was not an ideal or a set of principles, but an organisation that upheld the dignity of work and of working people and insisted that they had a constructive role to play in the governance of the country. Labour did not flirt with the popular front or the unity of progressive forces. It pursued a common good which included labour as an interest and as a source of value."

"Post-war Labour ideology in Britain has reached the end of the road. We tried the state (1945), we tried the market (1997), then we tried them both together (2007) and Britain is still not generating value in anything other than financial services and high end university teaching and research. Paradoxically, both sectors are protected by the two most ancient, and most democratic self-governing institutions left in the country. Cambridge University on the one side and the City of London Corporation on the other. It is time for our socialist tradition to rediscover the social."

"And what is going on is that the SPD (Social Democratic Party of Germany) has lost the trust of working class German voters, is overwhelmingly a party of the public sector, social science graduates and ethnic minorities and won barely more than a quarter of the vote. It has moved its concerns from those of the internal governance of the political economy to a political and legal orientation that requires the passing of laws, external regulation and redistribution. It has not seriously defended the internal virtues of its economic system, preferring to stress external factors such a stimulus and taxation. Justice and rights rather than democracy and the good have come to define the position. I am strongly suggesting the party has become liberal rather than socialist and that is the fundamental problem."

"The list of characteristics of the good life suggested by Lord Skidelsky include neither work nor politics and that indicates that there is a problem with understanding power. Part of a good life is not to be dominated by the rich and the powerful and that can only be done through asserting the necessity of recognising labour as a value so that the people who do it are treated humanely and that involves the other thing that defines human beings, they can get together and change things through the power of association. Politics is part of the good life too although I can tell you it doesn’t always feel that way."

"Neither economic liberalism nor Keynesianism can conceptualise vocation, virtue or labour value as economic categories, neither can give a primary economic value to intermediate institutions, whether they be the corporate governance of a firm, vocational colleges, regional banks or supporter owned football clubs, they can only conceptualise the state or the market and all forms of particular association are viewed as at best “cultural” or at worst “obstructive”. They can give no conceptual status to place, to the specificity of place and the necessity of institutions in generating virtue and value within it."

"The overriding paradox is that a democratic and vocational resistance to modernity, defined as the joint sovereignty of financial markets and public administration is the most efficient, competitive and sustainable modern position. The tragedy is that such a reasonable political position is unavailable within the mainstream of European politics, indeed there are those who argue that it would be illegal and an infringement of EU rules concerning competition."

"We begin with the people and they have to define the position. So relationships first, then build power among those people where they agree. So, based on support for thing like regional banks, interest rate cap, living wage, a very, very different kind of agenda. The words we don’t use much are equality, diversity, accessibility, inclusivity, because that’s not where people are. We work on living wage, anti-usury, regional banks, vocational colleges, workers on boards. And it’s a real change in the way that the party works."

"Capital has just become completely disconnected from the people. Labour was born in the world to resist the domination of capital. That’s our thing. So we say that five percent of the bailout should be used to recapitalise local banks. It’s our money anyway. Those local banks should only lend in the area that they’re in. Germany’s a very successful, a very, very successful example of how this can work."

"We believe that capitalism, and unfettered capitalism poses a threat to human existence through the commodification of the person and nature. And we believe in defending people and nature through democratic association, and confronting and constraining the domination of capital through building a balance of interests in corporate governance and public sector. We take on, we’ve taken on the banks in the city of London. That’s who we are."

"The story of the Northern Counties Building Society is instructive. Established in 1850 in the North East by dispossessed workers who pooled their funds to retrieve a home in the world it grew steadily over the years. It was part of the local economy and society, that most precious civic inheritance, a trusted financial institution. In 1965 it merged with another local institution, the Rock Building Society to become Northern Rock Building Society. It demutualised in 1997 and became Northern Rock, which sponsored Newcastle United and became the fifth biggest lender in the UK market. An institution that was founded by local people for local people and had partnered its region in good times and bad for a hundred and forty seven years, that had weathered four serious depressions and emerged stronger from each could not last through New Labour’s period in Government."

"Unless there is a decentralisation of power, in the financial markets and in politics, then there can be no negotiations that can transform the present system of domination. Domination by the rich of the poor, by the educated of the uneducated, by the City of the country. Perhaps a simpler but more controversial way of putting it is that the German economy, with workers on the boards, regional banks, vocational labour market entry and co-determined pension funds has proved to be more capable of producing goods than ours. Their system is based upon subsidiarity and vocation, the cornerstones of the Christian inheritance. Secular modernity is not working. It is inappropriate for our times. Here’s a new paradox: Modernity is out of date."

"We need to build incentives to virtue rather than incentives to vice, which prevail in the existing system and are self-interested, instrumental and unrelational. That’s the direction of travel. Towards the Common Good."

"I am working with Unite in Salford to set up the Bank of Salford. It is going well. They have consolidated the credit unions, put money in, the city council will put their pay roll through it to stabilise the asset, the government are supporting it with advice and lowering entry requirements to become a bank that can lend to businesses as well as families. It will be bounded within Salford, there will be local residents on the board as well as institutions, but Unite cannot do it on their own. There needs to be a partnership between the Church and labour that can put some constraint on capital without relying on the state. Relational accountability and democratic governance are key to this. That is how the old bones will walk again, by renewing a commitment to the common good in action. It’s a great thing to do."

"The condition of this task is training your own people in organising and leadership so that there can be some governance of the poor, by the poor and for the poor, and not simply a governance of them. This is a move from hosting the peace talks to actively seeking the peace. Pursuing it is a matter of necessity to your own flourishing."

"What did I think about Brown? I’ve said before, I don’t like his kind of politics. I didn’t really meet him properly but I identify him with state, state-ism, with simultaneously high morals and low cynicism. I never identified with that kind of politics. The last gasps of this idea that through the state you can transform society but how that then automatically leads to a dependence on finance to fund it. I don’t think Gordon Brown redistributed power to people."

"The last thing I watched on telly with my mother, she died in very late 2008 in the middle of the financial crash, was Gordon Brown saying that it was the destiny of the Labour movement to save the global banking system. And that statement –‘the destiny of the Labour movement to save the global banking system’… I looked to my mum and the last movement she made, really, was to shake her head. You know, it may be the fate of the Labour movement but it can’t be its destiny, that’s just crazy. She just looked bewildered by that."

"The nadir came out in Gordon Brown’s ‘that bigoted woman’ moment when I think what we saw was where a completely normal person, a Labour supporter too, expresses something about what she could see in her life about there being a lot of immigrants and Brown dismissed her as a bigot. Well, I saw that as an absolute manifestation of a self-righteous, self-regarding, elitism in Labour that really despises the concerns of working people. Labour had reached a situation under Brown where most of the people in the party hated one another and they hated people outside the party too."

"This conference has a very weird atmosphere – it’s a different atmosphere. It’s an atmosphere of a superannuated student union. They’ve just stayed in the student union through a lifetime. Until we have the maturity and generosity to have a genuine understanding of New Labour our growth will be stunted. The present criminalisation and demonisation of Blair doesn’t help us get to that place."

"The challenge for Labour is that there’s huge support for working class, from mining communities, from northern working class communities for UKIP, which wouldn’t be the case if they were a straightforward Thatcherite party. So an ability to engage with the rage and dispossession people feel is absolutely necessary for constructive politics. And how do you build a common good between locals and immigrants? How do you build a common good between north and south, between the small towns and cities? We’re not thinking of the levels of abandonment that people feel, and UKIP express that."

"Labour has always been a coalition between workerist and progressive elements, liberals and conservatives, mediated by socialism. It was held together by the belief that we are social beings who resist the domination of capital through democracy; and by the refusal to accept that human beings are a commodity or that our inheritance is exclusively monetary."

"We should not replace pity with fear in our relationship with the working class. It is a source of shame that Labour did not and does not represent the hopes and fears of the working class, by becoming a party that disapproves of their fears and is nervous of their hopes."

"It is perhaps a redeeming feature of the year that celebrity endorsements may be seen as the kiss of death to any political campaigning. The unanimous acclamation of Clinton by the famous and the lovey chorus for Remain were to no avail. It is better to build relationships and do politics with the poor rather than the rich."

"This is why it is vital that Blue Labour’s vision of a democratic self-governing nation that honours and rewards work, restores institutional integrity to the places that people live and supports family life based upon love and mutual sacrifice becomes Labour’s vision. It is also vital that Blue Labour reasserts its internationalism and makes free and democratic trade unions, all over the world, From Beijing to Tehran, from Havana to Halifax a central role of Foreign Policy."

"The vision pursued by the founders of the EU was one of economic self interest, (subsidies, protection and investment) and lofty aspiration, (peace, prosperity and justice). It was predicated on a Europe without borders where mutual economic interests would lead to perpetual peace. A soft Kantian Marxism underpinned the European Union from the start, in which economic interests and a legal order would displace local institutions and national politics."

"Labour was different to other European Social Democratic Parties in that it was never aggressively secular and was not divided by confessional fissures. Its founding act, the Dock Strike of 1889 was brokered by the Salvation Army and Cardinal Manning. It was never a revolutionary party that became more peaceable but was, from the start, committed to extending democracy within the inherited constitution. It also had a base of support among the working class that secured British democracy from Fascism and Communism and that was because of its paradoxical nature, as conservative as it was radical, as patriotic as it was nationalist. The greatest failure of New Labour is that it led rather than resisted the definition of the European Union as a neo-liberal project and did not develop a constructive alternative to the status quo. It seemed incapable of distinguishing between internationalism and globalisation."

"Labour should be robust in supporting free and democratic trade unions throughout Europe, in championing a balance of interests in corporate governance and strong civic self-government with a deep partnership between universities, cities and firms. The question is whether being part of the EU hinders this. Britain is already outside the Eurozone and the Schengen agreement. It is gratuitous to remain part of a political union that is so hostile to diversity and democracy and so disposed to the consolidation of big capital that it has become a remorseless machine for the liberalisation of trade and the disintegration of society, in which the demand for liquidity has dissolved solidarity."

"Among those who voted Brexit, there is still support for Parliament and its traditional sovereignty, for the monarchy, for the NHS, and for the Union. As the Copeland by-election showed, they prefer to vote Conservative rather than Ukip, and as the Stoke result indicates, many will grudgingly vote Labour rather than Ukip. What they wish to see is a democratic politics that represents their interests. If this is populism then it is of a muted English variety that wishes to see the renewal of national institutions and a recognition that family, place and work—the things that matter to them—matter to their rulers."

"Old Labour's international solidarity did not require the abandonment of the national democratic inheritance. But today’s left-liberals simply do not understand the traditional commitment to earning and belonging. This puts them at odds with how people understand themselves. We are beings with a tendency to attachment; in order to be open to the environment our bodies must also be closed; and in physics, atoms have a tendency to cluster. And yet in politics an ultra-liberal ideal developed that belonging, attachment and sociability, reinforced by institutions, should be replaced by the almost unmediated movement of people through space."

"[President] Trump recognises people want our own industry protected and we want secure borders. That is what people in the UK want too."

"Speaking for myself, I believe the abolition of the Treasury is necessary for our economic renewal [...] It is an outdated institution at odds with contemporary reality. We have reached the end of the road in terms of monetary and fiscal policy and must embrace a different logic of reindustrialisation. The Treasury is ideologically neo-classical in its economic method and hostile to the interests of the country."

"[There should be] a new economics ministry instead of the Treasury and Business in which priority is given to industry [and] the Chancellor should be moved out of Downing Street, which should become the political hub of the Prime Minister’s Office."

"[Finding Trump's tariffs thrilling] I feel fantastic! All my life, I’ve been trying to develop a pro-worker settlement. This is the end of globalisation! Free movement is over. The Deliveroo economy is over. We have to produce again! [...] In a weird way, Trump’s behaving like a Marxist. Of course he’s no idea he’s executing a Bennite policy, but that is what he’s doing."

"It's impossible to live in London without having your mobile phone getting nicked on the street out of your hand. That’s palpable. I think we've got to think imaginatively about deterrence and punishment, I really do. This is vital. I'm quite in favour of public humiliation of these shoplifters, bringing back the stocks, pelting them with rotten fruit. The old ways are the good ways!"

"Certainly getting the rotten vegetables and fruit from the supermarket and people having a chance to express their disgust at what they’ve been through, I don't think that's such a bad idea"

"Our system is not fit for purpose. It's inadequate in terms of its scope, it's inadequate in terms of its information technology, leadership, management systems and processes."

"It's not my job to manage this department - it's my job to lead this department."

"He said he did not believe the Home Office was "intrinsically dysfunctional... but I do believe from time to time it is dysfunctional in the sense it doesn't work"."

"Leadership isn't a zero sum game. When one of us shines it doesn't diminish the others, it reflects on all of us."

"It's not Muslims versus the rest of us. It's evil terrorists on one side against all civilised people on the other."

"If we in this movement are going to ask the decent, silent majority of Muslim men - and women - to have the courage to face down the extremist bullies, then we need to have the courage and character to stand shoulder to shoulder with them doing it."

"Until Roy Hattersley said he would shoot himself if I became prime minister, I had not been able to see any possible advantage in standing."

"You don't have to love everything George W. Bush stands for to hate everything that Osama Bin Laden stands for."

"The Hindu from his traditions and religion regards India not only as a political unit naturally the subject of one sovereignty, but as the outward embodiment, as the temple - nay even as the Goddess Mother of his spiritual culture.... India and Hinduism are organically related as body and soul."

"I cannot refrain from wishing you God-Speed in your election contest... [L]et the consequences be what they may, do not withdraw. The cause of Labour in Scotland and of Scottish Nationality will suffer much thereby. Your defeat will awaken Scotland and your victory will re-construct Scottish Liberalism. All success be yours, and the National cause you champion. There is no miner – and no other one for that matter – who is a Scotsman and not ashamed of it, who will vote against you in favour of an English barrister, absolutely ignorant of Scotland and of Scottish affairs."

"The Labour party is no class champion. In politics it is frankly democratic, in economics it is co-operative... It was not bought into being to revenge the wage-earner and mercilessly smash the capitalist... Capitalist and labourer alike feel that some new order must evolve if England is to exist."

"There is too much expected of parliament. Localities should manage their own affairs and unions of localities should be formed when necessary to look after common interests. Our county councils are excellent beginnings in this direction."

"Our loss of belief in the Liberal party is therefore owing to the fact that its day of historical fitness has passed away. The new problems of progress will demand treatment by men of different outlook, of a different political principle, of a different mental quality, of a new species of democratic sympathy. The mass of the Liberal party will no doubt continue progressive, but their organisation is not now the sole custodian of the progressive cause... The Independent Labour party is in the true line of the progressive apostolic succession. It alone is able to interpret the spirit of the time."

"The end we have to strive for is complete democratic liberty in politics and complete freedom in industry from the tyranny of monopoly and the vagaries of capitalism. Or, employing words appropriate to the spirit of Socialism, we should say that the task of the practical democratic reformer is now to show how the work of democratic liberty, begun so well by the early Radicals but dropped by their modern representatives, is to be completed; how the golden bridge of palliatives between political and social democracy is to be built; and how the foundations of social democracy are to be laid."

"Mr. Rockefeller not only owns the Standard Oil supplies: he controls the railways, the banks, the shops...upon which his Trust depends. The Steel Corporation not only makes steel; it owns coal and iron fields, ore steamers, the Erie and Pittsburgh mineral railway, as well as the operatives in Homestead. We oppose the Trust, not as an organisation, but because it is controlled by individuals for their own ends...But the Trust points out the line of British advance. In this country, however, the introduction of the Trust should be marked by public ownership."

"Factory Laws, Fair Wages resolutions, Trade Unionism itself, are...all Protection – not the Protection of Mr. Chaplin, the landlord, nor of Mr. Chamberlain, the demagogue, but the Protection of the Socialist."

"[Trade unions should identify] with something higher and wider than trade union industrial demands. It must set these demands into a system of national well-being; the wage earner must become the citizen: the union must become the guardian of economic justice."

"Lower forms merge into higher forms, one species with another, the vegetable into the animal kingdom; in human history one epoch slides into another...Socialism, the stage which follows Liberalism, retains everything of value in Liberalism by virtue of its being the hereditary heir of Liberalism."

"[W]e shall begin the exploitation of national resources like mines; or we shall begin the process of industrial reconstruction by agrarian policies which will bring the towns into contact with the country, re-populate the deserted villages, and re-till the waste fields."

"He had been across the veldt, he had seen the battlefields, the still open trenches, and it all came to Chinese labour. They were told it was going to release the slaves, the Uitlanders, to open up South Africa to a great flood of white emigrants. They were told it was going to plant the Union Jack upon the land of the free. But the echoes of the muskets had hardly died out on the battlefields, the ink on the treaty was hardly dry, before the men who plotted the war began to plot to bring in Chinese slaves. (Cheers.) They could talk about their gold; their gold is tainted. (Hear, hear.) They could talk about employing white men; it was not true, and even if it were true, was he going to stand and see his white brothers degraded to the position of yellow slave drivers? No, he was not. (Loud and continued cheers.) These patriots! These miserable patriots! If they had had the custodianship of the opinions of the country 75 years ago, slavery in the colonies would have continued. When the north was fighting the south for the liberty of men, these men would have counted their guineas, would have told them how many white men had plied the lash in the southern states, and they would have said that for miserable cash, miserable trash, the great name of the country required to be bought and sold. Thank God there were no twentieth century Unionist imperialists in office then. (Loud cheers.)"

"The books that influenced me most were Hugh Miller's, particularly his "Schools and Schoolmasters." Also the "Waverley Novels," in conjunction with Scottish History, opened out the great world of national life for and led me on to politics. But Hugh Miller had more influence upon me than any other."

"The England of 1844 did not break out into revolt; Chartism did not develop into socialism... The class war created trade unionism; the working classes became citizens; law, morality, the force of combination, lifted to some extent the pall of darkness which hung over the land. The Marxian today still wonders why England fell from grace. Neither Marx nor Engels saw deep enough to discover the possibilities of peaceful advance which lay hidden beneath the surface. Their analogies misled them."

"[A]ny idea which assumes that the interests of the proletariat are so simply opposed to those of the bourgeoisie as to make the proletariat feel a oneness of economic interest is purely formal and artificial... [T]o-day there is still a goodly number of workmen who cross the line and become employers or employing managers, whilst the great thrift movements, the Friendly Societies, the Building Societies, the Co-operative Societies, connect working class interests to the existing state of things. In addition, there are considerable classes of workers in the community whose immediate interests are bound up with the present distribution of wealth, and who, obedient to class interests, would range themselves on the side of the status quo. Of course (it could be said that) they are making a mistake from the point of view of their own interests, and that if they were properly enlightened they would see that they belong to an exploited class, one and indivisible. That may be true, but a mode of action which is ineffective until men are "fully enlightened" is a chimera."

"The idea that a lax administration of the Poor Law is Socialistic, that putting an unemployed man on a farm for six weeks at the public expense is Socialistic, that feeding school children is the beginning of the Socialistic State, is absurd. We can deal with our unemployed, our sweated workers, our derelicts, only by attacking the causes of unemployment, of sweating, of human deterioration and though at a crisis our humanitarianism will compel us to resort to palliatives and give temporary relief, our action at such times should not be a willing and proud thing but one which is hesitating and temporary."

"The voting strengths of the movement will come from the ranks of labour – the organised intelligent workers – the men who have had municipal and trade union experience – the men of self-respect who know the capacity of the people... They are to be the constructive agents of the next stage in our industrial evolution. But they are not to stand alone. Socialism is no class movement. Socialism is a movement of opinion, not an organization of status. It is not the rule of the working class; it is the organization of the community. Therefore, to my mind one of the most significant facts of the times is the conversion of the intellectual middle class to Socialism."

"Even if every person in the country had the ideal virtues that the working classes were asked by certain rather thin skinned and somewhat stilted critics of theirs to possess, and the capacity to turn his attention to every skilled trade in the country, and the very finest technical skill at his command, so long as they had the present system of industrial anarchy, when demand was never gauged by those controlling supply, when overproduction was a feature of one series of years and under-consumption a feature of another, they would have to face the unemployed problem. If that were so, it became a matter for the State to settle. The time had come to banish for ever from their thoughts the old-fashioned heresy that unemployment was merely the expression of individual shortcomings. Unemployment was the expression of the failure of social organisation, and so it became the duty of the State to protect the unemployed men from the awful horrors that attended unemployment."

"Of the Budget as a whole, I say "Bravo". I am going to support it through thick and thin."

"State Charity is not socialism but may become the greatest menace the Socialist Movement [has been] threatened with."

"The economic truths of Socialism, its industrialism, and its sociology, must remain the vainest of vain dreamings unless we preserve among the people the political frame of mind which can appreciate democratic liberty and worth. When "a man's a man for a' that" is recited without making the blood tingle, the man has ceased to be."

"The State does not concern itself primarily with man as possessor of rights, but with man as the doer of duties. A right is the opportunity of fulfilling a duty, and it should be recognised only in so far as it is necessary to the performance of duty... Nor should the State grant the "right" to the franchise unless by doing so it is promoting its own ends...as man approaches the fullness of liberty which he can enjoy only when he is perfect, his rights become more ample... The State regards the man as a carrier of human life between the Past and the Future, and assigns to him the work of realising the Future from the Past. It shows him the path."

"The land will therefore belong to the State in one or other of its several forms, and rent will be State income. The great factory industries will be controlled by associations of consumers which again will be identical with the State in some one or other of its aspects... the socialist state will mainly concern itself with co-ordinating production and consumption so as to prevent gluts, useless labour, unearned incomes, industrial loss, surplus values,—the causes of poverty."

"Greater liberty will be given to localities to regulate their own affairs, to acquire property for that purpose, to promulgate byelaws and more particularly to organise themselves as markets after the manner of co-operative societies."

"The Socialist, therefore, cannot consistently address himself to class sentiment or class prejudice. He ought, indeed, to look away from it, because any victory won as the result of siding with one party in the struggle only perpetuates what he desires to eliminate. The appeal to class interest is an appeal to the existing order, whether the class addressed is the rich or the poor. It is the anti-Socialist who makes class appeals; the Socialist makes social appeals. Class consciousness is an asset of the defenders of the existing order of exploitation."

"[T]he Labour Party stands for a contributory scheme so far as this Bill is concerned. Moreover, we are in favour of a contributory scheme with reference to sickness, whilst we were in favour of a non-contributory scheme in reference to old age pensions."

"Mr. Lloyd George will not resign on anything anti-German. He is anti-German, and the trust which the reasonable Peace people place in him is altogether misplaced."

"I have been mixed up a good deal with Army officers, and I never met an Army officer in that time without being told by some of them that they were going to stop Home Rule if that was to be applied to Ulster. I have met them on board ship going out to India, and I have been nearly assassinated by them. I remember one day on the way out to India we got a marconigram saying that Larkin had been sent to goal, and I said I could understand it if it had been Sir Edward Carson. The result of my saying that was that I was very nearly thrown overboard."

"When Sir Edward Grey failed to secure peace between Germany and Russia, he worked deliberately to involve us in the war, using Belgium as his chief excuse."

"The only reason from beginning to end is that our foreign office is anti-German and that the Admiralty was anxious to seize any opportunity for using the Navy in battle practice... Never did we arm our people and ask them to give us their lives for less good cause than this."

"Might and spirit will win and incalculable political and social consequences will follow upon victory. Victory must therefore be ours. England is not played out. Her mission is not accomplished. She can, if she would, take the place of esteemed honour among the democracies of the world, and if peace is to come with healing on her wings the democracies of Europe must be her guardians...History, will, in due time, apportion the praise and the blame, but the young men of the country must, for the moment, settle the immediate issue of victory. Let them do it in the spirit of the brave men who have crowned our country with honour in times that have gone. Whoever may be in the wrong, men so inspired will be in the right. The quarrel was not of the people, but the end of it will be the lives and liberties of the people. Should an opportunity arise to enable me to appeal to the pure love of country - which I know is a precious sentiment in all our hearts, keeping it clear of thought which I believe to be alien to real patriotism - I shall gladly take that opportunity. If need be I shall make it for myself. I wish the serious men of the Trade Union, the Brotherhood and similar movements to face their duty. To such it is enough to say 'England has need of you'; to say it in the right way. They will gather to her aid. They will protect her when the war is over, they will see to it that the policies and conditions that make it will go like the mists of a plague and shadows of a pestilence."

"Let us understand what we are out for. I say unhesitatingly...I say perfectly definitely that this country, if it retains any shred of honour at all, cannot accept a peace unless peace is forced upon it which means the sacrifice of Belgian sovereignty to any extent. If Germany imagines that there is any section of this country that is prepared to accept peace at the sacrifice of any portion—and I emphasise this—not merely of Belgian sovereignty, but of any portion of it, then the sooner German public opinion is disabused of that delusion the better."

"In youth one believes in democracy, later on, one has to accept it."

"Were I a German Minister I should sign [the Treaty of Versailles] only after making it clear that my signature was obtained under compulsion and that the provisions were such that I could not guarantee they would be carried out."

"Felt the virtues of the Victorian times so condemned by Mr Strachey. The simple honesties can always be made a butt by the impish unrealiabilites."

"We will endeavour to unite the whole country in opposing French aggression... We cannot stand by and allow the resources of Germany to be deteriorated by French action. The British occupation of the Rhine, if it is part of the French policy, cannot be allowed to continue."

"They were going to work their own country for all it was worth, to bring human labour into touch with God's natural endowments, so that the land would blossom like the rose and have houses and firesides where there would be happiness and glorious aspirations."

"When Mr. Lloyd George talked...about unemployment he forgot that he was the cause of it. Unemployment...and the increased cost of living were all due to causes that had been begun during Mr. Lloyd George's régime. Mr. Lloyd George went to Paris to try to make good the nonsensical pledges he gave in 1918, and supported a Peace Treaty which had been the cause very nearly of Britain's bankruptcy, and certainly the bankruptcy of many other nations. He, and he alone, was responsible for that... Everything that had happened had been the outcome of Mr. Lloyd George's blunderings, and he was using the calamities of his own policy as a reason why they should send him back to office."

"He was a free-trader, because he felt it was the best, with all its drawbacks. There were higher wages in protected America, but there was corrupt politics. Protection in America meant more sweating in America than free trade did in England. The very worst of conditions and slums in England were a paradise compared with the conditions of steel workers under protection in Pittsburg. The whole of the protection system was meant not for workers, wage-earners, or the wives of working men, but to make capitalists millionaires."

"I do think...that the way the Daily News and the Westminster Gazette behaved [during the election] was contemptible. We expect nothing better from the Daily Mail and such miserable products. The result, however, of the whole fight has been to dig both deeply and broadly a ditch between Liberalism and Labour. From all over the country I hear from my friends who fought that the Liberal fight was dirtier than the Tory, and I have seen leaflets like that issued by [Sir Henry] Webb who fought [Hugh] Dalton in Cardiff, which are simply amazing in their dishonesty. The line he took was that whilst we pitied the poor German who was being asked to pay £2,000,000,000 we had no qualms in imposing a Capital Levy upon Englishmen to the extent of £3,000,000,000."

"Mr. Lloyd George's campaign in its gross demagogic vulgarity has also increased both the number and the value of the reasons why we should have nothing whatever to do with his Party."

"We do not believe that military alliances are going to bring security. We believe that a military alliance in an agreement for security is like a grain of mustard seed—small to begin with. That is the essential seed of the agreement, and that seed with the years will grow and grow and grow, until at last the tree that has been produced from it will overshadow the heavens, and we shall be back exactly in the military position in which we found ourselves in 1914."

"The League takes upon itself as its first task the creating once again of the European system, and that European system never will exist until our late enemies have ceased to be our enemies and have come in to take their cooperative part in that system."

"I am in favour of arbitration—I see nothing else for the world. If we cannot devise a proper system of arbitration, then do not let us fool ourselves that we are going to have peace. Let us go back to the past, let us go back to competitive armaments, let us go back to that false, whited sepulchre of security and of military pacts—there is nothing else for us—and let us prepare for the next war, because that is inevitable."

"We are here preparing, as I see it, this international armaments conference. That ought to be our project. If we can remove the obstacles in the way of that we shall have done a tremendous amount of work that, in its very nature, once it is done, is bound to be permanent, because the reason and morality of the world will stand by it so loyally."

"During all my political life I have anchored myself firmly upon the conviction that if progress is to be well-rooted, it can only be carried on by what is called political or constitutional ways... I can see no hope in India if it becomes the arena of a struggle between constitutionalism and revolution. No party in Great Britain will be cowed by threats of force or by policies designed to bring government to a standstill; and if any sections in India are under the delusion that that is not so, events will very sadly disappoint them. I would urge upon all the best friends of India to come nearer to us rather than to stand apart from us, to get at our reason and our good will."

"Political leaders, irrespective of party...were beginning to see that, unless in Europe they could create an enormous federation of free-trade nations, there was not a single nation in Europe which could flourish in the industrial standard it ought to occupy."

"I can assure you that, whatever your political colour may be, in the Old Country political parties, even in the heat of battle, never obscure national or Imperial interests."

"The policy of Great Britain is not the policy of alliances with any certain set of nations. It is a policy of friendship with those nations that believe in democratic forms of government and democratic development. The policy of Great Britain now is, and must be, and will be, that all nations in good will, in singleness, and in disinterestedness of heart will meet together, consider the great problems of Europe and the problems of the whole world, and agree, as the result of cooperation, discussion, and joint exchange of opinion, on a common policy which will make alliances absolutely a thing of the past."

"What the Liberals have done to the Labour Party's programme is to come along like a gipsy, steal our child, get it in gaudy attire, and then produce it on platforms to perform at the General Election."

"I see that Mr. Lloyd George last night confessed that he read the betting news in the papers. (Laughter.) Ah! I shake my head at the Rake's Progress. (Laughter.) ... The only Liberal contribution to the programme advocated by Mr. Lloyd George is its headline... It is just a certain amount of improvised jazz—that is their programme."

"In 1918 Mr. Lloyd George let himself produce such a programme of development as would astonish his rivals. He was going to hang the Kaiser. You said, "That is the man who has the ear of the public." He was going to build one million houses. He was going to make the land fit for heroes to live in, and you said, "That's the thing." He was going to search the pockets of Germany for the last penny, and you said, "That the stuff." My friends, it was stuff. (Cheers and laughter.) ... If unemployment had been tackled in a business-like fashion in the first three years after the War, it would not have grown to the proportion it had now reached... Mr. Lloyd George has been in office, nay in power, with a majority of 300; Mr. Baldwin has been in power with a majority of 200. What have they done? Have they broken the tale of heartbreakening worsening? Nowhere. It is only to the Labour Party that you can look for the solution of your troubles."

"Let us declare boldly in favour of disarmament. Let us put down our own proposals, arguing them, fighting for them, persuading people to join us, appealing not only to the reason but to the moral sense of the world. Great Britain marching clear away at the head of the great movement for international peace, that is our idea."

"We want no injustice done to other people. I do not appeal to you merely as a class, but I do appeal to you workers to form yourselves into an organisation which will use political power in order to protect our human conditions and give you fair play in life."

"[I]f we lose our chance now, which really means if this Government is to be continued in power, that chance will not return either to us or to our children. The memories of the last War will grow dim. The world will get back into its old rut, familiar professions and piety about peace will again soothe us to sleep, and the various countries will once more base their security upon military preparation. So they will all, in the end, find themselves drifting hopelessly upon those currents that make for war—1914 will be repeated... And remember what the next war is to be like. The old lines which divide combatants from non-combatants, the weak and the diseased from the strong and the robust, men from women and children, will all be obliterated and civilization itself assailed, and from sea and sky will be brought to a heap of ruins."

"There can be no security until the Great Powers have agreed to settle their disputes, which have hitherto led to war, by conciliation and arbitration. This was the policy which the Labour Party was working up to in 1924, and which it will pursue again when it is in office."

"Unemployment cannot be cured by relief work nor by patchwork of any kind. We must develop national resources and improve trade so that there will be increased employment and a tremendous revolution in industry and in power by the use of electricity and petrol, which must be accompanied by reorganisation of transport, including the making of roads, the reconditioning of railway plant and equipment, an extension of pensions which must enable the more aged workers to retire, the raising of the school age with necessary maintenance grants. We must dam the influx of premature people into industry."

"We do not believe that a nation can flourish on the poverty of its masses. Empty pockets are not only poverty, but breed poverty. Our own backs and stomachs still are the most neglected and yet the most profitable of our markets. Those who believe that safeguarding or protection is any aid to the development of that market had better study protected countries, where wages are low, unemployment is habitual, and poverty even worse than it is here. Unemployment insurance is not a dole, it is a benefit which has been paid for just like life insurance. These payments must be made adequate for the purpose in order to safeguard our people against the demoralisation of charity. We have concentrated this policy into two points and they stand as representing our purpose. Work first of all, but if no work, maintenance."

"One of the great reasons why I belong to the Labour Party and hold the Socialist views of what a wise and just social structure is, is because I detest class politics and want to end them in real national unity. In bringing that about we have to consider the claims of the great mass of our people, who, on account of their poverty, cannot adequately protect themselves. What has national unity meant to them? A change in a machine can make them outcasts; a change in fashion can make them paupers... The Labour Party wants to bring within the bounds and the meaning of this national unity the bottom dog, as he is called. For this purpose we have organised our great public services. The Labour Party wishes to develop them."

"I am so much concerned for the quiet development of industry, the peaceful mind and confidence both at home and abroad, that I will use every ounce of influence I have to prevent another election for the next two years... I wish to make it quite clear that I am going to stand for no monkeying."

"The day is coming when we may have to give up orthodox free trade as we inherited it from our fathers."

"[The Kellogg Pact is] a mighty moral bulwark against war – and we must never underestimate the effectiveness of moral bulwarks with no bayonet nor bludgeon behind them. The entry of the United States into the Permanent Court of International Justice, the growing confidence in the court, and the increase in the number of nations who have signed the Optional Clause mark definite and, I believe, irrevocable steps in the displacement of military power by judicial process in the settlement of international disputes. Public servants like us will fail in our duty if we do not diminish military power in proportion to the increase of political security... I dare affirm that, in the naval programme of the leading naval powers, there is a margin between real security needs and actual or projected strength, and the world expects this Conference to eliminate that margin."

"All this humbug of curing unemployment by Exchequer grants is one of the most superficial and ill considered proposals that has ever been foisted upon the Party. There is no more Socialism in it than there was in the cup of tea that I had at breakfast this morning."

"As a result of a careful examination of ideas they had come to the conclusion that the great work of every constructive Government must be to put the population on the land. Here was something permanent. They took men body and soul off the pavements, which had no rootable capacity, and put them in the fields to till and sow and harvest. In the worst time they would produce their own food there. It might not be luxurious, but it was healthy."

"If we refuse...what are the prospects? Repression, and nothing but repression, and it is a very uncomfortable repression; a kind of repression from which we shall get neither credit nor success. It is the repression of the masses of the people, the great proportion of these masses being women and children. It is the repression not of organisations and not of bodies; it will develop into the repression of the whole of the population... If, on the other hand, you wish to bind India to you by bonds of confidence, to make her happy within your Empire and Commonwealth, if you wish to hear her praise you in gratitude and remain with you in pride, then accept the work that has been done by the Conference, and instruct the Government to proceed with it to a complete conclusion."

"We are going to Geneva determined, by persuasion, by arguments, by appeals to what has been written, appeals to measures already taken, appeals to history, appeals to common sense, to get the nations of the world to join in and reduce this enormous, disgraceful burden of armaments which we are now bearing from one end of the world to the other."

"The Socialist Movement in this country is going to rack and ruin, because it is being controlled by people who are nothing more than critics of the Government, inspired by the idea that all you have to do is to hand out largesse to the community. All sense of principle, of communal organisation, and of service given with one's whole heart to the community, has gone and we are in danger of drifting into a Poor Law frame of mind."

"If we yield now to the TUC we shall never be able to call our bodies or souls or intelligences our own."

"Yes, to-morrow every Duchess in London will be wanting to kiss me!"

"The desolation of loneliness is terrible. Was I wise? Perhaps not, but it seemed as though anything else was impossible."

"I do not intend to carry on when we are through this mess. As soon as we have turned the corner I will get out, but I do not want to leave the Labour Party in a bad position."

"If I had only been able to carry my colleagues with me what we could have achieved! What a chance we had! But we threw it away. If they had only been straight enough to stand by what they had initiated, not what finally resulted from it—I am not saying that—I could have helped them. When they ran away and began to deny that they had ever had anything to do with our proposals, well, I thought to myself that politics had become too degraded for me. Do you know that they turned me out of the Labour Party with a rubber stamp? ... [W]hen I write my book on how the Labour Party betrayed Socialism I will tell the story there."

"You are faced with the problem of what to do in respect to this question, to that question, and to the other question, but perfectly obviously, after you have faced the more superficial aspects of the separate questions, you want to know in relation to a complete plan what you are actually giving and what you are actually getting. Therefore, when the departmental, or compartmental, exploration has gone on to a certain extent it cannot be finished until somebody, co-ordinating all your problems, sets out in one statement and declaration the complete scheme that this Conference can pass in order to give security, to give disarmament, to give hope to the future–until that scheme has been placed before you, you cannot complete your examination of compartmental problems and questions..."

"As far back as 1895 I stood as an unflinching opponent of the idea that the progress of Socialism could be made by the declaration of a class war. I have always been opposed to it, and I exemplify that opposition to-day. The only method of social progress is not by dividing society, but by uniting society and giving all of us the community-consciousness that asks us cooperators to reach the great and good state ahead of us."

"To-day, in spite of the prospects, our faith is undiminished. Our hearts may be sad—mine certainly is—but I have handed in none of my papers of enlistment in the Army of Peace. I am still in the ranks of that Army: a fighting soldier to remain there and act there and strive there as long as there is breath in my body and persuasion in my lips."

"What we have to do is to doom the slums. And we have done it. It is going to take a year or two. We are not only going to doom slums, we are going to doom overcrowding. Next Session the House of Commons will...pass legislation which is going to doom overcrowding as we have already doomed the slums."

"The substance of Germany's general case has a background of reason and human nature. I cannot be accused of ever having approached it in the "mind of Versailles," nor in the spirit of one who assumed that a powerful and a proud people could be kept subordinate by force (even by what seems to be an overwhelming force), nor have I ever seen anything but disaster issuing from and to the League of Nations if it is used by victors to perpetuate the position and mind they were in on the day of their victory... But, be that as it may, Germany has acted in such a way as to destroy the feeling of mutual confidence in Europe. It has broken up the road to peace and has beset it with terrors. It claims a measure of armed power which puts most of the nations of Europe at its mercy. Every reflecting and reasonable German must see the force of the point I am making. He must know in his heart that Berlin is not enough—that, in fact, it has upset very much more than it has pacified."

"The most secure nation in the whole of Europe, until it roused suspicions and fears against itself, was Germany. The German people who believe stories of encirclement cannot help recognising that their latest policy of military expansion, together with the circumstances of its declaration—an army greater than that of any other nation in Europe, an air force already declared equal to ours, a fleet that would be equal to the French and superior to the Italian—must rouse fear and unsettlement in the mind of every nation at which it can strike, and inevitably force the sound pacific idea of general collective security into the dangerous form of military alliances. The nations which were backward in making their contributions are now congratulating themselves that they waited for Germany to make its contribution first."

"My first grave doubts as to German diplomacy arose when Germany left the League of Nations for reasons which I have never been able to appreciate, except upon assumptions which meant that the German Government was indifferent to the pacification of Europe."

"I know that, when the troubled history of these times comes to be studied and recorded in the cold and just light of truth, all the blame will not lie at Germany's door. That will not save it, its methods and its self-will, as shown in these latter days, from the blame of destroying the chances of success in peacemaking which were once again presenting themselves to us, and of throwing the mind of Europe suddenly into anxiety and turning it back upon the fatal ways of militarism, thus compelling the nations of Europe to return for an evanescent comfort to increased military equipment."

"The channels of world trade are so obstructed by the pursuit of nationalist economic policy that steps should be taken at once to make it possible to arrive at an international economic agreement which would revive international trade. A return to free trade pure and simple would only increase unemployment."

"This nation ought to be quipped to defend itself and to fulfil its responsibility under the League system of mutual assistance in the event of an aggressor coming to threaten us all. A defenceless Britain at this stage of evolution will not be an aid to peace but an incentive to war. But we must watch very closely lest the acceptance of the responsibility to prepare for defence may lead to a policy of militarism for its own sake. We draw this distinction and will continue to observe it."

"That blot on the peace of the world, the Treaty of Versailles, is vanishing, and for that I am thankful... France has again had a severe lesson, and I hope it will take it this time. In any event the folly of pandering to it by standing rigidly to the letter of Versailles or Locarno...must now be plain and this logical and legalistic nation should be brought to face reality."

"Ramsay MacDonald was a born leader, with a commanding personality and a magnificent presence; the most handsome man in public life. He was a great orator whose deep, resonant voice and sweeping gestures added to the force of his words. In his vehemence, however, he sometimes perpetrated startling malapropisms, and I remember him calling on delegates at an ILP conference to "work by day and propagate by night"."

"The Prime Minister had always had that gift of imagination, that touch of the quixotic, which might be called Scottish rather than Celtic, because it was the birthright of all their people. He had dreamed dreams which perhaps were not the dreams of many of them, but at any rate he had always had vision and a long perspective in life. There was a great deal of the Covenanter in him, and there was a great deal of the Cavalier. He had an acute sense of the past, and history was a living thing to him; but at the same time he was no drab antiquarian. He embodied, too, all their local affections, and he was a Highlander by descent and by domicile."

"What is the Prime Minister going to do? I spoke the other day, after he had been defeated in an important division about his wonderful skill in falling without hurting himself. He falls, but up he comes again, smiling, a little dishevelled but still smiling. But this is a juncture, a situation, which will try to the fullest the peculiar arts in which he excites. I remember when I was a child, being taken to the celebrated Barnum's Circus which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities, but the exhibit on the programme which I most admired to see was the one described as "The Boneless Wonder". My parents judged that that spectacle would be too revolting and demoralizing for my youthful eyes, and I have waited fifty years to see the boneless wonder sitting on the Treasury Bench."

"Early in the year 1923, Mr. Bonar Law resigned the Premiership and retired to die of his fell affliction. Mr. Baldwin succeeded him as Prime Minister, and Lord Curzon reconciled himself to the office of Foreign Secretary in the new Administration. Thus began that period of fourteen years which may well be called “The Baldwin-MacDonald Régime.” During all that time Mr. Baldwin was always, in fact if not in form, either at the head of the Government or leader of the Opposition, and as Mr. MacDonald never obtained an independent majority, Mr. Baldwin, whether in office or opposition, was the ruling political figure in Britain. At first in alternation but eventually in political brotherhood, these two statesmen governed the country. Nominally the representatives of opposing parties, of contrary doctrines, of antagonistic interests, they proved in fact to be more nearly akin in outlook, temperament, and method than any other two men who had been Prime Ministers since that office was known to the Constitution. Curiously enough, the sympathies of each extended far into the territory of the other. Ramsay MacDonald nursed many of the sentiments of the old Tory. Stanley Baldwin, apart from a manufacturer’s ingrained approval of protection, was by disposition a truer representative of mild Socialism than many to be found in the Labour ranks."

"The Liberal Party, rallying round the standard of free trade, to which I also adhered, gained a balancing position at the polls, and, though in a minority, might well have taken office had Mr. Asquith wished to do so. In view of his disinclination, Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, at the head of little more than two-fifths of the House, became the first Socialist Prime Minister of Great Britain, and lived in office for a year by the sufferance and on the quarrels of the two older parties. The nation was extremely restive under minority Socialist rule, and the political weather became so favourable that the two Oppositions – Liberal and Conservative – picked an occasion to defeat the Socialist Government on a major issue. There was another general election – the third in less than two years. The Conservatives were returned by a majority of 222 over all other parties combined. At the beginning of this election Mr. Baldwin’s position was very weak, and he made no particular contribution to the result. He had, however, previously maintained himself as party leader, and as the results were declared, it became certain he would become again Prime Minister. He retired to his home to form his second Administration."

"The general election of May, 1929, showed that the “swing of the pendulum” and the normal desire for change were powerful factors with the British electorate. The Socialists had a small majority over the Conservatives in the new House of Commons. The Liberals, with about sixty seats, held the balance, and it was plain that under Mr. Lloyd George’s leadership they would, at the outset at least, be hostile to the Conservatives. Mr. Baldwin and I were in full agreement that we should not seek to hold office in a minority or on precarious Liberal support. Accordingly, although there were some differences of opinion in the Cabinet and the party about the course to be taken, Mr. Baldwin tendered his resignation to the King. We all went down to Windsor in a special train to give up our seals and offices; and on June 7, Mr. Ramsay MacDonald became for the second time Prime Minister at the head of a minority Government depending upon Liberal votes. The Socialist Prime Minister wished his new Labour Government to distinguish itself by large concessions to Egypt, by a far-reaching constitutional change in India, and by a renewed effort for world, or at any rate British, disarmament. These were aims in which he could count upon Liberal aid, and for which he therefore commanded a parliamentary majority. Here began my differences with Mr. Baldwin, and thereafter the relationship in which we had worked since he chose me for Chancellor of the Exchequer five years before became sensibly altered. We still, of course, remained in easy personal contact, but we knew we did not mean the same thing. My idea was that the Conservative Opposition should strongly confront the Labour Government on all great imperial and national issues, should identify itself with the majesty of Britain as under Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Salisbury, and should not hesitate to face controversy, even though that might not immediately evoke a response from the nation. So far as I could see, Mr. Baldwin felt that the times were too far gone for any robust assertion of British imperial greatness, and that the hope of the Conservative Party lay in accommodation with Liberal and Labour forces, and in adroit, well-timed manoeuvres to detach powerful moods of public opinion and large blocks of voters from them. He certainly was very successful. He was the greatest party manager the Conservatives had ever had. He fought, as their leader, five general elections, of which he won three. History alone can judge these general issues."

"In the wake of the collapse of the stock market came, during the years between 1929 and 1932, an unrelenting fall in prices and consequent cuts in production causing widespread unemployment. The consequences of this dislocation of economic life became world-wide. A general contraction of trade in the face of unemployment and declining production followed. Tariff restrictions were imposed to protect the home markets. The general crisis brought with it acute monetary difficulties, and paralysed internal credit. This spread ruin and unemployment far and wide throughout the globe. Mr. MacDonald’s Government, with all their promises behind them, saw unemployment during 1930 and 1931 bound up in their faces from one million to nearly three millions. It was said that in the United States ten million persons were without work. The entire banking system of the great Republic was thrown into confusion and temporary collapse. Consequential disasters fell upon Germany and other European countries. However, nobody starved in the English-speaking world."

"It is always difficult for an administration or party which is founded upon attacking capital to preserve the confidence and credit so important to the highly artificial economy of an island like Britain. Mr. MacDonald’s Labour-Socialist Government were utterly unable to cope with the problems which confronted them. They could not command the party discipline or produce the vigour necessary even to balance the budget. In such conditions a Government, already in a minority and deprived of all financial confidence, could not survive. The failure of the Labour Party to face this tempest, the sudden collapse of British financial credit, and the break-up of the Liberal Party, with its unwholesome balancing power, led to a national coalition. It seemed that only a Government of all parties was capable of coping with the crisis. Mr. MacDonald and his Chancellor of the Exchequer, on a strong patriotic emotion, attempted to carry the mass of the Labour Party into this combination. Mr. Baldwin, always content that others should have the function so long as he retained the power, was willing to serve under Mr. MacDonald. It was an attitude which, though deserving respect, did not correspond to the facts. Mr. Lloyd George was still recovering from an operation – serious at his age; and Sir John Simon led the bulk of the Liberals into the all-party combination."

"The formation of the new Government did not end the financial crisis, and I returned from abroad to find everything unsettled in the advent of an inevitable general election. The verdict of the electorate was worthy of the British nation. A National Government had been formed under Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, founder of the Labour-Socialist Party. They proposed to the people a programme of severe austerity and sacrifice. It was an earlier version of “Blood, sweat, toil, and tears,” without the stimulus or the requirements of war and mortal peril. The sternest economy must be practised. Everyone would have his wages, salary, or income reduced. The mass of the people were asked to vote for a régime of self-denial. They responded as they always do when caught in the heroic temper. Although contrary to their declarations, the Government abandoned the gold standard, and although Mr. Baldwin was obliged to suspend, as it proved for ever, those very payments on the American debt which he had forced on the Bonar Law Cabinet of 1923, confidence and credit were restored. There was an overwhelming majority for the new Administration. Mr. MacDonald as Prime Minister was only followed by seven or eight members of his own party; but barely a hundred of his Labour opponents and former followers were returned to Parliament. His health and powers were failing fast, and he reigned in increasing decrepitude at the summit of the British system for nearly four fateful years. And very soon in these four years came Hitler."

"The British Government which resulted from the general election of 1931 was in appearance one of the strongest, and in fact one of the weakest, in British records. Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, the Prime Minister, had severed himself, with the utmost bitterness on both sides, from the Socialist Party which it had been his life’s work to create. Henceforward he brooded supinely at the head of an administration which, though nominally National, was in fact overwhelmingly Conservative. Mr. Baldwin preferred the substance to the form of power, and reigned placidly in the background. The Foreign Office was filled by Sir John Simon, one of the leaders of the Liberal contingent. The main work of the Administration at home was done by Mr. Neville Chamberlain, who soon succeeded Mr. Snowden as Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Labour Party, blamed for its failure in the financial crisis and sorely stricken at the polls, was led by the extreme pacifist, Mr. George Lansbury. During the period of almost five years of this Administration, from January, 1931, to November, 1935, the entire situation on the Continent of Europe was reversed."

"Mr. MacDonald’s health and capacity had declined to a point which made his continuance as Prime Minister impossible. He had never been popular with the Conservative Party, who regarded him, on account of his political and war records and Socialist faith, with long-bred prejudice softened in later years by pity. No man was more hated or with better reason by the Labour-Socialist Party which he had so largely created and then laid low by what they viewed as his treacherous desertion in 1931. In the massive majority of the Government he had but seven party followers. The disarmament policy to which he had given his utmost personal efforts had now proved a disastrous failure. A general election could not be far distant, in which he could play no helpful part. In these circumstances there was no surprise when, on June 7, it was announced that he and Mr. Baldwin had changed places and offices, and that Mr. Baldwin had become Prime Minister for the third time. The Foreign Office also passed to another hand. Sir Samuel Hoare’s labours at the India Office had been crowned by the passing of the Government of India Bill, and he was now free to turn to a more immediately important sphere. For some time past Sir John Simon had been bitterly attacked for his foreign policy by influential Conservatives closely associated with the Government. He now moved to the Home Office, with which he was well acquainted, and Sir Samuel Hoare became Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs."

"Although we have differed in late years on political matters, I hope that in the bitterness of spirit you must feel at present, you will recall that there are thousands who, like myself, remember with pride and gratitude your work for Socialism and the cause of Labour in days when it was neither easy nor popular to be a pioneer."

"Deep resentment was felt against him and charges of treachery were frequent. Throughout the Labour movement he was bitterly criticised for his action in 1931, and I fully shared the prevailing sentiments towards him... During 1931 and earlier I had been one of his most severe critics. While deeply conscious of his powers as an orator and liking him personally, I thought he was woolly headed; and behind the scenes I left him in no doubt of my estimate of his executive or administrative skills. Yet not once did he show ill-feeling towards me."

"MacDonald simply couldn't understand why he had been deserted by his former close friends. He felt that he had departed from none of his Socialist principles and had been true to the conceptions which had guided them through his political life."

"The Gladstone of Labour."

"MacDonald at Llandudno [in 1930] faced the test of a lifetime and, despite his assumed air of a weary Titan, it is hard to deny that he rose to it superbly. Even when his speech is read today – and MacDonald's speeches were very much intended to be heard, not read – its force is apparent. Picture the full scene with the presence, the gestures, the beautiful accent, the whole elegant swaying and lilting integration of voice, mind and body which is what a great MacDonald oration was, and it is not difficult to imagine the spell he cast."

"MacDonald's temperament was temporising, calculating, cautious, gradualist to the fingertips... He had enormous resources of diligence and patience and endurance. These qualities together made him the expert negotiator and party manager which he undoubtedly was... [H]e also had great spasmodic gleams of imagination which enabled him to sweep aside the suffocating orthodoxies of the time."

"[In 1931] MacDonald havered and hesitated and prevaricated; but he did not consciously set out to betray... Rather, he was utterly crushed by the choice he had desperately made... 1931 was a collective failure, not a personal failure... The scapegoat theory was an indecency as well as a falsehood... But neither he nor the other leaders had a right to run away in their different directions, and thereby open the gates wide to the enemy. No theory, evolutionary or revolutionary, or moderate, could justify that."

"I thank you for your kind message sent as you crossed the frontier from the United States to Canada. I only express the feeling of the people of this country when I say that we were all grateful for the opportunity of manifesting our sincere appreciation of the spirit in which you came to us. The welcome you have received is an earnest of the gratification felt in this country that the peoples of Great Britain and the United States have been brought even closer together by your visit. Mrs. Hoover also joins me in thanking you and we both send you our best wishes for a pleasant visit in Canada and a good voyage home."

"In the study there are photographs of Ll[oyd] G[eorge], Ramsay, and S[tanley] B[aldwin]. S. B. had learnt indirectly from one of the maids at Chequers in Ramsay's time that on entering the study for the weekend he always put the Ll[oyd] G[eorge] photograph in the table drawer, "because it makes me see red"."

"I never thought Ramsay would willingly cooperate with the Liberals. He hates them. He is a compound of vanity and vindictiveness. His snobbish instincts incline him to association with Tories."

"He had sufficient conscience to bother him, but not sufficient to keep him straight."

"He was a much more considerable man than it is now the fashion to admit. He was one of the creators, if not the chief architect, of the Labour Party. He brought it from a small membership in the House of Commons to a position in which it was able to hold office, not without credit...on two separate occasions... His actions in 1931, by which he destroyed his own creation and doomed the Labour Party to a long eclipse, naturally caused intense bitterness among his old colleagues. But the formation of the National Government resulted from real devotion to what he sincerely believed to be the interests of the State... He cannot be blamed for accepting what was the unequivocal view of almost all the leading experts as to what had to be done... The only difference between MacDonald and those who deserted him is that he had the courage to follow the advice which he believed to be sound, while they shrank from the unpopularity of policies which they themselves admitted to be necessary... If in his last years MacDonald sank into a woolly confusion of mind and language, the achievements of his life, taken as a whole, are by no means negligible."

"In the House of Commons once he was not in very good form. He tended to hesitate and repeat himself. I'd never heard him quite so bad ever before. And Jimmy Maxton stood up and said: "Sit down, man, you're a bloody tragedy." You could have heard a pin drop; you could have heard a feather move."

"I was surprised when it was conveyed to me that he expected me to call on him... I was shown into the Cabinet room, where I found the Prime Minister alone. Queen Victoria complained that Mr. Gladstone addressed her as if she were a public meeting. I know what she meant. Mr. MacDonald stood up and delivered a long discourse in his beautiful voice and with the phrasing of a practised orator. He began: "I am a layman from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, but I realise to the full the importance and value of religion in the community. It should be a force making for unity and a bulwark against the forces of disruption, which are more powerful to-day than is generally supposed." ... I listened attentively to this speech, storing up questions and points of disagreement for the time when my turn to speak should come. They were wasted; that time never came, for as soon as the Prime Minister had ceased his oration, Mr. Baldwin was shown in and I was shown out, having uttered perhaps two sentences during the whole interview."

"Ramsay MacDonald has a front-bench mind. Years ago I tried to get him taken into the Ministry, but others thought otherwise."

"On [5 August 1924] Hankey lunched with MacDonald and "took him to task about his unconcealed hatred of Lloyd George whom he always belittles". He stressed that the present conference "was simplicity itself compared with the Paris [Peace] Conference", that Lloyd George "had never allowed anyone to run him [MacDonald] down...when he was the underdog", but had described him as "a very considerable fellow fighting a lonely battle very pluckily". Hankey attributed MacDonald's attitude "to jealously of a much bigger man than he"."

"MacDonald then burst out into a general denunciation of the whole crew of French politicians—underhand, grasping, dishonourable. I was entertained the other day, he said, at Versailles... There were present about 70 ex-premiers and would be premiers—everybody, he added, in France wants to be a premier, if it is only for four days. I was seated in the middle of the long side of the table so had a good view of all the men opposite. There wasn't a good face among them. Mme Herriot, a very nice person, was seated next to me. I said to her "can you tell me if there is an honest man here, besides your husband". "Yes", she replied, "I think there are two"."

"He reverted again and again to this dislike and distrust of the Liberals. He could get on with the Tories. They differed at times openly then forgot all about it and shook hands. They were gentlemen, but the Liberals were cads."

"What a fine speech MacDonald made at Geneva—wise, far-seeing and courageous. I wish we had a man in our party who could have done the like."

"Ramsay MacDonald, who came to power in 1924; and thereafter, whether in or out of office, set his mark on British foreign policy for the next fifteen years. The MacDonald policy seemed to end in catastrophic failure with the outbreak of the second World war in 1939. His name is now despised; his very existence ignored. Yet MacDonald should be the patron-saint of every contemporary Western politician who favours cooperation with Germany. More than any other British statesman, MacDonald faced "the German problem" and attempted to solve it. Coercion was futile, as the occupation of the Ruhr had just shown... Only conciliation of Germany remained; and if conciliation were to be practised at all, it should be practised wholeheartedly."

"As one of the founders of the Parliamentary Labour Party, he was chiefly responsible for winning a place for Labour in the great world of politics and public opinion. If he had not possessed remarkable qualities, he would have irrevocably lost any influence that he ever possessed by his pacifist opposition first to the South African War, and subsequently to the War of 1914. Yet, within a short time of each of them, he was back again in public life, a leading figure and a politician of growing importance... Having become Prime Minister, he showed both tact and judgment. In particular, he succeeded in lowering the international temperature. The détente that followed the end of the Curzon–Poincaré wrangles gave him the chance of improving Anglo-French relations, whilst his love of tradition was a valuable antidote against the irresponsible anarchism of some of his followers."

"[H]e was...the romanticist. As sensitive as Fergus McIvor in Waverley, his vivid imagination made him see all the difficulties that beset any course of action. If it sometimes confused his arguments, it none the less kept him responsive to the needs of the time, and gave him an engaging touch in all his dealings with his Ministerial colleagues."

"It is to MacDonald's credit that he came out strongly against this one-sided attitude, and in an article of April 27 [1935] in the News Letter, the weekly paper of the National Labour Party, severely criticised the Germans for their intransigent militarism, and the Germanophiles in this country for their blindness in swallowing the German case."

"Ramsay was a simpler character than Baldwin, though he did not look it. He too was complicated, but not by S. B.'s desire to seem plain. A 'blend of cosmopolitan distinction and Scottish sense', Harold Nicolson called him, and no greater contrast with his predecessor could have been penned... [T]he key to him was the commonest in human nature—illusion, our stick and carrot. He had an overdose of incentive and I wished him joy of it, though joy he never got... Ramsay really was persuaded with H. G. Wells that 'our true nationality is mankind'... He really did believe that men were naturally good, that they could be brought into line though they looked like horses at a starting-gate for ever facing opposite ways and savaging each other. He had faith in every panacea... He really did hope that politics were a glittering but not endless adventure, especially in foreign affairs where he trusted to magic solutions round green baize... He really did believe that the grumpy wurrld found felicity by its firesides—he overdid firesides—and that he could make it happier still by catching it there. He really did persuade himself, especially on his feet, that we have some appointment with a star, and would rise to it by better ways than class-war, which he called 'pre-socialist and pre-scientific'... In short and in his own words he held that we were eternally moving in a surge toward righteousness... [He was] nearer to the Liberals than of his extremists. He was less absorbed in Socialism than in international events."

"[I]n the slums of the manufacturing towns and in the hovels of the countryside he has become a legendary being—the personification of all that thousands of downtrodden men and women hope and dream and desire. Like Lenin...he is the focus of the mute hopes of a whole class."

"[T]he Labour Party was always receptive...to rebels against the whole outlook of a leadership which they always accused of lacking determination or vigour or Socialist principles. These systematic critics...[included] the fervent and impatient idealists... Their outlook reflected the old radical, provincial, Nonconformist tendency to see Westminster politicians as willing victims of the aristocratic, or the parliamentary, or the Whitehall embrace. All those suspicions were so stimulated by the trauma of 1931 that even a generation later the most influential figure in the Labour Movement was said to be the ghost of Ramsay MacDonald."

"We commemorate a man, a leader, who in the years of creation and achievement towered above his contemporaries in figure and manner, in voice and power, who worked and fought, and who suffered—as they all suffered who dared to preach socialism in an unreceptive and hostile age. He was a man who had vision, and dared all in those years to make that vision a reality; a man who inspired affection in his associates as in his own domestic circle, and who, daring all, created a lasting and durable political instrument which today 60 years after its first political success, provides the Government of this country and in so providing owes more than many are prepared to admit to the young Ramsay MacDonald."

"Malcolm MacDonald, son of the Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, invited Ralph and me to meet his father and spend the night at Chequers. We met the Prime Minister along the road as he was taking his constitutional walk in his plus-fours, his scarf, his cap, his pipe and walking stick, a typical country squire, the last person to look like a leader of the Labour Party. My first impression was of a gentleman of great dignity, extremely conscious of the burden of premiership, with a noble countenance which was not without humour. The first part of the evening was somewhat restrained. But after dinner we went to the famous historical Long Room for coffee, and after viewing the original Cromwellian death mask and other historical objects we got down to a cosy chat. I told him that since my first visit there was a great deal of chance for the better. In 1921 I had seen much poverty in London, grey-haired old ladies sleeping on the Thames Embankment, but now those old lades were gone; no more were derelicts sleeping there. The shops looked well stocked and the children well shod, and that, surely, must be to the credit of the Labour Government."

"Nagging is the repetition of unpalatable truths."

"Your arguments are overwhelming. You’re obviously right — and the answer is No."

"As chief secretary, I was having a terrible time doing what I didn’t go into politics to do — cutting public expenditure. And I was having meetings with every departmental minister about their budget. They all wanted more money — Tony Benn and Barbara Castle more than most. I decided that I could get rid of three Cabinet ministers — the secretaries of state for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland — if I could settle on a formula for their budgets. So I set up this method for allocating public expenditure that the Cabinet then agreed to."

"The real problem is that now no politician wants to tackle it. The Barnett Formula saves people trouble. It saves prime ministers worrying. That’s the way with politics… Here we are, about to make the wrong decision again."

"We know that you have a very arduous duty ahead of you. We hope you enjoy the best of health; if you go on looking as attractive as you do tonight, it will be very beneficial."

"Among the many prejudices against vegans is the belief that they are always preaching to others and trying to convert them. I do not think that is true; we are incredibly tolerant. We are always polite when others ask, “Don’t you ever get tempted by a bacon sandwich?”… In fact, most vegans I know are rather coy about explaining why they are vegan, mostly because the question tends to be asked when we are sitting a dinner table full of meat eaters, and it seems rather impolite to answer. However, seeing as we are not at a dinner party now, here is the ethical case… If people are vegetarians for ethical reasons—because they believe that killing and eating animals is wrong—they really ought to be vegan, too. The average human eats more than 11,000 animals in his or her lifetime, but millions of calves and chicks are also killed every year as “waste products” of milk and egg production."

"I don’t think that maternal and child health is a global priority. The health and welfare of mothers and their children received unprecedented international attention in 2010, but not all Governments were involved and other issues subsequently knocked this issue off the top slot. For those Governments who did make specific policy and resource commitments, the role of civil society is to work hard to get them to deliver. However, to see a truly seismic shift in the life chances of mums-to-be and their babies, Governments — rich and poor — must tackle inequality, especially gender but also income."

"Building an integrated, cost-effective, national health service that delivers quality care for all is one of the critical challenges facing anyone with a stake in global health. A mum doesn’t divide the health of her family up into different bits when she goes to a health clinic: ‘vaccines’, ‘malaria’, ‘HIV’. For her a health centre is a health centre and a nurse is a nurse. When she goes to get help, she should receive integrated care for all her family’s needs not just the one thing that centre, or health practitioner, happens to know about. We need to assign inefficient, parallel health interventions to the rubbish bin."

"It bodes well for the future that young people are thinking so intently about political issues."

"Every weekend families across Britain settle down to watch the X-factor or Britain’s Got Talent. We revel in the discovery of new talent, the chance for someone to come from nowhere and suddenly make it big based simply on their raw ability and hard work. Yet (perhaps outside the realm of music and entertainment) our society is all too often the opposite of this ideal of opportunity."

"The idea that a child living deep in poverty whose parents don’t have enough money for food or heating, books or basic things like school trips can ever have the same opportunities for development as a more fortunate child is patently absurd. But because it leads to some difficult choices many politicians choose to ignore it, essentially promising to make you an omelette without breaking any eggs."

"It’s not about creating an equal country, but it is about stopping the development of an underclass cut off from the rest of society. This focus could be a straight forward set of things like a living wage, supporting more effective pathways into work and an effective benefits system."

"If we can find the will I strongly believe we can still make Britain’s approach to talent a bit more X-factor (without Simon Cowell) and a bit less Downton Abbey."

"I have fought a really local and positive campaign full of energy and enthusiasm and I think that came across. I’m not nervous, I’m honour and humbled to be elected, I appreciate the big challenge ahead, I have two children aged two and four so I am used to the challenge."

"It was the realisation of a lifelong ambition to be the MP for my home town. It was by no means the end of a journey, but rather the beginning of a new chapter both for me and for the people of Batley and Spen."

"We now face five years of an unbridled Conservative government that is intent on swingeing cuts, further attacks on society’s most vulnerable and on our NHS. This will severely limit what can be achieved but I am determined to work tirelessly to do what I can to make sure local people are heard in Parliament and protected from the worst of what is to come."

"Many people don’t realise just what a valuable lifeline libraries can be."

"They are a lifeline for job hunters without their own computer, slimmers, walkers, discussers, knitters and natterers."

"British policy on Syria has wandered aimlessly, a deadly mix of timidity and confusion. The lack of a coherent response, not just by Britain but by the wider international community, has allowed the situation in Syria to fester into the greatest humanitarian crisis of our lifetime. … We can and should do much more to help."

"We need a robust but targeted military approach. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no war-monger. I opposed the Iraq war and worked for a decade as an Oxfam aid worker – but this isn’t Iraq. This is a humanitarian crisis."

"I don’t believe there will be a military solution to this conflict but I do believe there will be a military component to it. The vast majority of the fighting will be done by people from the region and by Syrians themselves, but that doesn’t mean that the UK shouldn’t play a role."

"I don’t pretend to have all the answers. But despite all of the dangers and difficult judgements that lie ahead, burying our head in the sand is not an option. We must face up to this crisis and do all that we can to resolve it."

"Thanks Diane. I hope we can all agree that this debate should be about Syria not UK party politics"

"The priority has been offering a service and making a difference."

"I don’t think we as a party should let China and Russia stop international action to save lives in Syria … Three times they have vetoed action in Syria, and each time the crisis has escalated and escalated."

"I always back UN action where we can find it, but I do not think it should be a limit to our help. There have been multiple UN resolutions that say [to] Assad: stop killing indiscriminately your own citizens."

"On the military side, we need to get two things right if we only talk about limited air strikes against Isil [Isis] – and I back international action against Isil – it will be counterproductive. We have to look at the conflict dynamic in Syria, and that is 75% of civilian deaths and causalities are caused by the Assad regime due to his aerial bombardment of civilians."

"This is about a deterrence effect to stop the Syrian regime targeting their own civilians. I think it would be enforceable from the Mediterranean using US French and UK military capability already out there. It would mean the aerial bombardment of Syrian civilians would stop, and it would create space for peace talks."

"The civil war in Syria is the worst humanitarian tragedy of our generation and one that our government, and the world, is failing to deal with adequately."

"I never really grew up being political or Labour. It kind of came at Cambridge where it was just a realisation that where you were born mattered. That how you spoke mattered... who you knew mattered. I didn’t really speak right or knew the right people. I spent the summers packing toothpaste at a factory working where my dad worked and everyone else had gone on a gap year! To be honest my experience at Cambridge really knocked me for about five years."

"Having gone through that experience of being in a Cambridge college, surviving it and building myself up, meant that coming here (Westminster) was a walk in the park, and a lot of the same people are here!"

"I’ve been in some horrific situations where women have been raped repeatedly in , I’ve been with child soldiers who have been given Kalashnikov and kill members of their own family in . In Afghanistan I was talking to Afghan elders who were world weary of a lack of sustained attention from their own Government and from the international community to stop problems early. That’s the thing that all of that experience gave me - if you ignore a problem it gets worse."

"If you talk to quite a lot of people around the world, whether it’s in an camp or in an emergency disaster they often say the UK is a UN Security Council member, a leading member of the European Union, a leading member of , you can make a massive difference and they want us to act."

"Our communities have been deeply enhanced by immigration, be it of Irish Catholics across the constituency or of Muslims from Gujarat in India or from Pakistan, principally from Kashmir. While we celebrate our diversity, what surprises me time and time again as I travel around the constituency is that we are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us."

"In my neck of the woods non-conformity is what we do best."

"What many of our businesses are lacking is confidence: confidence to expand; confidence to borrow; confidence to grow; and the confidence to fuel a real economic recovery that benefits everybody, offering decent jobs, paying decent wages and bridging the skills gap."

"It is time to give city and county regions the powers and resources they need to promote growth, and I will happily work with all of those who are genuinely committed to building an economic powerhouse in the north."

"Yorkshire folk are not fools."

"Many businesses in Yorkshire want the security and stability of Britain’s continued membership of the European Union, a cause I look forward to championing passionately in this place and elsewhere."

"I am Batley and Spen born and bred, and I could not be prouder of that. I am proud that I was made in Yorkshire and I am proud of the things we make in Yorkshire. Britain should be proud of that, too. I look forward to representing the great people of Batley and Spen here over the next five years."

"Every decade or so, the world is tested by a crisis so grave that it breaks the mould: one so horrific and inhumane that the response of politicians to it becomes emblematic of their generation —their moral leadership or cowardice, their resolution or incompetence. It is how history judges us."

"We must put party politics to one side and focus on what really matters—the protection of Syrian civilians."

"Please let us stop casting the humanitarian, diplomatic and military responses as mutually exclusive alternatives. They are not. If we are serious about addressing this crisis, we need to stop pretending that any one of them offers a panacea and instead weave these strands into a coherent strategy."

"Let us not be duped into believing that we need to make a choice between dealing with either Assad or Isis. On the surface, this may seem appealing, but it is not an option. There is no choice."

"No matter what our humanitarian response is to this crisis, it will never be enough. It cannot end the conflict."

"If four years of continuous vicious conflict have taught us anything, it is that the current regime is no longer capable of bringing peace and stability to Syria."

"While I do not believe that there is a purely military solution to this conflict, I do believe that there will be a military component to any viable solution."

"I believe it is time for the Government urgently to consider deterring the indiscriminate aerial bombardment of civilians in Syria through the willingness to consider the prudent and limited use of force."

"We owe it to everybody in our party to be honest about where we stand."

"The Tories deserved a kicking last night. With chaos and discord in our hospitals and schools, an unprecedented housing crisis and fatcats lining their pockets while life gets tougher for everybody else, it’s an outrage for David Cameron to appear on TV looking like the cat who got the cream, knowing his party is on track to win again in 2020."

"Labour is in the doldrums and we have to ask ourselves why. Why, day after day during the campaign, we failed to get a hearing. Why the voters aren’t getting the alternative vision of a fairer, stronger, more just Britain that we should be offering."

"When the voters tell us on the doorsteps that they can’t picture our leader in No 10 we have to listen. When our candidates in London and Wales ask the leader to stay away, we have a problem. When the revival we were promised in Scotland with Corbyn’s “new” politics proves to be a mirage, we have to ask what it has actually achieved."

"We both nominated Corbyn for leader last year. We have never had cause to doubt his commitment to society’s most disadvantaged and to Labour’s values – a commitment we all share. But we have come to regret that decision."

"Weak leadership, poor judgment and a mistaken sense of priorities have created distraction after distraction and stopped us getting our message across."

"Every time we flounder we just embolden them further."

"Some say we need to be more patient. What we cannot, must not do is sit back and hope for the best."

"Corbyn needs to show he’s ready to lead from the front. He and those around him must come out of their bunker, stop blaming everybody else, and show the discipline and determination to drive our message home. These elections were a terrible missed opportunity. We cannot afford any more."

"In recent years, Britain has withdrawn from the world. On Syria, on Europe, on Ukraine this government has been on the periphery: all victim of the same lack of long-term strategic thinking about British foreign policy and the absence of a moral compass. It is time for the left to revive its ethical foreign policy and carve out a new long-term narrative that puts human rights and the protection of civilians centre stage once again."

"There is much to be proud of in the left’s internationalist past. Many from our movement made the ultimate sacrifice fighting Franco’s fascism during the . We were unequivocal in our opposition to Apartheid in South Africa, led action to protect civilians in Kosovo and . And we put this country firmly on the road to fulfil our historic commitment to spend 0.7 per cent of GDP on aid – an act of solidarity that has seen millions more children in school and many more women surviving childbirth. However, this active internationalist approach is not inevitable. It has been, and is still, contested across the . It is threatened by an increasingly nationalist and isolationist right, by a government that has withdrawn from global leadership. And it is threatened by those on the left who might show great personal solidarity with international causes but tend to think the British state has no role to play."

"I believe the left is now in a fundamental fight about our future approach to international affairs: one where we decide whether to channel UK resources, diplomatic influence and military capability in defence of human rights and the protection of civilians; or one where we stand on the sidelines frozen by our recent failures. I believe it’s time for the left to revive its ethical foreign policy and in particular, rebuild the case for a progressive approach to humanitarian intervention."

"After the horror of 9/11 ‘interventionism’ was increasingly expressed through the paradigms of ‘security’ or ‘counter terrorism’, rather than being grounded firmly in the protection of civilians. And then Labour’s support for military action in Iraq distorted a worthy principle with such devastating impact. The legacy of Iraq – an intervention I was wholly opposed to because it was not fundamentally about protecting civilians – still hangs over us. But Labour can no longer be paralysed by Iraq. We need to learn from its many lessons without forgetting the equally important lessons of Bosnia or Rwanda."

"President Assad dropped chemical weapons on school children and the world stood by. He rained down barrel bombs and cluster munitions on hospitals and homes and we did not respond. For too long, the UK government let the crisis fester on the ‘too difficult to deal with’ pile. There was no credible strategy, nor courage or leadership – instead we had chaos and incoherence, interspersed with the occasional gesture. It’s been a masterclass in how not to do foreign policy and a shameful lesson on what happens when you ignore a crisis of this magnitude."

"Unless we act to end the slaughter of civilians in Syria by President Assad, Isis will continue to find a steady stream of recruits from the Syrian Sunni population driven to desperation and radicalisation. In this context no amount of military action against Isis will be able to eradicate them. ... As long as these attacks persist these forces will not be able to focus – as many want to – on freeing their country from the cancer of Isis."

"The left should carve out a new long-term narrative about British foreign policy: one that puts human rights and the protection of civilians centre stage again. And one that reasserts our commitment to the responsibility to protect those most at risk of mass atrocity crimes. This isn’t really about being pro or anti-military intervention. Rather it’s a call to redefine the principles that will guide the decisions we take, as well as a commitment to then honour them."

"Before I heard the news that my friend Jo Cox had died from her injuries on Thursday, I sent her a text message, it read, 'you won't see this until you're better, but I love you'. And then I sat all day hoping, praying, willing her to recover. I still can't come to terms with the fact that she didn't. The 'I love you' still stands."

"I know if she could read this now she would wince and recoil, like so many women she beat herself up constantly, thinking she was struggling to be a good enough mum or a good enough MP. She was more than good enough at both."

"I think she was very worried that the language was coarsening, that people were being driven to take more extreme positions, that people didn’t work with each other as individuals and on issues; it was all much too tribal and unthinking. And she was particularly worried – we talked about this regularly – particularly worried about the direction of, not just in the UK but globally, the direction of politics at the moment, particularly around creating division and playing on people’s worst fears rather than their best instincts. So we talked about that a lot and it was something that worried her."

"She was a politician and she had very strong political views and I believe she was killed because of those views. I think she died because of them, and she would want to stand up for those in death as much as she did in life."

"The two things that I’ve been very focused on is how do we support and protect the children and how do we make sure that something good comes out of this, ... their mother was someone who was loved by lots of people and that therefore, it’s OK to be upset and it’s OK for them to cry and to be sad about it."

"She cherished every moment … I remember so much about her but most of all I will remember that she met the world with love and both love for her children, love in her family and also love for people she didn’t know. She just approached things with a spirit, she wasn’t perfect at all you know, but she just wanted to make the world a better place, to contribute, and we love her very much."

"To this end I suggest we need to look to an idea deeply rooted in Christian life and thought. The idea of the Common Good. The Common Good is concerned with personal and mutual flourishing in terms of our talents and vocations. It is about treating people as they really are: as human beings who belong to families, localities and communities. To shared traditions, interests and faiths. Not as abstracted, rootless, atomised individuals that dominates neo-classical or neoliberal thinking -the thinking that dominates our life."

"The main problem with current neo-liberal globalisation is that it detaches economic and political power from locality, tradition and interpersonal relationships. That’s because it makes a fundamental assumption about human nature: that we are essentially selfish, greedy, isolated individuals who seem to maximise our own individual happiness or short-term pleasure. Purely individual interests ultimately clash. This conflict is then supposedly resolved by the ‘invisible hand’ of the market and the visible hand of the state. In consequence we are left with an increasing centralisation of power, a growing concentration of wealth and an ever-more atomised society."

"Christianity and other faith traditions also teach us that the common good concerns the relational. Not lone egos, nor an anonymous mass. But instead shared bonds that are both convivial and sacrificial. That’s because human beings flourish as persons who freely associate with others in groups, communities and nations."

"Religions remind us that we are not necessarily selfish, greedy and prone to violence. Nor however, are we purely selfless and unconditionally cooperative. Rather, most people naturally and rightly seek mutual recognition – a fulfilling of themselves alongside others. They want to be at home in the world, but they don’t usually want to destroy the other home-dwellers."

"Labour should have an 'English Labour'. It should embrace a modern, radical Englishness, or else England and patriotism will simply be a right-wing politics of loss and sourness."

"We need a philosophy of the individual in society and a political culture that values the social goods that give security, meaning and value to people: home, family, friendships, good work, locality and communities of belonging. These were the concerns of the 19th century debates between social liberals and ethical socialists which created the modern spirit of the left. We need to re-invent a plural and ethical socialism rooted in the ordinary life of the individual producing and relating in society. The central value of this socialism, alongside liberty, is equality."

"The task is not to win the political centre ground – it is gridlocked and dead – but to transform it. A new social politics of democracy must be capable of creating the conditions for recovery, and setting out a set of principles and a political direction for the future, and it must also address the threat of global warming. The boom is over. In the future there will be less to go round and so let us share it out fairly amongst ourselves and embark on the deep and long transformation that will bring about a good society. It will be the great challenge of our time, and it will shape the lives of generations to come."

"We of the rank and file of the constituency parties say to the trade union movement that the Beveridge issue is as axiomatic to us as the Trade Disputes Act is to them. ... Jam yesterday and jam tomorrow, but never jam today."

"The poverty and unemployment which we came into existence to fight have been largely conquered."

"[W]e shall fight any legislation based on these proposals tooth and nail, line by line, and, however long it takes, we shall destroy the Bill."

"Finally to the channel tunnel. Personally I am relieved that Tony Crosland has decided we can't go ahead. This is not only anti-Common Market prejudice. It is a kind of earthy feeling that an island is an island and should not be violated. Certainly I am convinced that the building of a tunnel would do something profound to the national attitude – and not certainly for the better."

"They lured us into the Market with the mirage of the market miracle."

"This means a pension increase of 72p – a fair price for a bag of peanuts."

"Whenever you were with Barbara you felt plugged into a power station – she absolutely vibrated with energy. She had a great sense of humour and was just fun to be with – but there was nobody she did not have a row with. She had many with me and I look back on them with pleasure. Whatever she did she thought out and then when she had come to a conclusion she argued for it with passion and conviction."

"[Barbara Castle was] an extraordinary pioneer for women in politics. Barbara Castle was one of the dominating figures of the Labour movement of the last 50 years. She was courageous, determined, tireless and principled, she was never afraid to speak her mind or stand up for her beliefs. Britain has lost one of its great political figures and the Labour movement a great heroine."

"Barbara was a heroine of the Labour movement who brought in equal pay for women, and right up to her death was campaigning for the cause of justice for the elderly. She made a massive contribution to the 20th century and her achievements will never be forgotten."

"She was a wonderful fighter for socialism from her early days to the last. She gave her whole being to the Labour movement. Her last fight was for the pensioners and she helped to change that too."

"Her passion blazed and her courage held steady throughout her long life. [Her] dazzling charm and low cunning won and kept the admiration and affection of the Labour movement for nearly 60 years. She was fiery, funny, stylish and a socialist to her last breath."

"Barbara Castle was a woman of fire and conviction who was also elegant, attractive and consciously so. She had been shaped by the great depression, the war, and the determination of a post-war Labour government that the old class-ridden Britain must be transformed. She was an ideologue and a class warrior, but one committed to the poor and the unemployed, an icon of Old Labour. She was also considerate and brave."

"The best man in my Cabinet."

"Our proposal that the age of consent be reduced is based on the belief that neither the police nor the criminal courts should have the power to intervene in a consenting sexual activity between two young people. It is clearly the case that a number of young people are capable of consenting to sexual activity and already do so."

"Any suggestion that I supported or condoned the vile crimes of child abusers is completely untrue. When Jack Dromey, as NCCL chairman in 1976, vigorously opposed PIE at the NCCL AGM, he did so with the full support of the Executive Committee and myself as general secretary. As the NCCL archives demonstrate, I consistently distinguished between consenting relationships between homosexual men, on the one hand, and the abuse of children on the other. NCCL in the 1970s, along with many others, was naive and wrong to accept PIE's claim to be a 'campaigning and counselling organisation' that 'does not promote unlawful acts'. As General Secretary then, I take responsibility for the mistakes we made. I got it wrong on PIE and I apologise for having done so. I should have urged the Executive Committee to take stronger measures to protect NCCL's integrity from the activities of PIE members and sympathisers and I deeply regret not having done so. ..."

"We must finally see an end to cruel and inhumane conversion therapies, which have been allowed to spread fear and hatred in our society for far too long."

"There was one incident when I wore plain fishnets to parliament. I received so many overly sexual, misogynistic comments that I took the tights off and threw them in the bin and never wore fishnets again. I spoke to a more senior female MP. She told me to ignore it saying, ‘it’s all banter’. She told equivalent stories women MPs have been through. There were lots of stories of MPs looking up their skirt. The parliamentary environment needs to change."

"The good thing is now post-Me Too movement, we are not putting up with it. Some of the men have not moved forward. They still think it is acceptable to be sexist and misogynistic. When I was a whip, an MP was talking about me having a real whip in the tea room in parliament. It happened more than once. It became very uncomfortable and embarrassing for me. Parliament was designed for men only and there is still that prevailing attitude that this is a man’s place and the women are just window dressing and there is that entitlement to belittle women."

"I believe that Brent, South is a shining example of integration at its best. Brent, South deserves a chance to prosper, a chance to benefit from opportunities and a chance for my constituents to live independently."

"I am proud to represent the Labour party, which established the minimum wage, which some Opposition parties could not find time to support."

"I am proud to represent the Labour party, which has pledged to end the equal pay gap. My constituency has more women living in it than men—52 per cent.—and equal pay has a direct effect on economic stability and business prosperity, and a direct correlation with child poverty. If we are serious about tackling those issues, the gap must be closed, and soon. I am confident that I will be working hard with my Government to ensure that that will be achieved."

"This is modern, progressive politics reflecting our society."

"I am proud to be a GMB member and a former officer. I strive to ensure that my contributions continue to aid the historic constructive working relations between the Labour party and the trade union movement. The Warwick agreement, which was referred to in our manifesto, is another historic agreement which only the Labour party could achieve."

"I promised the youth that they would have a voice through me. We must encourage our youth, listen to them and help them to resolve youth issues. After all, they are our future. Guess what—not all youth are yobs, and not all yobs are youth. Furthermore, youths are victims of antisocial behaviour, more than any other group in our society. I will campaign and lobby extremely hard for my constituents in Brent, South to further their concerns and to put forward the case for social justice in Brent, South, the UK and worldwide."

"We know that you, the organised workers of the country, are our friends ... As for the rest, they do not matter a tinker's cuss."

"[I ask] the question of the role the police should play, if any, in civil society. Who are they protecting and from what?"

"The referendum is clear and has to be accepted and we can't have a re-run of the question that was put to the country earlier this year. But, and it's a big but, there has to be democratic grip of the process and, at the moment, what the prime minister's trying to do is to manoeuvre without any scrutiny in Parliament and that's why the terms on, which we're going to negotiate absolutely have to be put to a vote in the House."

"We accept and respect the outcome of the referendum."

"What I think is really important is that the government aims high. My worry is that the government has attached so much importance to immigration that it's not even going to try to get the best access to the single market. In other words, it's going to give up before it starts. My sense is that the government is saying 'because we want to take such a hard line on immigration we are going to give up on parts of the argument that would be better for the economy'."

"I wish the result had gone the other way. I campaigned passionately for that. But as democrats our party has to accept that result and it follows that the prime minister should not be blocked from starting the Article 50 negotiations."

"What's clear, from the CBI and others, is that there is no result that would be worse for the British economy than leaving [the EU] with no deal"

"The Labour Party has supported strong counter-terrorism legislation over the years and we have that commitment in our manifesto"

"We are absolutely clear we can not have a hard border we need to negotiate with our EU partners."

"Labour would seek a transitional deal that maintains the same basic terms that we currently enjoy with the EU. That means we would seek to remain in a customs union with the EU and within the single market during this period. It means we would abide by the common rules of both."

"Remaining in a form of customs union after a transition post-Brexit phase remained a possible end destination for the Labour party."

"[I want a partnership with the EU that] retains the benefits of the single market and the customs union"

"Obviously, there are lots of benefits from a customs union, none more so, in many respects, than in Northern Ireland."

"We all want to do bold new trade agreements but we would be better off doing that with the EU."

"Benefits of the single market and customs union... need to be hard-wired into the final agreement"

"There's a growing view, I think probably a majority view in Parliament now, that it's in our national interests and economic interests to stay in a customs union with the EU. We've got a huge manufacturing sector in the UK that needs to be protected, with many goods going over borders many, many times, and we need to protect that."

"It is right for Parliament to have the first say but if we need to break the impasse, our options must include campaigning for a public vote and nobody is ruling out Remain as an option."

"I remain as convinced as ever that the consequences of no deal would be so severe that it cannot be allowed to happen."

"During the talks, almost literally as we were sitting in the room talking, cabinet members and wannabe Tory leaders were torpedoing the talks with remarks about not being willing to accept the customs union. In terms of the team that we were negotiating with, I'm not blaming them. Circling around those that were in the room trying to negotiate were others who didn't want the negotiation to succeed because they had their eye on what was coming next."

"When you say you will leave without a deal - do or die - what sort of message does that send to the people of Northern Ireland?"

"I don’t think there are big issues on which I’ve changed my mind. The big issue we were grappling with then was how the Labour Party, or the left generally, bound together the wider movement and its strands of equality – feminist politics, green politics, LGBT – which I thought was incredibly exciting, incredibly important."

"Passover is also a fitting moment for me to acknowledge the pain and hurt that the Labour Party has caused Jewish people in recent years. Anti-Semitism has been a stain on our party. I have seen first-hand the unacceptable and unimaginable levels of grief and distress it has caused many in the Jewish community and beyond. It is why my very first act on becoming leader over the weekend was to apologise for the hurt that has been caused. I want to apologise again and reiterate my pledge to tear out this poison by its roots."

"The principle of what I want to achieve is clear: if you are anti-Semitic, you cannot and should not be in the Labour Party. No ifs, no buts."

"There are four elections on Thursday 6 May."

"I will change the things that need changing and that is the change that I will bring about."

"I've got to do Kinnock and Blair's job in one term."

"What a pathetic spectacle: the dying act of his [Boris Johnson's] political career is to parrot that nonsense. As for those who are left, they are only in office because no one else is prepared to debase themselves any longer—the charge of the lightweight brigade. Have some self-respect! For a week, he has had them defending his decision to promote [Chris Pincher] a sexual predator. Every day, the lines he has forced them to take have been untrue: first, that he was unaware of any allegation—untrue; then, that he was unaware of any “specific” allegation—untrue; then, that he was unaware of any “serious, specific” allegation; and now he wants them to go out and say that he simply forgot that his Whip was a sexual predator. Anyone with anything about them would be long gone from his Front Bench. In the middle of a crisis, does the country not deserve better than a Z-list cast of nodding dogs?"

"So let me be very clear: with Labour, Britain will not go back into the EU. We will not be joining the single market. We will not be joining a customs union."

"[Asked if he was concerned about the police dealing with anti-monarchist protesters during a period of national mourning six days after Queen Elizabeth II died.] The word I would use around that issue is respect. I think if people have spent a long time waiting to come forward to have that moment as the coffin goes past or whatever it may be, I think respect that, because people have made a huge effort to come and have that private moment to say thank you to Queen Elizabeth II. Respect that. Obviously we have to respect the fact that some people disagree. One of the great British traditions is the ability to protest and to disagree. But I think if it can be done in the spirit of respect. Respect the fact that hundreds of thousands of people do want to come forward and have that moment. Don’t ruin it for them. But also we do need to respect the fact that other people must be entitled to express their different views."

"Today I want to set out what's at stake for Britain, because while politics is always about choices, the choice now is as stark as it gets. We face a battle for the soul of our country, who we are, who we're for, and the Labour choices of Britian is that it's greener, fairer, and more dynamic."

"The lady's not for turning up."

"The only mandate she's ever had was from members opposite. It was a mandate built on fantasy economics, and it ended in disaster. The country's got nothing to show for it except the destruction of the economy and the implosion of the Tory Party. I've got the list here: 45p tax cut, gone. Corporation tax cut, gone. 20p tax cut, gone. Two-year energy freeze, gone. Tax-free shopping, gone. Economic credibility, gone! And her supposed best friend the former chancellor, he's gone as well. They're all gone! So why is she still here?"

"The only time he ran in a competitive election, he got trounced by the former prime minister, who herself got beaten by lettuce!"

"So that means fair rules, firm rules, a points-based system. What I would like to see is the numbers go down in some areas. I think we're recruiting too many people from overseas into, for example, the health service. But on the other hand, if we need high-skilled people in innovation in tech to set up factories etc, then I would encourage that."

"[Opposing a future Scottish independence referendum regardless of the Supreme Court in London potentially deciding to accept the Scottish Parliament has a legal right to hold one.] It's good the case has gone to court because I think it's better to have legal certainty, so we all know the basis on which we're operating [...] All the court is going to be able to rule is, if it does rule in favour, is that there could or can be, [that] it's legally permissible to have a referendum. That doesn't answer the political question, which is 'should there be a referendum'?"

"We took the decision to leave and we have left. So now what we need to do is rather than just sticking with the deal we've got which is not good enough, we need to make Brexit work."

"Antisemitism is an evil. It is a very specific type of racism, one that festers and spreads like an infection. Its conspiratorial nature attracts those who would have no truck with any other form of prejudice. Indeed, it can be those who call themselves "anti-racist" who are most blind to it. The reason the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) opened their investigation into the Labour Party was because it had become an incubator for this poison. We needed to change. That's why my first act as leader was to commit to tearing antisemitism out by the roots, without fear or favour."

"The Labour Party I lead today is unrecognisable from 2019. There are those who don't like that change, who still refuse to see the reality of what had gone on under the previous leadership. To them I say in all candour: we are never going back. If you don’t like it, nobody is forcing you to stay."

"The Labour Party I lead is patriotic. It is a party of public service, not protest. It is a party of equality, justice and fairness; one that proudly puts the needs of working people above any fringe interest. It is a party that doesn't just talk about change – it delivers it."

"The lettuces are out, but the turnips are in."

"They blew up for me an incredibly detailed photograph of a lung with very dark marks on it which were all the air pollution from our roads which were causing cancer in that and many other patients. It's worth us all just asking ourselves...if we are not prepared to do these sort of schemes what are we going to do. If increasing numbers of people, and young people as well, are getting cancer...I have to say..intake of breath when I saw the phot[o]graph, they said there are the dark areas that are lung cancer because of it (air pollution). We can’t just sit that out."

"[On the Just Stop Oil protests] I can't wait for them to stop their antics, frankly. They're interrupting iconic sporting events that are part of our history, tradition and massively looked forward to across the nation. I absolutely condemn the way they go about their tactics. And I have to say it's riddled with an arrogance that only they have the sort of right to force their argument on other people in this way."

"In fact, I hate tree huggers."

"As for Uxbridge [and South Ruislip], we always knew that was going to be tough [...] We didn't win Uxbridge in 1997, and obviously we knew that ULEZ [(Ultra Low Emission Zone)] was an issue. That's why we lost in Uxbridge. We all need to reflect on that, including the mayor [of London], but there's no taking away from the historic event that has happened here in Selby [and Ainsty]."

"Every time there's been the threat of a rebellion he's backed down. The one thing you get if you win the leadership of your party is the right to say 'I've won the leadership and I'm going to do this, and we're going to do it and this is what I'm saying we're going to do with the party, and we're going to do it’. He doesn't have the ability to do that because he hasn't got a mandate."

"Further information came to light yesterday calling for decisive action, so I took decisive action. It is a huge thing to withdraw support for a Labour candidate during the course of a by-election. It's a tough decision, a necessary decision, but when I say the Labour Party has changed under my leadership I mean it."

"Tonight the Prime Minister has finally announced the next General Election. A moment the country needs – and has been waiting for. And where, by the force of our democracy power returns to you. A chance to change for the better. Your future. Your community. Your country. It will feel like a long campaign – I’m sure of that. But no matter what else is said and done. That opportunity for change is what this election is about. Over the course of the last four years – we have changed the Labour Party. Returned it once more to the service of working people. All we ask now – humbly – is to do exactly the same for our country. And return Britain to the service of working people. To that purpose. We offer three reasons why you should change Britain with Labour. One – because we will stop the chaos. Look around our country. The sewage in our rivers. People waiting on trolleys in A&E. Crime virtually unpunished. Mortgages and food prices – through the roof. It’s all – every bit of it – a direct result of the Tory chaos in Westminster. Time and again, they pursue their own interests. Rather than tackling the issues that affect your family. And if they get another five years, they will feel entitled to carry on exactly as they are. Nothing will change. A vote for Labour is a vote for stability – economic and political. A politics that treads more lightly on all our lives. A vote to stop the chaos. Two – because it’s time for change. Our offer is to reset both our economy and our politics. So that they once again serve the interests of working people. We totally reject the Tory view that economic strength is somehow gifted from those at the top. Over the past fourteen years – through all the crises we have had to face – sticking with this idea has left our country exposed, insecure and unable to unlock the potential of every community. But a vote for Labour is a vote to turn the page on all that. A vote for change. And finally, three – because we have a long-term plan to rebuild Britain. A plan that is ready to go. Fully-costed and fully funded. We can deliver economic stability. Cut the NHS waiting times. Secure our borders with a New Border Security Command. Harness Great British Energy to cut your bills for good. Tackle anti-social behaviour. And get the teachers we need in your children’s classroom. But most of importantly of all, we do all this with a new spirit of service. Country first, party second. A rejection of the gesture politics you will see in this campaign, I have no doubt from the Tories and from the SNP. I am well aware of the cynicism people hold towards politicians at the moment. But I came into politics late, having served our country as leader of the Crown Prosecution Service. And I helped the Police Service in Northern Ireland to gain the consent of all communities. Service of our country is the reason – and the only reason – why I am standing here now – asking for your vote. And I believe with patience, determination and that commitment to service there is so much pride and potential we can unlock across our country. So – here it is – the future of the country – in your hands. On 4th July you have the choice. And together, we can stop the chaos. We can turn the page. We can start to rebuild Britain. And change our country. Thank you."

"This is a serious plan, carefully thought through. It is not about rabbits out of the hat, it's not about pantomime, we've had enough of that. I'm running as a candidate to be prime minister, not a candidate to run the circus."

"If you want politics as pantomime, I hear Clacton is nice this time of year."

"We did it. You campaigned for it, you fought for it, you voted for it and now it has arrived. Change begins now. And it feels good, I have to be honest. Four-and-a-half years of work changing the party. This is what it is for – a changed Labour Party ready to serve our country, ready to restore Britain to the service of working people. And across our country, people will be waking up to the news – relieved that a weight has been lifted, a burden finally removed from the shoulders of this great nation. And now we can look forward again, walk into the morning, the sunlight of hope, pale at first, but getting stronger through the day, shining once again on a country with the opportunity after 14 years to get its future back. And I want to thank each and every one of you here for campaigning so hard for change, and not just in this campaign either – also for these four-and-a-half years changing our party. The Labour movement is always – everything’s achieved past and future – down to the efforts of its people. So thank you truly – you have changed our country. But a mandate like this comes with great responsibility. Our task is nothing less than renewing ideas that hold this country together – national renewal. Whoever you are, wherever you started in life, if you work hard, if you play by the rules, this country should give you a fair chance to get on. It should always respect your contribution and we have to restore that. And alongside that, we have to return politics to public service, show that politics can be a force for good. Make no mistake, that is the great test of politics in this era – the fight for trust is the battle that defines our age. It is why we campaigned so hard on demonstrating we are fit for public service. Service is the pre-condition for hope, respect the bond that can unite a country. Together, the values of this changed Labour Party are the guiding principle for a new government – country first, party second. That is the responsibility of this mandate. You know, 14 years ago, we were told that we're all in it together. I say to the British people today, imagine what we can do if that were actually true. So by all means, enjoy this moment. Nobody can say you haven’t waited patiently. Enjoy the feeling of waking up on a morning like this with the emotion that you do see the country through the same eyes. Hold onto it, because it is what unity is made from, but use it to show to the rest of the country, as we must, that this party has changed, that we will serve them faithfully, govern for every single person in this country. But also don’t forget how we got here. This morning, we can see that the British people have voted to turn the page on 14 years but don’t pretend that there was anything inevitable about that – there’s nothing pre-ordained in politics. Election victories don’t fall from the sky. They’re hard won and hard fought for, and this one could only be won by a changed Labour Party. We have the chance to repair our public services because we’ve changed the party. We have the chance to make work pay because we’ve changed the party. We have the chance to deliver for working people, young people, vulnerable people, the poorest in our society because we’ve changed the party. 'Country first, party second' isn’t a slogan – it's the guiding principle (of) everything we have done and must keep on doing – on the economy, on national security, on protecting our borders. The British people have to look us in the eye and see that we can serve their interest and that work doesn’t stop now – it never stops. The changes we've made are permanent, irreversible and we must keep going. We ran as a changed Labour Party and we will govern as a changed Labour Party. I don't promise you it will be easy. Changing a country's not like flicking a switch, it's hard work, patient work, determined work, and we will have to get moving immediately. But even when the going gets tough, and it will, remember, tonight and always, what this is all about. Now I may have mentioned my parents a few times in this campaign – once or twice – but the sense of security we had, the comfort they took from believing that Britain would always be better for their children, the hope, not high-minded, not idealistic, but a hope that working-class families like mine could build their lives around. It is hope that may not burn brightly in Britain at the moment, but we have earned the mandate to relight the fire. That is the purpose of this party and of this Government. We said we would end the chaos and we will. We said we would turn the page and we have. Today we start the next chapter, begin the work of change, the mission of national renewal and start to rebuild our country. Thank you."

"I call again for...the return of the sausages."

"I am clear that Israel has the right to defend itself against Iranian aggression. I'm equally clear that we need to avoid further regional escalation and urge all sides to show restraint. Iran should not respond"

"I have just returned from Buckingham Palace, where I accepted an invitation from His Majesty the King to form the next government of this great nation. I want to thank the outgoing Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak. His achievement as the first British Asian Prime Minister of our country — the extra effort that that will have required — should not be underestimated by anyone. We pay tribute to that today, and we also recognise the dedication and hard work he brought to his leadership. But now our country has voted decisively for change, for national renewal and a return of politics to public service."

"When the gap between the sacrifices made by people and the service they receive from politicians grows this big, it leads to a weariness in the heart of a nation, a draining away of the hope, the spirit, the belief in a better future — that we need to move forward together. Now this wound, this lack of trust, can only be healed by actions, not words. I know that, but we can make a start today with the simple acknowledgement that public service is a privilege and that your government should treat every single person in this country with respect. If you voted Labour yesterday, we will carry the responsibility of your trust as we rebuild our country. But whether you voted Labour or not — in fact, especially if you did not — I say to you directly, my government will serve you. Politics can be a force for good. We will show that. We’ve changed the Labour Party, returned it to service — and that is how we will govern, country first party second."

"Yet, if I am honest, service is merely a precondition of hope, and it is surely clear to everyone that our country needs a bigger reset, a rediscovery of who we are. Because no matter how fierce the storms of history, one of the great strengths of this nation has always been our ability to navigate away to calmer waters. And yet this depends upon politicians, particularly those who stand for stability and moderation — as I do — recognising when we must change course. For too long now, we turned a blind eye as millions slid into greater insecurity. Nurses, builders, drivers, carers, people doing the right thing, working harder every day, recognised at moments like this before, yet, as soon as the cameras stop rolling, their lives are ignored. I want to say very clearly to those people — not this time."

"Changing a country is not like flicking a switch. The world is now a more volatile place. This will take a while. But have no doubt that the work of change begins immediately. Have no doubt that we will rebuild Britain with wealth created in every community."

"Brick by brick, we will rebuild the infrastructure of opportunity, the world class schools and colleges, the affordable homes that I know are the ingredients of hope for working people, the security that working class families like mine can build their lives around. Because if I asked you now whether you believe that Britain will be better for your children, I know too many of you would say no, and so my government will fight every day until you believe again. From now on, you have a government unburdened by doctrine guided only by the determination to serve your interest, to defy, quietly, those who have written our country off."

"You have given us a clear mandate, and we will use it to deliver change. To restore service and respect to politics, end the era of noisy performance, tread more lightly on your lives and unite our country. Four nations standing together again, facing down as we have so often in our past, the challenges of an insecure world committed to a calm and patient rebuilding. So with respect and humility, I invite you all to join this government of service in the mission of national renewal. Our work is urgent, and we begin it today."

"He’s a true one-off, a pioneer in business, in politics. Many people love him. Others love to hate him. But to us, he's just... Peter."

"I actually welcome the judgment because I think it gives real clarity. It allows those that have got to draw up guidance to be really clear about what that guidance should say. So I think it's important that we see the judgment for what it is. It's a welcome step forward. It's real clarity in an area where we did need clarity, I'm pleased it's come about. We need to move and make sure that we now ensure that all guidance is in the right place according to that judgment."

"Let me start by saying that the victims of Epstein are at the forefront of our minds. He was a despicable criminal who committed the most heinous crimes and destroyed the lives of so many women and girls. The ambassador has repeatedly expressed his deep regret for his association with Epstein, and he is right to do so. I have confidence in him, and he is playing an important role in the UK–US relationship."

"Let me start where I must: with the victims of Epstein. All our thoughts are with them. Our thoughts are also with all those who lost jobs, savings and livelihoods in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash. To learn that there was a Cabinet Minister leaking sensitive information at the height of the response to the 2008 crash is beyond infuriating, and I am as angry as the public and any Member of this House. Mandelson betrayed our country, our Parliament and my party. He lied repeatedly to my team when asked about his relationship with Epstein, before and during his tenure as ambassador. I regret appointing him. If I knew then what I know now, he would never have been anywhere near Government. That is why yesterday the Cabinet Secretary, with my support, took the decision to refer material to the police, and there is now a criminal investigation. I have instructed my team to draft legislation to strip Mandelson of his title, and wider legislation to remove disgraced peers. This morning I have agreed with His Majesty the King that Mandelson should be removed from the list of Privy Counsellors on the grounds that he has brought the reputation of the Privy Council into disrepute."

"I am sorry. Sorry for what was done to you, sorry that so many people with power failed you, sorry for having believed Mandelson’s lies and appointing him."

"We don't support trying to deliver regime change from the air"

"Two-tier Keir"

"[H]e got into Leeds University where he was told by academics that if only the world was ruled by human rights, it would be just and peaceful and there'd be no war. So he really believes in all that. That was his formation. And then he becomes prime minister and has this terrible awareness that the world is not ruled by words and paper. There’s things like armies and war in Europe and Donald Trump got elected. This is all pretty shocking [to him]."

"Has Britain elected a bumbling nobody to the highest office in the land? Or does his dullness conceal a driving purpose?"

"The worst mistake of political conservatives in the western world has been to refuse to understand and examine the length, breadth, depth, and height of the post-1968 left in Europe and North America. If you do not know what you are fighting, you will never find out why you are fighting, or how you should fight it. By becoming dull, and by speaking in code, the revolution has overwhelmed those who would have fought it with all their might if it had appeared in the guise of the Bolsheviks or the Jacobins."

"If you want a culture wars warrior, Starmer is not your man. If you want a radical socialist who seeks to overturn capitalism, Starmer is not your man. If you want an entertainer, a comedian, a tweeter, Starmer is not your man. If you want to rerun previous leaders, Wilson or Blair, or someone who runs an agile team firing on all cylinders, sorry, Starmer is not your man. But if you want a leader who might start to heal the sinews of an enfeebled state and anaemic economy, and who will work in the interests of the relatively powerless, then he may very well be who we need."

"On 5 July, either Keir Starmer or I will be Prime Minister. He has shown time and time again that he will take the easy way out and do anything to get power. If he was happy to abandon all the promises he made to become Labour leader once he got the job, how can you know that he won't do exactly the same thing if he were to become Prime Minister? If you don't have the conviction to stick to anything you say, if you don't have the courage to tell people what you want to do, and if you don't have a plan, how can you possibly be trusted to lead our country, especially at this most uncertain of times?"

"Whilst he has been my political opponent, Sir Keir Starmer will shortly become our Prime Minister. In this job, his successes will be all our successes, and I wish him and his family well. Whatever our disagreements in this campaign, he is a decent, public-spirited man, who I respect. He and his family deserve the very best of our understanding, as they make the huge transition to their new lives behind this door, and as he grapples with this most demanding of jobs in an increasingly unstable world."

"As Labour MPs wargame how to depose Sir Keir Starmer, some have a strategy from the Margaret Thatcher years in mind. In 1990, the former Conservative Prime Minister was told her time was up by a delegation of “men in grey suits” from her party. Now, Labour MPs are discussing sending a deputation of women to tell Starmer to resign."

"This is not Winston Churchill that we're dealing with."

"Yesterday’s motion gave us the opportunity to send the opposite message to the world … that, while Saudi Arabia will remain a valued strategic, security and economic ally in the years to come, our support for their forces in Yemen must be suspended until the alleged violations of international humanitarian law in that conflict have been fully and independently investigated. And until the children of Yemen have received the humanitarian aid that they so desperately need."

"The communities who stand to lose out most from Brexit must be looked after first,"

"We cannot turn the clock back and run the Brexit vote again. We have been given our instructions by the British people and we must act on them."

"We need to leave the European Union but it is good for our economy - they're our biggest market - that we stay as close as we can"

"We have to negotiate a new agreement. That, we think, is likely to be a customs union that will look pretty much like the current customs union."

"[A new agreement is needed] that we think is likely to be a customs union that will look pretty much like the current customs union."

"I think anybody who has looked into this issue has seen that it is quite clear that there is no other place that we can go than to remain in a customs union with the European Union - nothing else makes sense."

"Britain has disappeared into the Brexit black hole"

"It is quite clear that the government of Venezuela is, on the face of it, responsible for human rights abuses and it does not have a plan to get themselves out of the situation they are currently in."

"[Under a Labour government, there would be] no indulgence of human rights abuses because they are committed by less powerful countries, or by countries who call themselves 'socialist' but who, by their actions, betray every socialist ideal."

"We've got to a stage where we feel that any deal is so controversial and may well be so far from what people voted for when they voted to leave, that we think that it is probably appropriate… that we say to the people, 'Is this what you wanted?' We just want to check. Because if it isn't, then let's stay."

"Frankly, it’s a shame and a disgrace that the Equality and Human Rights Commission have been brought in to look at the Labour party, but they have. And I think we should now welcome it, open our doors up and say to them, right we have been trying to improve our processes, clearly it’s still not working, can you help us?"

"Are we going to celebrate a Labour version of Brexit? No. We must have the Labour Party this week saying no to Brexit and we must lead the campaign to remain."

"[Labour must] lead the campaign to remain"

"Let's be clear: this was always going to be the Brexit election, the first genuine single-issue election in 119 years. Back then, in 1900, the Tories were cynically capitalising on their early success in the Boer war to try to win another thumping majority over the Liberals. It was also Labour's very first election, and we went into it with noble domestic ambitions far distant from the South African veldt."

"And if you're a Labour voter seized with gloom – or a Tory gleaming with complacency – just remember that in 1906, six years after the last single-issue election, the Liberal opposition won a majority of 124, with the Tories losing 246 seats. Why? Because the Tories were totally divided over trade policy and because their "single issue" of the Boer war had turned into a disaster. Will history repeat itself now as the Tories grapple with the reality of "getting Brexit done"? Well, history has a tendency to do that."

"The Labour Party hate the concept of Englishness. They have done for a very long time. New Labour can't even stand the concept of patriotism. They think the flag somehow is unpleasant, backward-looking and nasty. People like Emily Thornberry would rather we had that blue flag with 12 stars on it that comes to us from Brussels."

"What is sick is Tory politicians returning from sunny climes in Bermuda shorts seeking then to take the credit for the restoration of peace to our streets when they had bugger all to do with it."

"I don't think Donald Trump should be allowed within 1,000 miles of our shores....Donald Trump is free to be a fool but he is not free to be a dangerous fool in Britain."

"It would be catastrophic were we to have to fall back onto WTO [ World Trade Organisation ] rules with tariff barriers, which would see jobs lost on a grand scale on this country ... the idea is that you have such barriers is deeply damaging."

"With pensioner poverty on the rise and the Tories already having broken their pledge to protect pensioner benefits and free TV licences for over-75s, it is more important than ever that people are given the right information about their pension. The government must ensure that all pension data is accurate and secure."

"It's surprising that there would appear to be those in this House who know more about making cars than those who make cars, more about building planes than those who build planes, more about engineering than the engineers and that the simple truth is the overwhelming and unmistakable voice of the world of work, industry and all the employers organisations and the trade unions is that a No Deal Brexit would have catastrophic consequences with tens of thousands of workers losing their jobs, making our country a poorer country in every sense of the word for years to come."

"The fascist method essentially implies the attempt to create a popular mass movement for the protection of monopoly capitalism. Its adoption means that the directing capitalist groups consider that the regular State forces at their disposal are inadequate or unsuitable for repressing the workers. Thus, an attempt is made to create, by the employment of skilled demagogues, the expenditure of large sums of money, and the reckless dissemination of propaganda designed to play on every prejudice, a mass party composed of a petty bourgeois nucleus, combined with such backward workers and peasants as can be successfully deceived. This party is then used for the destruction by terror of working-class organizations of struggle, the workers' defence organizations, clubs, trade unions, newspapers and party machines."

"It is almost always impossible to get the fascist party together without using some anti-capitalist slogans, in the early stages at any rate, of the necessary propaganda. And this type of propaganda may have so coloured the minds of the rank and file of the Fascist party as to make them difficult adequately to control."

"The retention of power by the capitalist class by means of the success of a fascist party necessarily implies the scrapping of all democratic institutions. It involves revelation, without any attempt at a democratic disguise, of capitalist dictatorship. And a wise capitalist class will certainly not dispense with the serviceable mask of democracy, which has stood it in good stead, until no other course is open to it."

"The institutions of democracy will be gradually and, if possible, imperceptibly withdrawn. The Press will become a better and better directed and drilled servant of the capitalist class. All other methods of disseminating information, notably the cinema and the wireless, will be more and more consciously monopolized. Power may be gradually withdrawn from a democratically elected Chamber (cf . Reform of the House of Lords in Britain) or alternatively the franchise may be gradually curtailed (cf. the proposals of the British Conservative party for withholding the franchise from persons in receipt of poor relief). At the same time, the habitual regime of police violence will be increased (cf. the present heavy sentences on working-class militants in Britain passed almost openly, not for any specific offence but because the accused were working-class militants, as notably in the case of Arthur Homer; the increasing use of terror in all American wage disputes ; the police regime in France, etc., etc.). This method applies the principle of " the inevitability of gradualness " to the introduction of an open capitalist dictatorship."

"Strachey [was] the most persuasive Marxist who has ever influenced this country's thinking."

"There is a nice story which is rather revealing about the power of Keynes's arguments and their political content. It is about John Strachey, a Marxist. He was a cousin of Lytton Strachey ― they both had the same skill in writing. John Strachey wrote a book called The Coming Struggle for Power. In the 1930s this book was so influential in Cambridge, England, that, when I got there, every person had it on his bookshelf, prominently displayed. It was an exciting book, intellectually exciting to read. It was the Bible of Cambridge students. In my last year at Cambridge Strachey was invited by the Marshall Society, which was the general undergraduate society for economics student, to give a talk. In this talk he argued that Marx showed us the way to make the system work, an argument that met a very, very strong favorable response ― as his earlier writing had done. I had been asked in advance to move a vote of thanks at the end of the lecture; say a few words, if I could, about his lecture, but essentially to move a vote of thanks. I did, except I took the occasion to say that there would appear ― this was in November 1935 ― within a few months a book that would set out a superior method of analysis. It had been written by John Maynard Keynes. I didn't know whether Strachey would know the name. He motioned to me and said, "I'd like to thank you for your vote of thanks," and so on; "I'd like to find out more about the book by Keynes." And I told him, and he took down the name. At the time, I did not realize the connection between Keynes and Lytton Strachey and Lytton and John Strachey. A couple of years later I received a new book by John Strachey in the mail from the Left Book Club. I was astounded; it was absolutely Keynes. I mean, he was so much influenced by Keynes ― he had been so strongly influenced by Keynes that he became an instant, overnight, follower. Strachey really understood Keynes; it's a brilliant exposition and application to the British situation. It's rather more interesting than Keynes and deserves to be reprinted. It shows how Keynes had refuted Communism and how John Strachey, an extreme Marxist whose life up to then had been devoted to Marx and the Marxian course, had been completely changed by Keynes. Given that history, the later attacks on U.S. Keynesians, accusing them of being Communists, were incomprehensible to me."

"It seems there is no good in the world that they cannot somehow attribute to the EU and no imagined disaster they cannot predict if we vote leave,"

"[Brexit is] our opportunity to take back control of a whole area of democratic decisions"

"If we insist on leaving the EU then there is realistically only one way to honour our obligations under the Good Friday Agreement and that is to remain members of both the customs union and the single market"

"[Leaving the EU is] the biggest economic crisis that our country will have faced for many, many generations."

"[Brexit is] the first instance that I can think of in living memory of a government pursuing a policy that they know is going to make our economy smaller and reduce people's livelihoods and life chances and I cannot understand why we in Labour would support that."

"It's about time we started honouring those people involved in the armed struggle. It was the bombs and bullets and sacrifice made by the likes of Bobby Sands that brought Britain to the negotiating table. The peace we have now is due to the action of the IRA."

"[he would be glad to] go back to the 1980s and assassinate Thatcher."

"I was up in Liverpool a fortnight ago where Alec McFadden, one of our organisers, launched the Sack Esther McVey Day, on her birthday. There was a whole group in the audience that completely kicked off quite critical of the whole concept, because they were arguing "Why are we sacking her? Why aren’t we lynching the bastard?""

"I would swim through vomit to vote against this bill. And listening to some of the nauseating speeches in support of it, I might have to."

"Inevitably in this century we will have open borders. We are seeing it in Europe already. The movement of peoples across the globe will mean that borders are almost going to become irrelevant by the end of this century so we should be preparing for that and explaining why people move."

"It's time to turn this debate around, drive out politics of despair and offer a vision for Britain in Europe."

"I think people out there in the real world, our constituents, just want us to get on with the job of getting the best deal possible for them"

"We have to respect the decision that was made in the referendum ... otherwise, to be frank, we undermine all confidence in our democratic process."

"When Britain leaves the European Union, free movement of labour and people will then come to an end"

"We should not pretend the referendum result can be undone."

"This means we must not try to re-fight the referendum or push for a second vote and if Article 50 needs to be triggered in Parliament Labour will not seek to block or delay it."

"We will be cut off from our biggest trading partner. We will be cut off from the skills and contribution that EU nationals have made to our economy and society."

"Our objective is tariff-free access to the market"

"That has been our objective since immediately after the referendum. The structures - whether we are in or out - are a secondary matter. We are not ruling anything out but what we are saying is that we are the fifth largest economy in the world and we have a special status in both our relationship with the EU and the rest of the globe and we feel we can get a deal that achieves tariff-free access."

"We voted for the implementation of Article 50 because we respect the referendum result. But we cannot have this situation where government becomes unaccountable on the implementation of one of the most important decisions for a generation."

"There are enough sensible people in the House of Commons to say 'this cannot happen, we cannot damage our country in this way'."

"If the government says 'well a customs union for a couple of years or maybe customs union until we decide there won't be one,' well actually, that doesn't give the stability for investment for anyone"

"My fear is that if we did have another referendum, we might get the same or similar result and the country will still be divided. Somehow we have got to try and bring the country back together again."

"Therefore now in the national interest we have got to come together and secure a compromise. If we can't do that, well yes, we have to go back to the people."

"The values of Catholicism are the inherent values of the Labour Party and the inherent values of socialism..."

"My view is that you'd put the deal to the people, but you'd have to also have the option of the status quo. Deep in my heart, I'm still a Remainer, but I've got to try and bring together effectively what is a British compromise."

"I think he's reckless and I think he's unstable and I will move heaven and Earth to stop a no-deal Brexit."

"If Jeremy got hit by the No 57 bus, or whatever it is, there's the next generation coming through. And the reality is the next leader should be a woman. It's high time to have a woman."

"We can't say to people 'Labour wants you to share in the running of your workplace, your community and your environment, but we don't trust you to have the final say over Brexit.'"

"I'd like them to vote Remain, but that's part of the debate we've got to have"

"John McDonnell, the nearest to a hero in both books. McDonnell worked tirelessly and pragmatically. He wanted to win, knowing that unity and a semblance of coherence were fundamental preconditions for victory. He kept up a dialogue with the so-called moderates and spoke out publicly on both anti-Semitism and the Salisbury poisonings, to the point where he and Corbyn did not talk for several months."

"The EU invests £11bn a year on manufacturing innovation programmes of which 15% are invested here in the UK."

"[Labour is] clear that Britain is better off in Europe"

"And you know, woe betide politicians that don't listen to what voters tell them. You know, I think a future Europe will have to look at things like the free movement of labour rules."

"I feel great. I feel absolutely fantastic. Chilled out, I feel like my IQ has gone up. I feel younger. It's a great feeling."

"We've got to eradicate anti-Semitism, anti-Jewish racism in all its forms [and] for us to address that now, I think he needs to take a personal lead on examining those cases and if necessary, recommend it to our NEC (National Executive Committee) what needs to be done."

"Pro-European is who we are and who we have always been. Our members are Remain. Our values are Remain. Our hearts are Remain."

"The only way to break the Brexit deadlock once and for all is a public vote in a referendum,"

"Politicians have a responsibility to give effect to the result of the last referendum"

"The bill has wide cross-party support and is backed by members who have very different views on how the matter of Brexit should be concluded. What unites us is a conviction that there is no mandate for no deal and the consequences for the economy and the country would be highly damaging."

"This guarantee only covers about half of the regional funding due to Wales and does not provide the long-term certainty needed and which was promised ahead of the referendum."

"Once the mass of the people had the vote, Socialists were convinced that Conservatism and all that it stood for would be swept away. Their victory seemed certain, for Conservatism which was based on privilege and wealth was inevitably a minority creed, whereas Socialism, with its appeal to social justice and economic self-interest, should recruit the big battalions of the poor and underprivileged, whom the vote would make the masters of political democracy. ... Yet it is clear that events have falsified these predictions. ... The question which must now be asked is why the fruits of universal suffrage have taken so long to ripen. How is it that so large a proportion of the electorate, many of whom are neither wealthy or privileged, have been recruited for a cause which is not their own?"

"Britain's relationship with the English-speaking Commonwealth was closer than that with the Continent. That is how the British people feel."

"What the advocates of membership are saying, insistently and insidiously, is that we are finished as a country; that the long and famous story of the British nation and people has ended; that we are now so weak and powerless that we must accept terms and conditions, penalties and limitations, almost as though we had suffered defeat in war; that though we have the right on June 5, we have no option but to remain in the Common Market age."

"We don't have to have these passports, do we? Surely we can keep our British ones if we want. ... My children and grandchildren forced to abandon the old British passport!"

"Cities serve and sustain the whole region around them in cultural, social and economic terms. If cities fail, so to a large extent does our society. That is the urgency of tackling the problem, and why it has to be of concern to everyone in this land."

"What is more worrying is the unbalanced nature of the migration, with a disproportionately high number of skilled workers and young people moving out, leaving the inner areas with a disproportionate share of unskilled and semi-skilled workers, of unemployment, of one-parent families, of concentration of immigrant communities and overcrowded and inadequate housing."

"Nowhere had the decay of cities in Britain paralleled what had happened to some cities in North America, but the experience of New York should provide us with a salutary reminder of just how rapidly a city could slide into decline if powerful action is not taken."

"The opportunity to attract industry back to the inner areas now exists in a new way in which it did not a decade or so ago. In all the major urban areas there are large tracts of derelict land and buildings lying idle and often demoralizing those who live near by."

"Of course, to those avowed Trotskyists and infiltrators, the turning over of stones, the exposure to the light of day, will be as unwelcome as sunlight to Dracula—and predictably, we shall hear plaintive cries of witchhunts and McCarthyism."

"Peter was one of my very oldest political friends and a man of outstanding commitment and ability. He was someone who enriched public life."

"He made a huge contribution towards modernising the economy of the country and tackling urban deprivation. Peter was a man of immense integrity with strong convictions and latterly played an important role in raising standards in public life. He was a great parliamentarian, a great patriot and a true servant of his constituents."

"He was a very loyal cabinet colleague with strong principles and convictions. I deeply regret his passing."

"Scots are not so worried about sovereignty, having lived under Westminster bossism for so long. Shore once chided Cook and Smith as "Nordics", and therefore unable to understand the English."

"Between Harold Wilson and Tony Blair, Peter Shore was the only possible Labour Party leader of whom a Conservative leader had cause to walk in fear. His party, alas for them and for him, never appreciated that fact."

"Shore remained, to the end of his life, the most ferocious of patriots, thus testifying to an underlying nationalism in Labour politics. The Conservative Party likes to lay claim to the title of the patriotic party. When my wife first met Shore, and found him an embedded nationalist, she asked me: "Why isn't he one of us?" I explained – I hope successfully – how deeply ran the nationalist belief in the old Labour Party. From 1966 Shore came to exemplify it so effectively that he was the only possible Labour leader whom I, as a Tory, feared."

"I talked to Peter Shore. He was stressing the need to help the unemployed in the constructions industry. When I mentioned the Channel Tunnel as a way of doing this with private finance and with European money, Shore went slightly mad. He rose to his feet, waving his arms, saying this would be the worst thing that could ever happen to Britain. How old was I? Did I not remember 1940? We would be invaded by Germans coming through the tunnel. We must not give up our island status, etc., etc. It was very worrying. He is quite mad on this European issue – in fact more unbalanced and dogmatic than Tony Benn is on any issue. He must be kept away from top power."

"Peter Shore to dinner... I found him very anti-Benn, whom he thinks rather mad, skirting round the mountain of Healey, very pro-Foot. His views on world politics is that of an old-fashioned Atlanticist of the 1950s, very pro the Americans, on nearly all their attitudes, wise and unwise, which they have taken up over both Iran and Afghanistan. He is bitterly anti-Europe, particularly the French, where one has a bit of sympathy with him, but he goes much too far and regards them as not so much a nation as a conspiracy against the public weal. But the whole impression was one of somebody who is agreeable, intelligent, but miles off being a great man, and not very inspiriting either."

"At the [1983] election, Labour got stuck, thanks to P. Shore, as the party which favoured borrowing – another thing the British don't like."

"Silkin thinks Shore owes him a favour – for he stood down for Shore after they tied in the Shadow Cabinet elections in 1971 or 1972. They are, in a way, friends those two. Shore the more intelligent politician – but a man who always comes late into an issue. Very important political trait. In fact a real nationalist, with attitudes very similar to Enoch Powell, including on race (says very little about South Africa, you will notice). On foreign affairs, only interested in Europe, it seems."

"Courteous, courageous, perceptive and far-seeing, Peter Shore has served the Labour Party as an official and in Parliament, and the British public, for more than 40 years. Who can deny that his cool, logical conclusion that the UK's accession to the European Union has destroyed the basis of the British constitution and thereby our freedoms and contribution to representative democracy worldwide?"

"Within the party he is seen as a man with solid left-wing beliefs but for whom the successful application of policies is an essential part of their formulation. He is a principled and practical man, an unexcitable, almost ponderous person whose political impetus depends upon finding the most direct way of achieving socialist aims... It is just such rhetoric, delivered in sub-Churchillian tones, his hair flopping over his still youthful face, that his supporters consider to be an asset. For Mr Shore is a socialist who is not afraid to boast that he is British... His strengths are his youth—he is 56—his intelligence, his grasp of economics and his practical idealism which can appear inspirational when in full flight."

"I'll tell you who I think has developed remarkably: Peter Shore. He's really become very impressive."

"The Other Club – Pichon-Lalande 1970 excellent. Sat next to Peter Shore. He is a nice man. He says it's the first time in twenty-five years that he has been out of touch with the top leaders of the Labour Party. He said he had a lot of Bengalis in his constituency. Hugh Gaitskell had been blind to the perils of unlimited immigration."

"We need to secure resources for large-scale economic transformational change. That can be achieved by a government committed to subordinating markets in money, goods and services to regulatory democracy – in other words, to the interests of the democratic societies and the ecosystems in which they operate. 'Free-market' neoliberal economic policies that detach markets from society's oversight achieve the reverse. They are designed to subject markets to private, not public, democratic authority."

"Clive Lewis is unusual for a Labour MP – not least among Labour’s left flank – for being a former serviceman. He joined the Territorial Army in 2006 and served in Afghanistan in 2009, where he remembers soldiers' boots melting because of the heat. There was a "bit of a macho camaraderie" and "Man up, cupcake" was an expression he heard a lot."

"While his sergeants and corporals would return to their base with soldiers who could understand what serving in a conflict zone was like, Lewis, as a reservist, was thrown back into ­civilian life. “It was like feeling crushed,” he says. Eventually, he was diagnosed with depression, but he found it difficult to talk about. “That mental health side is embarrassing. There’s a stigma. As a man, you fear it’s about your masculinity – you’re not strong enough, not tough enough.""

"The time has arrived for the working classes to seize political power and use it to overthrow the competitive system and establish in its place state cooperation."

"Liberalism would progress just as far as the great money bags of capitalism would allow it to progress, and so I took the plunge and joined the SDF ... because I felt that they stood in England for revolt against present conditions, and for a reorganised society which would be built up by the efforts of the workers themselves."

"The workers of all countries have no quarrel. They are ... exploited in times of peace and sent out to be massacred in times of war."

"The workers must be given tangible proof that Labour administration means something different from capitalist administration, and in a nutshell this means diverting wealth from wealthy ratepayers to the poor."

"A few centuries ago one King who stood up against the common people of that day lost his head—lost it really. (Laughter and cheers.) Later, one of his descendants was told to get out as quickly as he could. Since that day Kings and Queens had been what they ought to be. They never interfered with ordinary politics, and George V would be well advised to keep his finger out of the pie now."

"There is only one way to peace, and it is to be found in the words, "Throw down your arms.""

"I object altogether to the idea of teaching children that the British Empire is something which ought to be preserved in its present form, and that the British Empire is something which, through the mercy and help of God, has been brought into being."

"[F]or years I worshipped at the political shrine of Mr. Gladstone."

"'You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours' was the basis of policy where jobs and contracts were concerned ... the slum owner and agent could be depended upon to create the conditions which produce disease; the doctor would then get the job of attending the sick, the chemist would be needed to supply drugs, the parson to pray, and when, between them all, the victims died the undertaker was on hand to bury them."

"I want the Church to say in a clear language that it is against God's Law that in the midst of abundance there should be poverty. I want them to rally the people to a great crusade to compel Parliament to alter the system which dooms the people to these conditions."

"Up to the present time, all governments, including the government of which I was a member, dependent as they are for their existence on those who support Capitalism, have attempted to reconcile that which is impossible of reconciliation. …the workers who assist in productive work are denied the use of the goods they produce. Miners see their children shivering in the cold of winter while outside their home are thousands of tons of the coal they have helped to produce. I ask those who profess and call themselves Christians to face up to this dilemma in which Capitalist society and Capitalist governments have landed us. Priests, bishops, ministers, urge their congregations to pray for God's blessing on the labour of our brain and hands, and when in answer to these prayers, or otherwise [what a man he is for placating those who don't believe as he does], a bountiful return comes in the form of a bumper harvest and huge production in every sphere of industrial enterprise, those who control finance and our whole economic life, tell us that God or Nature has made a mistake, that food-stuffs must be burned, that cotton must be ploughed back into the soil, that further production must be restricted and millions of people suffer privation and want."

"I would close every recruiting station, disband the Army and disarm the Air Force. I would abolish the whole dreadful equipment of war and say to the world: “Do your worst”."

"I do not want, and my friends would not want me, to do anything to jar with any effort on the part of the Government for real peace, but we have no confidence at all in a proposal to secure peace by pacts based on enormous armaments. We have great faith in peace being brought about through the League of Nations and disarmament. We cannot believe that the piling up of armaments will bring peace, and we think that fundamentally peace between nations in the last resort must be based on a realisation of the interest of each nation in an economic sense and of the fact that they are all part of the human family."

"I believe that force never has and never will bring permanent peace and goodwill in the world ... God intends us to live peacefully and quietly with one another. If some people do not allow us to do so, I am ready to stand as the early Christians did, and say, this is our faith, this is where we stand, and, if necessary, this is where we will die."

"I believe that both men desire peace every bit as fervently as I do myself, but I believe also that owing to their outlook on life, an outlook based in the main on British imperial interests and all that those interests imply, their policy is incapable of its very nature of making effective contribution to the cause of world peace. Peace and imperialism cannot go hand in hand- and when I say that, it is the same as saying that peace and capitalism; cannot go hand in hand. The capitalist system, the system under which you and I are living, is a system based on exploitation. Exploitation of man by man, the enslavement of the many by the few, is as I have already said, evil and unchristian; but for the moment I do not want to discuss the ethical side of the question. I want rather to concentrate on the economic foundations of the system under which we live, to examine them, and after I have examined them, to ask you the question: 'Do you honestly think that such a system can make for peace?'"

"Here in Britain the Socialist movement is struggling to establish a Socialist state and is confronted with a form of centralized capitalism; which shows quite remarkable signs of vitality. This apparent vitality of British capitalism; has discouraged many Socialists, who point with derision at the present concentrated and over- dictatorial form of the trade unions, and ask us if we ever hope to create a Socialist state with such an implement as the contemporary Trade Union movement. But this certainly is no time for despair. British capitalism; is as fragile as any other capitalism;, and it is only showing signs of life now, firstly because it has more places in which it can distribute its surplus goods than has any other capitalism;, and secondly, because of the artificial stimulus the rearmament boom has given to the heavy industries. British capitalism; cannot possibly remain as it is, any more than Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy can continue as they are to-day. Nor can the British trade unions for long suppress their Left Wing."

"Hitler] appeared free of personal ambition ... wasn't ashamed of his humble start in life ... lived in the country rather than the town ... was a bachelor who liked children and old people ... and was obviously lonely. I wished that I could have gone to Berchtesgaden and stayed with him for a little while. I felt that Christianity in its purest sense might have had a chance with him."

"I think history will regard Hitler as one of the great men of our time."

"I hope that out of this terrible calamity there will arise a real spirit, a spirit that will compel people to give up reliance on force, and that perhaps this time humanity will learn the lesson and refuse in the future to put its trust in poison gas, in the massacre of little children and universal slaughter. Mr. Gladstone once said, from the other side of the House, that the cause he represented was going down, but he was sure the day would come when it would triumph. There cannot be a man or woman in this assembly to-day who takes part in the Prayers in this House, every day, and there cannot be any men or women who go to church and believe in their faith but must in their hearts believe that sooner or later, if mankind is to live in freedom and peace, there is only one way by which it can do that, and that is by a complete and entire change of mind and outlook, which enables us to see ourselves in other people and God in everybody."

"I hold fast to the truth that this world is big enough for all, that we are all brethren, children of one Father."

"[Lansbury attracted large audiences throughout Britain who saw] an old man full of energy, very much alive and possessed of an unquenchable zeal, breathing love and kindliness, and yet all the time a fighter, vehement and determined."

"George Lansbury was filled with the burning zeal of the prophet. He hated cruelty, injustice and wrongs, and felt deeply for all who suffered. In the course of his long life he was ever the champion of the weak, and with that immense vitality of his, sustained right to the end of his life, he strove for that in which he believed."

"In his later years Mr. Lansbury's intense hatred of war became more and more the leading feature of his political creed. I dare say there were not many hon. Members who felt convinced of the practicability of the methods which he advocated for the preservation of peace, but there was no one who did not realise his intense conviction, which arose out of his deep humanitarianism. He has perhaps been spared much that would have given him pain. He has left behind him the memory of a man who was deeply loved by all who knew him best, on account of his passionate devotion to the cause of the poor and helpless and his unselfish and kindly nature. I feel sure that in the Angel's Book his name will be found to be written like that of Abou ben Adhem as one who loved his fellow man."

"Generally speaking, anyone who expressed any desire to improve the lot of the exploited and injured, or proposed any remedy for the mortal sickness of acquisitive society, was regarded by the Conservative class as the vilest of criminals, an untouchable, an outcast, in short—a "Bolshevik." George [Lansbury] himself, had been imprisoned by the Tories in the days when he was a Poplar Guardian, and therefore, like so many heroes of the class-struggle, a "gaol-bird.""

"It should not be forgotten that until long after Hitler was in power the Leader of the Labour Party was an out-and-out pacifist. Everybody loved old Mr. Lansbury, and nobody could possibly doubt his sincerity. And this is what he said nearly ten months after Hitler came into power: "I would close every recruiting station, disband the Army and dismiss the Air Force. I would abolish the whole dreadful equipment of war and say to the world 'Do your worst'." Never had the leader of a great party in this country used words so wild and irresponsible. Mr. Lansbury was a sincere and devout Christian, but it may be said with certainty that, had he been Prime Minister, there would have been no Battle of Britain seven years later."

"Lansbury was a talented politician, speaker, and organizer. What made him remarkable was the stubbornness with which he clung to his principles... [He] became one of the best-loved and most-respected figures in the labour movement. Lansbury's legacy has been the adamantine insistence among an element within the Labour Party that Britain must stand for moral principles, must set the world a moral example. Concretely, this has meant demanding the total abolition of capitalism and unilateral disarmament, policies that Labour's leaders have usually thought utopian or worse"

"Although I have listened to many of his speeches and heard him say many things with which, rightly or wrongly, I have disagreed, I think I have never heard him say anything unkind, ungenerous or unfair. His earnestness, dignity and sincerity and his faithful and even passionate devotion to the people whom he served commanded our admiration while he lived and will now enrich the traditions of Parliament."

"Lansbury obviously is the idol of all these workers and their women-folk. He has moved, in his time, in proud places. But his heart remains with people."

"[David Lloyd George] said he had talked to George Lansbury in the House about Lansbury's recent visit to Hitler, and Lansbury had entirely agreed that Hitler wanted peace and to be friends with this country. ‘Lansbury talked to me very frankly. He said he was in despair in regard to his own party.’"

"The most lovable figure in modern politics."

""The old White Rabbit", as Hugh Dalton called him, hampered rearmament till 1935. He was one of those first-class Christians who have so nearly wrecked Christian civilization."

"The coming of George Lansbury, whose daring rectitude expressed itself in splendid, shameless words and deeds, seemed to herald a better time."

"A society that acquiesces in the presence in its midst of a vast permanent army of unemployed is a society that has ceased to believe in itself."

"We shall never get a chance of building socialism unless we carry with us in the process the consent of the ordinary man. And he, very naturally, takes short views ... We can be at once opportunist and constructive; but we must never, in the search for constructiveness, forget the need for building on the opportunities of the moment, of offering the plain man realities and not mere promises post-dated to the Socialist future."

"Economy à la Sir George May will not help much; for it means nothing positive. ... We need, if not a Five Years Plan, at any rate a centrally controlled attempt to readjust industry and agriculture to the changing needs of the British consumer and of the world market, with less exclusive concentration on the old staple industries and far more attention to the development of those which have a real capacity for expansion."

"Gradualism, in this sense, however much it appeals to the first thoughts of the electorate, fails because in the event it is unable to deliver the goods. It may put a Labour Government into office; but it will also ensure its subsequent discredit."

"I became a Socialist, as many others did in those days, on grounds of morals and decency and aesthetic sensibility. I wanted to do the decent thing by my fellow-men. I could not see why every human being should not have as good a chance in life as I, and I hated the ugliness both of poverty and of the money-grubbing way of life that I saw around me."

"In any socialised enterprise, no matter what its form, socialisation requires that proper provision be made for the democratic participation of the workers in determining the conditions and allocation of work, both at the work place level and at the higher levels of management and control."

"Professor Cole is a fluent and engaging writer with a natural sense of style, and avoids like the plague anything that smacks of obscurity or pseudo-profundity. His conversational manner, which probably owes something to the lecture-room, makes him always easy to read, though it is also responsible for a certain looseness of texture which sometimes seems more appropriate to the spoken than to the written word. Any impression, however, that Professor Cole is only skimming the surface of his subject may be corrected by consulting the very thorough and systematic bibliography at the end of the volume. This is a work of encyclopaedic learning, however lightly the learning may be worn. Few people to-day have browsed so widely and so far afield as Professor Cole among these lesser known French and British progenitors of socialist ideas."

"Douglas is a strong Tory in everything but politics!"

"However much on the intellectual plane Douglas was an internationalist, emotionally—and he never attempted to hide it—he was profoundly attached to England. He was not even a little Englander—really a little Southern Englander!"

"I discovered how much more he hated the liberals than the tories. This came out vividly when we were walking past the ground of the Highclere Estate. ... At this point Douglas, to my astonishment, launched into a panegyric of the English aristocracy. It might not have been wholly serious, but it did, I think, reflect a certain nostalgia for pre-industrial Britain."

"We afterwards went on to see G. D. H. Cole. ... He struck me as a genuine British Bolshevist, disbelieving in Parliamentary action, disbelieving in the trades union movement and the trades unionist leaders, and waiting only till the shop-stewards movement...was further developed...in order to use the weapon of the general strike, or some approach to it both for political and for industrial purposes. When I suggested that Parliamentary action was the appropriate weapon and that a general election...ought to give Labour a great accession of strength he objected that there were no leaders and no prospect of any. ... Professed himself a thorough "Pacifist"...so that it would seem he was preparing...for a stop-the-war movement by industrial pressure. At the same time he professed to be against the violence which such a movement if carried far enough would necessarily provoke. Personally I should doubt if he has the moral qualities needed for the enterprise."

"I was filled with determination, to do my best to expose and destroy what i then knew to be a legalized infamy, responsible for a vast destruction of human life."

"I saw those hunted woman, the blood flowing as the whip struck and struck again, the savage soldiers and their burning villages, casement told me to be amazed that i 5000 miles away had come to conclusions identical with his in every respect, an immense weight passed from me."

"A cry for mercy and Justice rises from the Congo."

"In any inclusive study of the roots of modern British socialism and internationalism, Casement’s collaboration with E.D. Morel should be cited as a critical conjuncture in a tradition of English radicalism and the struggle for the fairer distribution of land."

"Congo reformers like Morel, much to the annoyance of Hochschild, advocated either German or British colonization of the area (Congo). Morel’s view, according to Hochschild, speaking ex cathedra from the hallowed seat of modern California, “seems surprising to us today” and was among his “faults” and “political limitations.” Quite the opposite. The moment the Belgians colonized the Congo in 1908, a miraculous improvement was noted on all fronts. Seeking to debunk colonialism, Hochschild’s book demonstrates the opposite. This is the first and biggest lie at the heart of King Leopold’s Ghost."

"George Floyd's awful brutal death is what we should be talking about and addressing the racism, the discrimination and the inequalities black people face in my city, in our country and around the world. It's really important nobody's under any mistaken impression that it is acceptable to be abusive or violent towards police officers or even journalists."

"My wife and children can't open the door because they never know who is going to be behind it. I can't spontaneously decide to go see my mum, I've got to let the police know. I want to go back to normality; I miss it. I miss just being able to go out to the corner shop without police protection. I certainly hope I won't need protection for the rest of my life."

"Boston is among an increasing number of municipalities, universities, and private foundations that have announced plans to divest from fossil fuels. In late October, ahead of the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, better known as COP26, Auckland, New Zealand; Copenhagen, Denmark; Glasgow, Scotland; Paris; Rio de Janeiro; and Seattle announced commitments to divest from fossil fuel companies and increase investments to make cities more sustainable. Also last month, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott signed a bill that requires the city’s three pension funds to divest from the fossil fuel industry. Those are in addition to divestment commitments made last year by Berlin; Bristol, England; Cape Town, South Africa; Durban, South Africa; London; Los Angeles; Milan; New Orleans; New York City; Oslo; Norway; Pittsburgh; and Vancouver, Canada. “Cities are at the forefront of tackling the climate emergency and there is real momentum to move investments away from fossil fuels and toward climate solutions,” London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who is chair-elect of C40 Cities, a network of mayors working to confront climate change, said in a statement. “I will continue to encourage more cities to join the movement, and urge national governments and private finance institutions to mobilize more finance to invest directly in cities to support a green and fair recovery.”"

"I continue to believe that the best opportunity we have to advance our socialist objectives lies in forging the closest possible links with our fellow socialists and trade unions across the Channel."

"We are seeing the increase of unemployment throughout the industrial world, and it is a problem for which we still have no real answer."

"There are other reasons to be worried. One is the increasingly anti-parliamentarian rhetoric in which Benn engages. When he speaks about the primacy of the activists, he virtually parrots Lenin. He speaks a language which despises the ordinary party worker, again Lenin-like. The supremacy of party and activist is a central Leninist tenet, and Shirley believes she has read more Lenin and Marx than Benn has. She thinks he does not really know what he is saying. Also, that he is to some extent being used by people much harder than he is: Maynard-type, Richardson-type, Militant sympathisers."

"There can be a Fascism of the Left as well as Fascism of the Right."

"We are going to fight to save the party and by God we think we can. We are going to start fighting for a Labour Party worthy of the name."

"David has had the idea that the voters to try and win are defecting Tories... I personally have always held that we must try to replace the Labour Party."

"There was a feeling of tremendous dedication in the air, a feeling that we didn't care what happened, this is the way we were going to vote, we were going to put our names on the line... I think it was the beginning of the ultimate split in the Labour Party into an SDP and a Labour Party, and that was, when I look back on it, really where it all began."

"Bill and I were much more of the Labour ethos than probably David or Roy were... It seemed much more a whole life that was going and I guess that we were more reluctant to face the fact that probably the Labour Party was by that time irrecoverable."

"Recently I was in Berwick Street, Soho, where I often work, when a man said to me outside a studio: "I'll never forgive you for what you did to our grammar schools." The man looked extremely respectable and I said to him: "What did you say?" And he said: "I'll never forgive you for what you did to our grammar schools, and neither will my wife." I was suddenly very irritated with him: "What are you talking about, you silly bugger, what have I done to grammar schools?" My aggression obviously startled him, for he looked at me rather more carefully, cleared his throat and said, "I do beg your pardon, I thought you were Shirley Williams," and he went off muttering."

"Shirley is, without doubt, the most reactionary person I know."

"Shirley is surrounded by a beatific light that shields her from the harm and criticism which would be heaped on ordinary people."

"I...thought it a good idea to run through my speech with her, which I did, and she said it was more or less all right... She merely asked for a change at the end where I referred to a possible revival of Liberal and Social Democratic Britain. She said, 'Couldn't you use small letters and leave out the "and" – "liberal social democratic Britain"?' Thinking that if Paris was worth a Mass, Shirley was certainly worth an 'and' (and a lower case) I decided to do so, after which we rang off on terms of great amity. She said she was sure we would all be together in six months or so."

"[On women-only train carriages] It would be worth consulting about it. It was pooh-poohed (when Jeremy Corbyn suggested it), but these statistics seem to indicate there is some merit in examining that. Complemented with having more guards on trains, it would be a way of combating these attacks, which have seen a very worrying increase in the past few years. I'm not saying it has to happen, but it may create a safe space. It would be a matter of personal choice whether someone wanted to make use of it."

"[On antisemitism in the Labour Party] I'm not saying it never ever happens but it is a really dirty, lowdown trick, particularly the antisemitism smears. Many people in the Jewish community are appalled by what they see as the weaponisation of antisemitism for political ends. It is pretty repellent to use that to attack somebody like Jeremy Corbyn, who has spent his whole life fighting for social justice and standing up for the underdog. But I feel people have stopped listening to the smears and lies and dirty tricks. I think for all the talk about Venezuela and antisemitism, and the latest thing is sexism now, Jeremy’s overwhelming landslide victories in the leadership elections and the general election mean people have stopped listening to the smears."

"Hands off Gilad Atzmon - sign the petition! [initial tweet, soon deleted]"

"Earlier today I tweeted a petition about an Islington Council ban against the Blockheads performing with their chosen line-up. The council has blocked jazz musician Gilad Atzmon from playing with the group [...] Since then I've learned that Atzmon, a former Israeli soldier, is not confined to the jazz world. I am told that in various blogs and in speeches he has adopted anti-Semitic language. [...] I wasn't aware of this until after I tweeted the petition. As soon as I was informed, I deleted the tweet. I've always condemned all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism, and strongly disassociate myself from Atzmon's anti-Semitic views. I therefore apologise for tweeting this petition and any distress or offence it may have caused."

"The party that has done more to stand up to racism is now being demonised as a racist, bigoted party. I have got to say I think our party's response has been partly responsible for that because in my opinion… we have backed off too much, we have given too much ground, we have been too apologetic."

"I deeply regret, and apologise for, my recent choice of words when speaking about how the Labour party has responded to the ongoing fight against antisemitism inside of our party. I was trying to stress how much the party has done to tackle antisemitism."

"The pearl clutching hyperbole by sections of the "left" about this [David Miller] tweet is depressingly familiar. Stop letting the bad faith racist Zionist movement frame our narrative. That's what killed the Corbyn project, and it was the liberal left who wielded the knife."

"The idea of an all-powerful Israeli or Zionist lobby is one that has found swathes of appeal among the British left. It is common for British Jewish organisations or institutions to be referred to as an "pro-Israel lobby group." By using such a term as a preface to a UK Jewish organisation, the implication is being made that those Jews hold dual loyalty or are working against the interests of their own country. Ironically, it's on Iranian state broadcaster, Press TV, where former Bristol University professor David Miller and former Labour Member of Parliament Chris Williamson respectively produce and present a series called Palestine Declassified almost entirely devoted to trying to prove that British Jewish organisations have a Zionist or Israeli affiliation, thereby (it is claimed) doing the nefarious bidding of the Israeli state."

"Hats off to Chris Williamson, Labour MP – a genuine human being."

"Chris Williamson is a very good, very effective Labour MP. He's a very strong anti-racist campaigner. He is not antisemitic in any way."

"Labour's insistence that the party is an implacable foe of anti-Jewish racism is rendered laughable every day that Chris Williamson remains a Labour MP. The anti-racist charity Hope Not Hate is right to demand he be stripped of the Labour whip. If the Labour party fails to make that move, then it will have passed judgment on itself – and that judgment will be damning."

"Chris Williamson is a politician made for the digital age in its worst respects: he baits Jews in a way that is relentless, provocative and inflammatory."

"Last November, hours after the massacre of 11 Jews at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Mr Williamson tweeted an attack on the Board of Deputies of British Jews. It came from a far-left site called Skwawkbox, which has referred to a "Jewish 'war on Corbyn'"."

"Everybody knows Chris is not an antisemite. If you pass on defending him for some tactical advantage, we are all losers. It's a slippery slope."

"I've come into this job as a referee, and that's where I want to be. It shouldn't be about me, it's about the Chamber."

"We should not allow anything to overshadow the most important event the world will ever see and that’s the funeral of Her Majesty."

"For the Labour Party, the exclusion of the revolutionary trend in the movement paved the way for the unchallenged domination of the right wing and locked the party ever more firmly into class collaboration and reformism. [...] In that sense, the decision to reject communist affiliation paved the way for the whole miserable litany of Labour-led disasters from 1931 to 1979."

"That things happened in the USSR which were inexcusable and which ultimately prejudiced Socialism's whole prospect is today undeniable. Whether Communists in the capitalist world could or should have done more than they did is much more contentious."

"Next Tuesday is the 120th anniversary of the birth of Josef Stalin. His career is the subject of a vast and ever expanding literature. Read it all and, at the end, you are still left paying your money and taking your choice. A socialist system embracing a third of the world and the defeat of Nazi Germany on the one hand. On the other, all accompanied by harsh measures imposed by a one-party regime. Nevertheless, if you believe that the worst crimes visited on humanity this century, from colonialism to Hiroshima and from concentration camps to mass poverty and unemployment have been caused by imperialism, then [Stalin’s birthday] might at least be a moment to ponder why the authors of those crimes and their hack propagandists abominate the name of Stalin beyond all others. It was, after all, Stalin’s best-known critic, Nikita Khrushchev, who remarked in 1956 that "against imperialists, we are all Stalinists"."

"Our party has already made its basic position of solidarity with People's Korea clear."

"Hitler is uniquely excoriated because his victims were almost all white Europeans, while those of Britain (and other classic colonialisms — French, Belgian, Dutch, Italian and Wilhelmine German) were Asian, African and Arabs. That Hitler's regime is seen as the most bestial of modern times is not of course objectionable. What needs to be confronted is the view that the crimes of other great powers of the last 150 years or so, being less lurid than those of the Nazis, can therefore be subject to a more nuanced judgment, in which the deaths of millions of people on the one hand can be offset against the construction of railways on the other. The British Empire was almost certainly responsible for more human deaths, albeit over a considerably longer period of time, than Hitler was."

"There is nothing in the imperial record as chilling as the systematic extermination of the great majority of Europe's Jews."

"[Israel is a "white settler state"] To ask Muslim community leaders to tackle "extremism" effectively when every night you can see on television a Muslim child being pulled lifeless from the rubble caused by the operations of the bloc of the USA, Britain, Israel and other white settler states like Canada and Australia is asking a lot."

"The Salisbury attack is something we got wrong. When it happened, I thought, "Well, probably there's Russians behind this, because of the use of novichok." I just thought it was Russian gangsters — some business interests, and so forth. I didn't think the Russian state was behind it. And we were wrong. The evidence that's emerged since is overwhelming. We misread that. I still think that the line Jeremy was trying to follow, which is, "Get the evidence first and then state sanctions, and so on, rather than the other way around," is a defensible position. You don't run into saying "This is Putin's responsibility" when you haven't produced the evidence of it. In fact, this evidence has now been produced. Had we known then what we know now, we'd have taken a different view, I think. We just didn't think the Russian state would be so stupid and brazen as to do something like that — to carry out a poisoning attack on British soil. I know, given the Litvinenko precedent perhaps we should have done but that never really got sorted out so clearly . . . Up until then we'd still ha[d] a quiescent PLP. We were doing all right in the polls. That started bringing all the doubts about Jeremy and the leader’s office to the surface again."

"There were no emails in 1978. Word processing meant dictating copy to stenographers; each newspaper had a phone booth in a gloomy corridor for this purpose. The [[w:Morning Star (British newspaper)|[Morning] Star]]s chief stenographer was an implacable Bolshevik called Doris. The 80-something comrade was hard of hearing with arthritis in her fingers, leaving her bereft of any qualification for her role beyond ideological rectitude. I had no chance of keeping an exclusive as I bellowed my scoops at a pace Doris could keep up with. Eventually I persuaded management that an infusion of youth was required in the stenography department, and a new typist was engaged. Dictating to her for the first time, I began my story, as so often in those days, with "Premier Thatcher...". I was stopped at that point. "How do you spell that?" she asked. "Which word?" I said. "Both." Give thanks for automatic spellchecks too."

"[During the 2017 general election campaign] Andrew Murray is a member of the Labour Party and he is an official at Unite, and he is temporarily helping us with the campaign."

"He is a person of enormous abilities and professionalism, and is the head of staff of Unite the union. To manage a very large union and a large number of staff takes special skills, and Andrew has them."

"[Asked about Murray's alleged "Stalinism"] I don't believe that Andrew is anything other than a democratic socialist and member of the Labour Party like me."

"[Following Murray's comments ("That things happened in the USSR...") cited above] Mr Murray believes that British communists in the 1930s were justified in backing the Great Terror, the Moscow Trials and the Ukraine famine."

"[Following Murray's comments ("That things happened in the USSR...") cited above] Murray is seriously maintaining that its an open question whether British communists did all they might have done in denouncing these abominations."

"I roundly told her to fuck off .... She fucked off. People said to me they had always wanted to say that to her, and I don’t know why they don’t as the opportunity presents itself every other minute."

"I would do anything that I felt was going to make the Labour party win the general election because if I don't have that attitude then all I’m doing is colluding with the Tories. If that means making Jeremy better, I'll roll my sleeves up. If that's not going to happen – and I've said [this] to him and to his staff to their faces: 'The day that ... you are hurting us more than you are helping us, I won't knife you in the back, I’ll knife you in the front.'"

"I am, however, still dubious about the need for an international men's day in and of itself. For me it is up there with needing a white history month, or able body action day. Men are celebrated, elevated and awarded every day of the week on every day of the year. Being a man is its own reward. You hit the jackpot when you are born a boy child. Yes within your group things are tough for all sorts of reasons. None of them are because you are a man. You might be a poor man, a sick man, a marginalised minority ethnic man. Brother, I'm with you. I'll carry your banner, sing your song of freedom, I'll even carry your coats and make the sandwiches."

"One of the things I want to achieve in the potentially short time I'm in Westminster is to stop people thinking we're all the same. Because while they believe that, the establishment stays in the same people’s hands. Nothing changes. It is awful to hear people on the doorstep saying: "You politicians are all in it for yourselves." But that's nowhere near as bad as hearing that people feel they have no one to represent them. That's the disaster, not the fact that I have to weather a Twitter storm."

"Assange has, for seven years, evaded accusations of sexual violence in Sweden."

"The trouble is that many of those who like what Assange did with WikiLeaks are willing to look the other way about the accusations against him. The same people who would march for women's rights wearing pussy hats and waving banners about what a sexist pig Trump is are not feminist allies when their gods are found to be fallible. Platitudes about how we should never say women are lying when they come forward about rape suddenly don't fit any more and now women are making up sexual violence as part of an American conspiracy."

"All the talk about rebuilding the economy post-pandemic, post-Brexit, post-austerity, is always about diggers [...] I mean, do something to make sure everyone gets to play with the digger. What have they done to get more women signed up to digger courses? Make sure I can control a digger."

"[Referring to domestic violence.] It took until the third [statement during the first lockdown] for the prime minister to even mention it. And the first penny that reached the frontline was five months after the crisis started. It’s not for the want of people like me, in the beginning, being like "we should think about this". When Covid-19 was still just a thing in China, we were talking about rising rates of domestic abuse that were being reported by Chinese charities."

"We punish mothers for falling prey, rather than see how we can help them be the best moms that they can be and support them. We treat people terribly – we tell people that it's their fault that they're victims and that they're going to have their children removed because they haven't protected them."

"Reading out the list of names of women killed by men compiled by the femicide census as I do every year on International Women's Day will, no matter what I do in the future, never be rivalled by anything else in my political life. It is the thing most strangers approach me about when I am out and about. I've been told so many times that I read out the name of someone's daughter, sister, friend or mother. It catches me off guard whenever this happens. I'm struck by the honour that families feel to see their loved one's name exists forever on the public record; a roll call akin to that of fallen soldiers."

"[M]aking women as important as bins."

"In the Johnson and [[Dominic Cummings|[Dominic] Cummings]] era of government, it was often assumed that anything that happened in Westminster was a group of political geniuses playing 3D chess and laying traps for the Labour Party (or opponents from within the government) to fall in to. It did sometimes feel true, although it was my experience that it was more by accident than design. I think it might be fair to say that they were playing 2D chess with quite some skill – until they weren't. Liz Truss, it would seem, cannot even play 1D chess. In fact, I am not sure her particular operation could be compared to the shape-sorting toys a one-year-old can master."

"I have seen again and again how women's lives are considered a niche issue rather than the main event. If there are no powerful women in the room, it will continue to happen. I can already hear the rebuttal that Liz Truss was a woman and she was dreadful, but that argument only holds if you think that Liz Truss is the embodiment of all women and her failure belongs to us all. Liz Truss didn't fail because she was a woman, she failed because she was a right-wing ideologue who was unfit for the job. I can see plenty of those left around the cabinet table so they can't be too fussed about that."

"You get low-level sexism all the time. I've defended other women in the chamber. I know women who work for me, certainly Black women, have found Westminster to be oppressive. Lots of men shush me because I'm quite rowdy. I get lots of comments like "calm down, the honourable lady acts with her heart". In the post-Me Too world, you get joking comments like "am I allowed to ask you to pass the milk?" or "I don't know if I'm allowed to say this to me, but you look lovely". ... Quite a lot of Tory men treat me like I'm some sort of exotic bird. People act like I'm either a pain or something to be marvelled at. You can see sometimes in meetings, women are asked to do things like get the tea. The expectation of them being stupid and annoying is quite common – that is very irritating. There is a power imbalance, there is an element of impunity."

"The Russell Brand exposé by the Sunday Times and Dispatches for Channel 4 would have not long ago been overwhelmingly applauded as thorough, well-sourced and sensitively managed journalism. Instead, we have seen the exact reason why women don't speak up."

"This week has been one of the toughest weeks in politics since I entered parliament. I have tried to do everything that I could to make it so that this was not the outcome, but it is with a heavy heart that I will be leaving my post in the shadow Home Office team. On this occasion I must vote with my constituents, my head, and my heart which has felt as if it were breaking over the last four weeks with the horror of the situation in Israel and Palestine. I can see no route where the current military action does anything but put at risk the hope of peace and security for anyone in the region now and in the future."

"[Entering the elevator in Portcullis House] My husband's a lift engineer and he always takes the stairs."

"My only ambition in politics is to halve the levels of violence experienced by women and girls in a decade. Despite two women dying every week there is still no strategy or target around femicide. We live in a patriarchy still. It is 2024 but all our institutions are based on a 1950s, or 1850s or even 1750s ideal that doesn’t work for women"

"[To pro-Palestinian hecklers] I will carry on with my speech. I understand that a strong woman standing up to you is met with such reticence."

"[The UK is] in desperate need and our politics [is] in even greater need of cleaning up and I thank everyone in this room for making a really good spectacle of proving that for me."

"[The vandalising of cars used by Phillips' team were filmed for social media postings] The reason they're filming is to drive content, to incite more intimidation [...] In my constituency, the humiliation was by men, to women. And they wish to drive content ... that's what our politics has become - humiliation. Content-driven grift."

"She compares activist-journalist Owen Jones and Novara Media writers to noisy, overexcited children who have had too much sugar – "Who cares what they think, frankly.""

"But what mattered most to [[w:Karen Ingala Smith|[Karen] Ingala Smith]] were women’s names, not numbers. So in 2016 she was delighted when the Labour MP Jess Phillips – who’d previously worked for Women's Aid – asked to read them out on International Women's Day. Now this roll call of more than 120 stolen lives, recited to a hushed House of Commons, has become an annual commemoration. "Dead women is a thing we’ve all just accepted as part of our daily lives," Phillips said last year, when among the names was Sarah Everard. The list not only put male violence in the national spotlight but, says Ingala Smith, "Family after family have said how important it is to hear their loved one’s name read out in parliament, and know it is recorded in Hansard for ever.""

"It seems to me that this problem of the distressed areas cannot be dealt with as though it were a problem existing by itself and divorced from the whole of the economic and social complex of affairs out of which it arises. I have heard during this Debate and during the Debates that have preceded it in the past week many gibes at this party because, as was alleged, it has refrained from endeavouring to apply its Socialistic faith to the problems that we were discussing. Therefore, I hope the House will not think me too doctrinaire or dogmatic if I endeavour to say how, in my view, those Socialistic ideas and principles, for which I and my friends stand and work, are the only principles which have any relevance to the problems which the House is discussing on this Motion. I am bound to say that, listening to the jibes during the past week and coming here for the first time straight from the open air and light which seem to come so rarely in this Chamber, either physically or otherwise, I felt a sense of deepening gloom as speaker after speaker from the Government Benches, beginning with the Prime Minister, made speech after speech the burden of which was, so far as I could see, purely a confession of impotence—they could not do anything, this course will not do, that measure will not do, no grand schemes will be of any effect and no particular schemes are worth pressing very hard."

"It is no accident that the distressed areas we are discussing are the very areas which, in the past, have contributed most to the prosperity of this country and to its achievements all over the world. The hon. Member for East Aberdeen was right when he said that we must pay people to eat. I would invite him to go further and say that we must learn how to pay people not to work. Only in that way can we use that dividend of civilisation in the interests of the community which has achieved those things."

"I think it is true to say that the people of this country have no enthusiasm for this or for any war, but they would not be willing, in the main, now that the war has started, to let it end on such terms as would restore the world to the position in which it was —or to anything like that position— before we started. It was a position in which we were continually stumbling along from one crisis to the next, never knowing what was to happen, and without any kind of order, stability or security. I think the people of this country would not go back to that now, and that they are prepared to fight until some kind of order, based on stability and justice can be secured."

"It may be that you hold the view that no kind of peace is possible unless the Nazi regime in Germany is removed. If that is one of the things you regard as essential, say so by all means; but do not stop there. You have to say what you would do then. Suppose that the Nazi regime went, suppose that the abnoxious individual went, what then would you propose?"

"It is possible that the war might go on for many years before we got peace. You could create a European desert and call it peace, and give it the permanence of the grave. The objects that we regard as essential for the maintenance of civilisation may require a long war. If so, we should not be afraid of it. But neither should we assume that that is going to be necessary. Now, while people are in the mood to talk, talk to them. It is not necessary to talk on their terms; but if you tell them what are your terms and invite them to talk on your basis, you take the initiative out of their hands, you take the leadership, and perhaps you do something to acquire a long-wanted diplomatic success for ourselves."

"I would just summarise, very shortly, the qualities and aspects of this penalty which make it to all of us a revolting and barbaric thing. It is hot only the melodrama and sensationalism with which these proceedings are surrounded; it is not only the sordid squalor, every detail of which spreads into the newspapers in every one of these crimes, and whose effect on juvenile delinquency has never been measured but must be very considerable; it is not only the relentless finality of this penalty, the relentless finality which makes this result that once it has been inflicted there is no room for rectification if there were error or miscarriage of justice. No one who knows the records can doubt that there have been cases of error, that there have been miscarriages of justice, and that innocent men have in fact been executed. Above all these things, there is the sense which we all have that this penalty, of itself, denies the very principle on which we claim the right to inflict it—namely, the sanctity of human life."

"Sydney Silverman will be remembered as one of the great backbenchers of the House of Commons. The respect he commanded, even among those who bitterly opposed his views, was total. As a parliamentarian, he was totally dedicated, and therefore dominating. As a politician, he was uncompromising and vehement in saying what he had to say—often a superbly lucid crystallisation of what others had been trying to present Nobody could put a lawyer's training in argument and grasp of essentials to better parliamentary use, but where Silverman differed from many Commons lawyers was that, when he reached the heart of the matter, it invariably had a heart. It also had sense, and a solid backing of relevant fact. He was a somewhat pompous figure but, in his case, this was accepted as a virtue. Pomposity is one of the first things to be laughed at in the Commons, but one would have to search far back in one's memory to recall anybody laughing at Sydney Silverman. Physically he was tiny; his shoes, as he sat on his familiar front bench below the gangway, scarcely touched the carpet. If he had been a Minister, there would have been no point in his trying to put his feet on the table in the orthodox manner of nonchalance. But his dignity was unassailable. and nonchalance, was not part of sis nature. He was one of the few remaining backbenchers, who could put many Ministers and Shadow Ministers utterly in the shade."

"Conservative MP Mr Stafford has started a petition calling for his title to be removed, describing it as "an insult to his victims". He said: "There is no getting away from the fact that this paedophile is in possession of a peerage and this is absolutely and categorically unacceptable. He should be stripped of this immediately. "I will be speaking to my colleagues in the Department of Justice to ensure that this individual is not allowed to continue to hold a peerage, which would be an insult to his victims."

"On Friday, Mr Justice Lavender told Ahmed: "Your actions have had profound and lifelong effects on the girl and the boy, who have lived with what you did to them for between 46 and 53 years. "Their statements express more eloquently than I ever could how your actions have affected their lives in so many different and damaging ways." The survivor of the attempted rapes read her own victim personal statement in court, saying: "An overwhelming feeling of shame remained with me throughout my childhood and early adult years. "It was a burden I was made to carry, and it silenced me for many years. It is now time for me to pass that burden to him – the paedophile who I know feels no personal shame.""

"In 2018, she wrote an op-ed for the Sun addressing the "problem [of] British Pakistani men raping white girls", in reference to the Rotherham grooming-gang scandal. She was subsequently accused of being Islamophobic and was forced to quit the shadow cabinet. Given the treatment of Champion, you can see why many in the public eye opt, in the interests of self-preservation, to describe Pakistani grooming-gang members as "Asian" – if indeed they talk about the issue at all."

"Cryer said that it is because they do not want arranged marriages with “very young girls from their village” in Pakistan that Muslim men "look for very young girls through this organised sex ring that we are seeing in Keighley." She does not explain what part of "Asian culture" would lead the parents to want their sons to marry “very young girls” from Pakistan, nor why this should lead to "organised" rings of men who seek to exploit "very young", non-Muslim girls near Bradford, and get them addicted to drugs and alcohol and then turn them into prostitutes. Ann Cryer left it up to the population of Britain to assume that Hindu and Sikh and Buddhist men were also doing this, as these activities were supposedly part of “Asian culture”, rather than men from one specific religious group..."

"But the quotations of contemporaneous reports of what Cryer actually said in 2003 show that in claiming that it was to do with "Asian culture" rather than religion, she had led the public to believe the problems were nothing to do with Islam. Since Islam comes from Arabia rather than Asia, and since Asia has many religions and cultures other than those of Muslims, the public was led to believe that what was happening in Bradford involved criminal grooming gangs of many different religions. But Cryer was talking to Muslim leaders in order to get the grooming gangs to stop; there was apparently no need for her to talk to Hindu or Sikh leaders to get their youths to stop grooming young white girls. Thus, even at the time, Cryer should have been able to perceive the difference between Muslim culture and Asian culture."

"We are aware of no evidence showing that Ann Cryer spoke out about the activities of the grooming gangs before August 22 2003, when Channel 4 News disclosed the existence of the 18-month investigation into the grooming gangs by Bradford Council and West Yorkshire Police, although surely as the MP she must have known about such a major investigation into their activities. Perhaps she had known about this investigation, but had chosen to remain silent, as the previous year she came under criticism from left-wing Muslims for "damaging race relations", when she stated that "Asian gangs" in her constituency were out of control."

"It is for the Prime Minister]] to decide whether he expressed himself appropriately in the Commons. It is up to him as to whether he wants to annoy 51% of the population."

"This year, the Tory party has given us five Education Secretaries, four Chancellors, three Prime Ministers, two leadership coups—[Interruption.] And, Mr Speaker, the partridge has had to sell the pear tree to pay the gas bill. [Laughter.] Is it not the case that, after a year of Tory chaos, incompetence and self-indulgence, the best Christmas present the Prime Minister could give to the British people is a general election?"

"Hogwarts gone wrong."

"What the police have said, literally, is: "If we recorded it, we will have to do something about it." And you think, yes, that’s absolutely the point."

"We now need the data to know the extent of what is happening, and what we are hearing from police who are doing it is that it transforms the way they deal with violence against women, because it makes the link between misogyny and violence."

"[W]e know from police trials that classifying misogyny as a hate crime can encourage women to come forward, about domestic abuse, rape, forced marriages – there are lots of examples of how it can make a difference. All the evidence shows that this can make a difference. For comparison, there is a requirement to say if skin colour is a reason for why someone has been targeted. There are so many crimes that women have internalised. We have asked women to find ways of coping rather than asking the police to intervene and stop it."

"Why do we think motherhood should be about sacrifice in some way – that every mother should be a martyr? I don’t want to be a martyr – I just want to be a good mum and a good MP."

"Do I think some women were born with penises? Yes [...] But they are now women and I respect that."

"JK Rowling doesn't support self-identification whereas I do. Of course biological sex is real – it’s just not the end of the conversation. I am somebody who would say that a trans woman is an adult human female. I would say that you and I were adult human females. ... [O]ne of the things that happens to trans women is that they are oppressed because the patriarchy goes, "Oh well you’re a woman, right that's it, let's pick you apart". So it's right for me to stand with my trans sisters and say: "Let's fight these battles together"."

"[Tominey: "Describing as 'bonkers' the need for two doctors to decide whether someone is a woman or not [gender dysphoria], as the law currently requires, [Creasy] adds":] That brings up all sorts of questions about what is a woman in terms of gender – what does it mean to live as a woman? I wear flat shoes, I’ve got terrible bunions, is someone going to tell me that living as a woman means you have to wear high heels for two years? Do I want to live in a world where we’re policing everyone who goes into a toilet? No. Do I recognise that there are very real concerns about refuges and safe spaces? Yes."

"Watching this I am concerned that the prime minister thinks homeless means "doesn't have a country pile at the moment"."

"[W]e should all welcome the protection from sex-based harassment in a public bill. It echoes the way that hate crime legislation penalises those who target certain groups based on their identity, by using an existing offence used to prosecute harassment – from the Public Order Act 1986 – and applying a harsher sentence to those whose motivation is shown to be about the sex or perceived sex of their victim. It is the first time the statute book will recognise how misogyny drives crimes against women. Yet, as ever, nothing is straightforward. Public order offences allow the accused to claim a defence that they thought their behaviour was "reasonable", even if no one else would. This contrasts with other legislation that also covers harassment in English law, and only allows a defendant to claim their behaviour is reasonable if others would agree; that they "ought to know" if their conduct was unacceptable. Without changing this element of the forthcoming public harassment bill to be consistent with how harassment operates elsewhere, this new law – while well-intentioned – risks giving perpetrators the opportunity to claim "she just can’t take a compliment" as an actual defence to a criminal offence."

""[D]on't feed the trolls" misses the point: if someone is obsessing about you to the point they are seeking out those around you, ignoring them won't disrupt their behaviour before it causes more damage."

"Now that the parliamentary security team requests the details of your daily travel plans – when you'll be visiting your local supermarket, or the pub – it's hard not to feel that something has gone very wrong. Indeed, my local council records me as a safeguarding risk to my own children because of the threats I face as an MP."

"They don’t threaten criticise, yell or exert their physical strength in increasingly frightening ways. Not at the start. Not when they think you're sweet, funny and gorgeous. Not when they turn up to your third date with chocolates, then jewellery."

"You learn that "I’ll always look after you" and "You’re mine for life" can sound menacing, are used as a warning over and over again."

"In a strange city his face changes in a way you are starting to know and dread. In a way that tells you, you need to stay calm, silent and very careful. You read a city guide … mentally packing a day full of fun. But he seems to have another agenda. He doesn’t want you to leave the room. He’s paid a lot of money and you need to pay him your full attention. You are expected to do as you are told. You know for certain what that means, so you do, exactly what you are told. It’s when the ring is on your finger that the mask can start to slip and the promises sound increasingly like threats."

"Those patterns continue: reward, punishment, promises of happy ever after, alternating with abject rage, menace, silent treatment and coercive control."

"It was just a big load of scary noise, this giant person. When you’re bullied your brain starts to shut down. It’s protecting yourself. And you can’t think of the words; you’re not eloquent. I would misspeak, stutter, and he would exploit that."

"He was totally withdrawing from me, to let me know that I was not to be spoken to, and I wasn’t to talk to him, or be touched, or anything, and that was really hurtful. But it was always my fault, always, always, always, without question. And that got established from day one, even when he was still trying to woo me and charm me. [At the end of an argument.] He’d come up to me very earnestly, very sincerely, and say to me, "Are you going to be my good girl, now?""

"His tempers were very violent. I knew I had to be careful. There was always an underlying threat. He would drive incredibly aggressively, yelling at me when I was trapped in the car. That was scary stuff. Because the feelings are violent, the violence is there in the room with you. The raising of a fist or the hand is the next logical step. He didn’t hit me. He did other things that made me realise he was in control."

"It’s ridiculous and nothing about me is a dinosaur. I’m angry at colleagues chucking me on the railway tracks. I’m even more determined. I’m not a transphobe, I never have been and I never will be. I simply want to use the word women."

"I don’t talk about trans rights because I think it’s not my place to talk about trans rights. Trans people have got some great organisations and they’re very good at representing their rights, and that is just as it should be. Trans rights are the same rights as everyone else, but what concerns me is that there is a slight conflict in some cases between trans rights and women’s rights. Women’s rights are why I came to Parliament, and why I’m sitting here, because women are now visible in Parliament. I grew up in a very strong feminist household, and what really concerns me are the rights of women to have privacy and space, and the necessity to be in women’s refuge – not shared with someone with a male body."

"[On the possibility misgendering might become a hate crime.] Is that a serious thing? Is that coming to Parliament any time soon? I hope not because you might as well arrest me now. I'm not calling Eddie Izzard a woman."

"LGBT+ Labour now seem to hate my guts and I feared they’d have a massive go at me at conference [...] The people who threaten me I don’t think are actually likely to harm me. They just say it often and very loudly."

"There are some women who get involved and want to be seen to be very woke ... but mostly it is men, and the same men that have trolled me ever since I got elected. So it looks like, feels like and smells like misogyny, and this is just the latest cause they have latched on to ... The fact that I am blonde — they call me a bimbo. The fact that I don’t like antisemitism. There is always something, but it is always the same people who attack me."

"For the first time in my life, having been an ambassador for a gender-balanced 50:50 parliament, I would hesitate to encourage other women to come into politics [...] I would have to really think about what I was asking them to do, and putting people into this position when they are going to be on the front line of some pretty shitty abuse."

"Being shouted down in the chamber by Labour men who clearly don't want women to speak up for our rights to single-sex spaces. How very progressive."

"Many of us know that self-identifying as a woman does not make a person a biological woman who shares our lived experience. But for obvious reasons, these views are not voiced outside of closed rooms or private and secret WhatsApp groups. Even there, the most senior MPs often do not post a single word; they know exactly what’s at stake and not many of them want to be me. So for now, they mostly remain silent."

"Is it starting to look like Labour has a women problem? It certainly is for the 7,000-strong group of women members, councillors and activists who make up Labour Women’s Declaration and had a stall at last year’s party conference refused. It is for Lesbian Labour, who were also stopped from exhibiting at last year’s conference. It is for Dr Karen Ingala Smith, the formidable feminist campaigner who compiles a list of women killed in the UK each year which is then read out in parliament by Jess Phillips every International Women’s Day, and who had her membership rejected after she made a few gender-critical joke tweets featuring kittens."

"We're watching not only those white men that run things having the safe seats, giving themselves the safe seats, but then they're the ones that get to judge whether or not we get to be candidates. So that's incredibly uncomfortable for me to watch from a so-called progressive party. It needs cleaning up, it needs tackling. It was the same under Jeremy Corbyn's faction and time, it's exactly the same under Keir Starmer."

"Today I have made the extremely difficult decision not to attend local hustings events during this general election campaign. Hustings are usually an enjoyable and interesting part of any political campaign, but sadly the actions of a few fixated individuals have now made my attendance impossible. The constant trolling, spite and misrepresentation from certain people - having built up over a number of years and being pursued with a new vigour during this election - is now affecting my sense of security and wellbeing. The result is that I feel unable to be focused on giving a clear presentation of the Labour Party's manifesto commitments."

"Most backbenchers I'm friends with are women and most of us refer to the men that surround him [Keir Starmer], the young men, as 'the lads' and it's very clear that the lads are in charge. They have now got their Downing Street passes. They are the same lads who were briefing against me in the papers and other prominent female MPs."

"The sleaze, nepotism and apparent avarice are off the scale [...] I am so ashamed of what you and your inner circle have done to tarnish and humiliate our once proud party."

"Someone with far-above-average wealth choosing to keep the Conservatives’ two-child limit to benefit payments which entrenches children in poverty, while inexplicably accepting expensive personal gifts of designer suits and glasses costing more than most of these people can grasp — this is entirely undeserving of holding the title of Labour prime minister."

"Forcing a vote [on the winter fuel payment] to make many older people iller and colder while you and your favourite colleagues enjoy free family trips to events most people would have to save hard for — why are you not showing even the slightest bit of embarrassment?"

"As prime minister, your managerial style and technocratic approach, and lack of basic politics and political instincts, have come crashing down on us as a party after we worked so hard, promised so much, and waited a long 14 years to be mandated by the British public to return to power. Since the change of government in July, the revelations of hypocrisy have been staggering and increasingly outrageous. I cannot put into words how angry I and my colleagues are at your total lack of understanding about how you have made us all appear."

"How dare you take our longed-for victory, the electorate’s sacred and precious trust, and throw it back in their individual faces and the faces of dedicated and hardworking Labour MPs?"

"The Labour Party was formed to speak for those of us without a voice, and I stood for election partly because I saw decisions about the lives of those like me being made in Westminster by only the most privileged few. Right now, I cannot look my constituents in the eye and tell them that anything has changed,” she said. “I hope to be able to return to the party in the future, when it again resembles the party I love, putting the needs of the many before the greed of the few.”"

"[In March 2023, Duffield] dared to like a tweet by the writer Graham Linehan, who was responding to a tweet by Eddie Izzard claiming that, had he lived in Nazi Germany, "I'd have been murdered for it". Linehan – and rightly, so in my view – retorted with a sarcastic, "Ah, yes, the Nazis, famously bigoted against straight white men with blonde hair." You might well think Izzard was wrong to make that comparison to Nazi Germany in trying to score points in the gender war. But remarkably, in Labour land, it is Duffield who is being investigated."

"In the interests of full transparency, I should say that Rosie Duffield's a friend of mine. We'd probably have been friends no matter where or how we'd met, but we found each other as part of a group of women fighting to retain women's rights."

"It seems Rosie has received literally no support from [Keir] Starmer over the threats and abuse, some of which has originated from within the Labour Party itself, and has had a severe, measurable impact on her life. But she fights on ... because she feels she has no choice. Like me, she believes the stakes are too high to walk away."

"To my dismay, for all the talk about the values of equality, diversity and respect at last week's NUS conference, in practice nothing could be further from the truth, in relation to anti-semitism. A leaflet was readily available on the GUPS stalls at the conference for two days. The text was the typical anti-semitic work; the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Once again, complaints were met with unacceptable delays and silence. Many people claim that being anti-Israel/Zionist isn't being anti-semitic. But why does hatred of Israel lead them to turn a blind eye to the Protocols on a GUPS pamphlet? Furthermore, while the UJS has always preached a two-state solution and peace, time and time again we see others reject it. This is evident in the attack on a UJS peace stall at the European Social Forum. University authorities are also dismissive of these issues - look at the Israeli boycot motions put to this month's Association of University Teachers conference."

"I think the insensitivity surrounding all parties' approach to asylum and immigration has a lot to say for the rise in not only anti-Semitism but any form of racism directed at immigrants. All parties have been responsible for not dealing with the issue in an appropriate manner."

"I have to be very careful what I say here. I'm disappointed by the fact that they are playing to other parties' policies in order to discuss it all. Whereas the Labour Party in the past have been so strong and so active in combating and standing up for themselves, I'm surprised that on this particular issue, it's unfortunate that it's been played into."

"While I accuse no one of anti-Semitism, this year NUS has been a bystander to Jew-hatred [...] In the past three days, at the heart of our democratic union, to my horror, I have seen the events of the year replayed."

"Only active government can shape markets, create new ones, and create green growth. Individuals and businesses cannot do it alone: they need a government by their side. That's why the Labour government introduced the Climate Change Act in 2008 to enshrine carbon targets in law, and to move Britain from a high-carbon to a low-carbon economy. We planned to achieve 40% low-carbon electricity by 2020, and to create 400,000 new jobs in green businesses. This government inherited a range of green initiatives, such as the green investment bank, which they've watered-down, or punted into the long grass. The Tory-led government's blinkered focus on the deficit means they are not making the right strategic decisions for now or for the next generation. Their promised green economy road map will appear many months after the publication of their energy bill."

"[Being asked if she was someone's aide at a climate change conference] I'm nobody’s aide! I find a lot of people say, you know, "When do we get to meet the MP?" And, er, no, I am the MP."

"[On abusive Twitter posts] Online hate needs to be taken as seriously as offline hate – but it isn’t. Twitter’s response isn't good enough. It has a responsibility to do more to protect its users. The site is letting me and many others down who have been the subject of lots of hate ... It could start by proactively banning racist words which aren't allowed to printed in newspapers or broadcast on TV that could never be used in a positive way – such as kike – a derogative and anti-Semitic term for describing a Jew."

"[On receiving a vast number of hate messages on Twitter.] It’s personal and sometimes very extreme in its nature. Sometimes it's pornographic, sometimes violent, often very misogynistic. At its peak, there were 2,500 tweets. Some people who were shown just one message couldn’t believe it, so to receive thousands is difficult."

"[On the categories of antisemitic abuse she was receiving] First, there are people who say it’s all a smear and accuse me of "faux anti-semite outrage" and "bullshit of the highest order". This attack has come even after Jeremy has acknowledged in the strongest terms that the mural was anti-semitic. Second, there are those who say the mural is "absolutely true" and that they support it, that "global banks are ripping everyone off because they are run by Jews". The third strand is to accuse me of having "two masters", that I'm "Tel Aviv’s servant" and a "paid-up Israeli lobby operative" as well as being an MP. It’s anti-semitism of the worst kind, suggesting I'm a traitor to my country. They call me "Judas", "a venal piece of detritus", a "Zionazi" and an "absolute parasite", telling me to get out of the country or go back to Israel. The last strand are the messages from people who tell me to "f*** off", resign, call me "another red Tory that needs deselecting" and make physical threats."

"Over 40 Labour MPs and peers joined the demo against antisemitism. Every one of us did so because we are anti-racist and anti-fascist campaigners, and will always challenge all forms of racism, no matter where they appear. We protested, and will do again if we must. Protest forms an important part of our Labour tradition. So does dissent and disagreement. We should always "dare to be a Daniel" and speak out against the prevailing winds. No Labour MP should ever be cowed by the Labour machine into silence, against the voice of our own conscience. As a Jew, I defend my right to speak at rallies against antisemitism. Mr Loach, in calling for Labour MPs to be expunged from the party, undermines Labour’s local election campaigns across the country."

"[On deciding to openly challenge Jeremy Corbyn] It was the Friday before the Monday of the Enough Is Enough demonstration outside Parliament. I hadn't actually seen it [the mural] before then, despite it being discussed on blogs and written about in the JC before. But I didn't get a proper response [from Mr Corbyn], then there was the fight to get the party to adopt the IHRA definition in full, which even at the last moment there was an attempt to undermine. Then there was what became known as the 'summer of antisemitism' - all the connections Jeremy had made, his statements of July, August and September - it really has got worse. More recently, two weeks in a row at the meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party, we had a motion that was unanimously supported by party colleagues calling on the leadership to release the information about antisemitism cases - and we were held with utter contempt. This has been something the leadership has sought to dismiss and turn a blind eye to every step of the way. That is why I have come to the conclusion the party is institutionally antisemitic. I said 'Enough is Enough' and I challenged it from within. Now I mean Enough IS Enough."

"The volume and toxicity of stuff thats come from the left for daring to speak out, for daring to address this, because it's so incongruous with the values that I'm supposed to share with people on the left around anti-Semitism. People believe that there is a place for anti-Semitism on the left, that's what I found particularly challenging and difficult over in particular this past year. Not that it hasn't occurred at all before but it's certainly been given oxygen and I only have to reflect on what I've seen and the volume of it and from those accounts that use the hashtag #JC4PM in their biography."

"I'm glad that I left the Labour party [...] Everything that has happened since then proves that I was right to leave. The great party that I joined is a shell of its former self."

"The abuse didn't stop when I left the Labour party. I have a threshold for how bad it is. If I take a screenshot of something it's pretty bad. Just in the last few days I've taken quite a number of screenshots. They have all come from the left."

"[When asked who was responsible for continuing issue of antisemitism in the Labour Party] I sat in meetings with Jeremy Corbyn. Ultimately the leader is responsible and must take responsibility."

"The last local constituency meeting I attended was so awful, so toxic, there was no humanity in the room. [...]I went into detail about the threats I'd been subjected to — messages handed in to my office saying I was going to get stabbed and raped and have acid thrown on me. I was categorically committed to Labour. I worked seven days a week, true to the values that led me into politics, but because I would not commit to Jeremy Corbyn as prime minister that night, I was dead to them. I thought, "I just cannot be part of this any more.""

"Why do people with antisemitic views think today's Labour party is the right place for them? And why are so many people on the left still averting their eyes? The exit from the party of the Liverpool MP Luciana Berger is a case in point, bluntly summed up by the leftwing Jewish journalist Rachel Shabi: "A Jewish MP left Labour because of the tide of antisemitism directed at her and I don’t think the terrible significance of this has sunk in for chunks of the left.""

"It is almost four years to the day since you left our Labour Party. I say 'our' deliberately. You left because you were forced out by intimidation, thuggery and racism. Yours was a principled and brave move. But it was one you should never have been forced to take. That day will forever be a stain on Labour's history. I don’t need to explain to you the litany of failures that left you — a Labour MP with a huge future ahead of you — no longer feeling welcome in your own party. Instead, I want to once again apologise."

"What you experienced was intolerable and unacceptable. The abuse you suffered was disgusting. You were left isolated and exposed. Shamefully, those who should have defended you stood by. The Labour Party — our party — has always prided itself on being a party of equality, collectivism, solidarity and anti-racism. But during those dark days we were none of those things. Before you were forced out of the party, you were an outstanding member of parliament ... Both the Labour Party and British politics are poorer places without you. I would be honoured to work alongside you in continuing to build a Labour Party we can be proud of again — a Labour Party that can win again."

"People expect to be able to use wi-fi on a train in the same way they would use a toilet."

"We get very complacent about the state of our democracy. We think that because we’ve got parliament, and people get elected, that’s the democracy box ticked. It’s not."

"No, I’m not going on Strictly. I won't dance. Don't ask me. Our primary job is running the country. We've got to a state now where most of us are more fixated on our two-minute clip on Twitter than a sustained, nuanced argument."

"[On the damage done to politician's public reputation by the actions of MPs such as Boris Johnson] We've gone from 45 per cent of people thinking we're all terrible and lying all the time to 80 per cent. That is really problematic. Government is by consent and if the people no longer think that, in the main, parliament is there to defend their rights and freedoms, then the danger is they'll go, "What is the point of democracy?" It's easy for someone to say it's a lot more efficient to just have someone in charge. Why bother with getting things through the House? Why bother with persuading people? That’s the danger."

"Then there is the crucial issue of the Irish border. If, in any deal, Northern Ireland is to be treated differently from the rest of the UK then anyone who believes in the Union could not possibly support that deal. No doubt there will be some flowery EU-speak designed to hide the true intention and we will be told that as it is never intended to be needed then we shouldn’t worry."

"While I understand that Ireland was quite shocked at our decision to Leave, so much of the controversy over the border has been manufactured by it to try to keep Northern Ireland bound by EU regulations and different from the rest of the UK."

"I’m pro-union, I’ll do anything to make sure that the United Kingdom has Northern Ireland as an integral part of it on the same terms as any other part of the United Kingdom when we leave the EU."

"I don't have to believe in conspiracy theories to see that the Irish Government and the European Union have been from day one working closely on tactics particularly relating to the border question."

"I thought our Shadow Foreign Secretary saying she would be campaigning for Remain is quite shocking and goes 100% against our manifesto. More and more people are feeling more confirmed in their views that politicians say one thing in their manifestos and then change their view."

"I'm actually going to be voting in Northern Ireland and unfortunately the Labour Party is so anti-democratic in Northern Ireland that they allow people to join but they don't put up candidates. [...] So I'll be voting for a pro-union candidate in Northern Ireland."

"I'm pro-union. I would not dream of voting for Sinn Fein, I wouldn't dream of voting for the SDLP."

"[The vote for the Conservative Party in the 2019 general election was] what we needed for stability because now the European Union knows that we're not going to revoke Article 50. We're not going to have a second referendum. We're going to get out, and they will have to change their attitude, too, to the negotiations. And we will get, I hope, within the next year a good free trade deal with the European Union. And of course, then we will be discussing with the United States to get an even closer relationship with you as well."

"We can be a successful independent country like the United States, working, cooperating with the rest of the world."

"I think we all kind of know how we got here, that Northern Ireland was sacrificed because it could have been that we weren’t going to get Brexit at all."

"I personally couldn't vote for the Withdrawal Agreement because of Northern Ireland but I could understand many of my colleagues in the Leave campaign because they have to do it."

"There are people in Northern Ireland, leading politicians, who say, and it's true, that Northern Ireland has now become a form of colony. The EU’s first kind of colony."

"If Stormont goes back with the present Windsor Framework, they in fact would be almost like what happened during the war with the Vichy government, where all those [w:Member of the Legislative Assembly (Northern Ireland)|MLAs]] [Members of the Legislative Assembly] would be collaborators with a kind of colonial government."

"Taking foreign laws from a foreign legislature, governing much of our economy in Northern Ireland and keeping us in a foreign customs code whereby GB, Great Britain, our country, where our capital is, becomes a third country, becomes our foreign country – it’s just not acceptable."

"[On Northern Ireland remaining part of the UK] I don't think anyone from a pro-union background should fear Keir Starmer becoming the next prime minister of the United Kingdom."

"[[w:Flag of Ireland|[T]he tricolour]] is not my flag ... I genuinely don't feel Irish. Is there something wrong with that?"

"I was always very cynical about the European Union."

"I don't fit into a mould."

"Kate Hoey is an asset to the Labour Party. She has been a brave and principled fighter for what she believes, and yesterday’s announcement, though understandable, is regrettable. I wish her well."

"I don't live in London, I live in Yorkshire, I live in a working class constituency. I've known Jon [Lansman] for many years – Jon's been around from the Bennite days. I'm afraid the working classes have always been a big disappointed for Jon and his cult. [[Jeremy Corbyn|[Jeremy] Corbyn]] was a disaster on the doorstep. Everyone knew that he couldn't lead the working class out of a paper bag. Now Jon's developed this Momentum group, this party within a party, aiming to keep the purity, the culture of betrayal goes on. You'll hear it more and more now over the next couple of days as this little cult get their act together. I want them out of the party. I want Momentum gone. Go back to your student politics and your little left wing."

"It was a terrible decision and I would like to say I was not involved in that [...] Because there weren't a lot of women in the room making these decisions – we were on the pink bus, which tells you everything you need to know about how valued women were in terms of making the decisions. But it's a big lesson there in terms of chasing celebrities for political points."

"Being so casual and cynical about being happy to lose the Muslim vote plays into a wider darker narrative which Labour doesn't want to fuel, because it's not who we are."

"This relentless Rwanda obsession, every day, the rows, the demands to be more extreme, to defy human rights law and international responsibilities… it’s such sinister madness. The govt has lost it. Eaten up with their own failure. Becoming ever more fascist in their uselessness."

"Or does the Prime Minister's advice to women simply consist of following her example and finding herself a wealthy husband?"

"What is this National Marriage Week? [...] I don't know why my colleagues are suddenly so fond of the word."

"[Primarolo was married to her second husband] [So] you could say I'm into the institution. When I was a single mother my son happily described our family as me, him, our dog and our cats."

"[On her earlier membership of the Campaign Group of left-wing MPs] I was hell-raising. I'm not saying I haven't made my mistakes but I don't regret anything: it's all been part of my learning curve."

"If I were a politician who said, I've never learnt anything and I don't look around me and see that circumstances change [...] then people would say, this person does not deserve to be a Member of Parliament. How can you be responsive to people and allow your own politics and ideas to develop if you don't take on change."

"We used to go in the chamber and sit next to each other when one of us spoke to support the speaking member, because the catcalls across the chamber were designed, as they always are, to undermine you and put you off."

"[On dealing with sexism from male MPs] One of our colleagues from the northern group had complained about Mo [Mowlam]'s swearing, and he was in the tea room when we got there. So she said: "Oh, it's all right, I won't swear today. But you need to understand the real problems I'm having with my period." I've never seen anybody run faster out of the tea rooms."

"Wharton’s refusal to Narendra Modi weakens free speech and the quest for justice in 2002 riot cases... In order to listen to someone, one does not need to be an ardent follower or a bitter critic... Freedom of expression knows no boundary. The more we listen to people and ideas, the more enriched we get. When an educational institution gets prescriptive on the kind of speech one can and cannot listen to on the campus, it kills intellectual freedom, a democratic idea that the U.S.A., India, and the U.K. have cherished from times immemorial...Cancelling lectures will not help, in fact it will present Modi- baiters in [a] poor light that they have extinguished all points of reason and debate to have had to resort to such an action...As a Gujarati myself, I consider it to be a gross insult that the chief minister of my state, however wrong one may feel he is, cannot express his views at a global forum, such as the one in Wharton, because a few in the audience don’t like him...."

"A stranger to the spirit of the law as it was evolved through centuries in England will always find its history a curious one. Looking first at the early English Common Law, its most striking feature is the enormous extent to which its founders concerned themselves with remedies before settling the substantive rules for breach of which the remedies were required. Nowhere else, unless perhaps in the law of ancient Rome, do we see such a spectacle of legal writs making legal rights."

"The moral of the whole story is the hopelessness of attempting to study Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence apart from the history of its growth and of the characters of the judges who created it. It is by no accident that among Anglo-Saxon lawyers the law does not assume the form of codes, but is largely judge-made. We have statutory codes for portions of the field which we have to cover. But those statutory codes come, not at the beginning, but at the end. For the most part the law has already been made by those who practise it before the codes embody it. Such codes with us arrive only with the close of the day, after its heat and burden have been borne, and when the journey is already near its end."

"Conscience and, for that matter, law overlap parts of the sphere of social obligation about which I am speaking. A rule of conduct may, indeed, appear in more than one sphere, and may consequently have a twofold sanction. But the guide to which the citizen mostly looks is just the standard recognised by the community, a community made up mainly of those fellow-citizens whose good opinion he respects and desires to have. He has everywhere round him an object-lesson in the conduct of decent people towards each other and towards the community to which they belong. Without such conduct and the restraints which it imposes there could be no tolerable social life, and real freedom from interference would not be enjoyed. It is the instinctive sense of what to do and what not to do in daily life and behaviour that is the source of liberty and ease. And it is this instinctive sense of obligation that is the chief foundation of society. Its reality takes objective shape and displays itself in family life and in our other civic and social institutions"

"Indeed the civic community is more than a political fabric. It includes all the social institutions in and by which the individual life is influenced—such as are the family, the school, the church, the legislature, and the executive. None of these can subsist in isolation from the rest; together they and other institutions of the kind form a single organic whole, the whole which is known as the Nation."

"There are few observers who have not been impressed with the wonderful unity and concentration of purpose which an entire nation may display—above all, in a period of crisis. We see it in time of war, when a nation is fighting for its life or for a great cause. We have seen it in Japan, and we have seen it still more recently even among the peoples of the Balkan Peninsula. We have marvelled at the illustrations with which history abounds of the General Will rising to heights of which but few of the individual citizens in whom it is embodied have ever before been conscious even in their dreams."

"There is growing up a disposition to believe that it is good, not only for all men but for all nations, to consider their neighbours' point of view as well as their own. There is apparent at least a tendency to seek for a higher standard of ideals in international relations. The barbarism which once looked to conquest and the waging of successful war as the main object of statesmanship, seems as though it were passing away. There have been established rules of International Law which already govern the conduct of war itself, and are generally observed as binding by all civilised people, with the result that the cruelties of war have been lessened. If practice falls short of theory, at least there is to-day little effective challenge of the broad principle that a nation has as regards its neighbours duties as well as rights."

"In the year which is approaching, a century will have passed since the United States and the people of Canada and Great Britain terminated a great war by the Peace of Ghent. On both sides the combatants felt that war to be unnatural and one that should never have commenced. And now we have lived for nearly a hundred years, not only in peace, but also, I think, in process of coming to a deepening and yet more complete understanding of each other, and to the possession of common ends and ideals, ends and ideals which are natural to the Anglo-Saxon group, and to that group alone. It seems to me that within our community there is growing an ethical feeling which has something approaching to the binding quality of which I have been speaking"

"In the welter of sentimentality, amid which Great Britain might easily have mouldered into ruin, my valued colleague, Lord Haldane, presented a figure alike interesting, individual, and arresting. In speech fluent and even infinite he yielded to no living idealist in the easy coinage of sentimental phraseology. Here, indeed, he was a match for those who distributed the chloroform of Berlin. Do we not remember, for instance, that Germany was his spiritual home? But he none the less prepared himself, and the Empire, to talk when the time came with his spiritual friends in language not in the least spiritual. He devised the Territorial Army, which was capable of becoming the easy nucleus of national conscription, and which unquestionably ought to have been used for that purpose at the outbreak of war. He created the Imperial General Staff. He founded the Officers' Training Corps."

"Mr. Asquith had decided that the time had come when his Ministry ought to be reconstituted on a national instead of a party basis. He had invited the Conservative leaders to enter into a coalition, and they had agreed, but on conditions. One condition was that Haldane should not be included. A discreditable newspaper campaign had attacked him as pro-German, although in fact no man in the whole country had more clearly realised the danger of a German aggression, and no man had done more than he, as Secretary of State at the War Office, to initiate great reforms in the organisation, expansion, and equipment of the army to prepare it for such an eventuality. Haldane had been for many years an intimate friend of Asquith's and was his closest political associate. Now he had to choose—for the condition was insisted upon—between inflicting upon him what he knew to be a cruel injustice, or else failing in his duty to construct a combined Government to carry on the war."

"I wasn't going to struggle with someone wearing a huge sword on their hip."

"The Conservative Party have an aim to break up our country. They aim to destroy our NHS and we will say no. We will fight them in the Parliament, we will fight them in the courts, we will fight them in the workplaces and we will fight them in the streets."

"I did not plan to say this, but during the pandemic, my second cousin—a 15-year-old boy—died in a tragic accident of auto-asphyxiation. It devastated the family, as can be imagined, and happened in the pandemic when we were only allowed six people at the funeral. If he had been taught about risky sex acts—he was 15, not a pre-pubescent child—and how to make sure he did things safely, rather than just learning something from the internet that then led to the end of his life, he might still be around and his family might not be devastated. So, actually, because of that personal experience I do have a problem with saying that we should not teach any of this to our children."

"This complaint has had a deep and lasting impact on me and my health, but with this ordeal now over, I am looking forward to putting this year behind me with my reputation restored."

"I genuinely felt that my work was beginning to help shape the potential Labour Government's stance on housing, energy, and climate issues, as well as scrutinising the Cabinet Office and constitutional matters. We were making steady progress. I am disappointed not to have been able to continue this important work."

"I still like to be underestimated because it gives me an edge. It gives me a bit of stealth."

"On things like law and order I am quite hardline. I am like, shoot your terrorists and ask questions second."

"I want you to beat down the door of the criminals and sort them out and antagonise them. That’s what I say to my local police … three o’clock in the morning and antagonise them."

"I guess you could say that, moving from banking, I am one of the few people entering politics to be going to a more popular profession."

"Until this government's formation just over a year ago, every generation of women has enjoyed greater opportunity. My great-grandmother was a cockle picker on the south coast of Wales, my grandmother worked in shoe factories, and my mother is a primary school teacher. But this expectation that women of the next generation will do better than the one before is now fundamentally threatened."

"Unless you take swift action in the wake of a financial crisis the problems stick around for 10 to 20 years."

"The real cause of what is happening now is a terrorist attack. If Britain or any other country was attacked by terrorists, we would believe, and rightly so, that we have every right to defend ourselves, to get back hostages and to protect our citizens. Israel is no different. It has every right to defend itself. [...] Of course, it has to abide by international rules of engagement."

"I want to see a Palestinian state existing alongside a safe and secure Israel and what frustrates me so much is that what Hamas has done over the last few days has set back the cause of peace that I am so desperate to see in the Middle East and that people across Labour are desperate to see in the Middle East. But terrorism is not the way to get there and I am appalled by what we have seen."

"I also know that many of you have concerns closer to home, about the antisemitism, the anti-Zionism and the anti-Israeli feeling that is allowed to flourish in some communities in Britain. And so we stand alongside you here at home as well and will ensure that the police do everything within their powers to hold responsible anybody who behaves in that way here at home. And we stand in solidarity with the Jewish community here in Britain, not just today but every single day."

"“I feel like in many ways, I’m standing on their shoulders… I believe the biggest impact that I can make to the lives of ordinary women, women who go out to work, is to close the gender pay gap once and for all.”"

"“I’m not going to let [critics] stop me from doing what this government’s got a mandate to do, and that is to grow the economy, to make working people better off.”"

"“In too many areas, regulation still acts as a boot on the neck of businesses, choking off the enterprise and innovation that is the lifeblood of growth.”"

"“The global economy has become more uncertain … The increased global uncertainty has had two consequences. First, on our public finances. And second, on the economy.”"

"“These fiscal rules are non-negotiable. They are the embodiment of this government’s unwavering commitment to bring stability to our economy.”"

"“We are renewing Britain. But I know that too many people in too many parts of our country are yet to feel it. This government’s task, my task as Chancellor and the purpose of this spending review is to change that.”"

"“This is going to be the most pro-growth, pro-business Treasury that this country has ever seen.”"

"“We have seen global economic uncertainty play out in the last week. But leadership is not about ducking these challenges, it is about rising to them. The economic headwinds that we face are a reminder that we should – indeed, we must – go further and faster in our plan to kick-start economic growth.”"

"“Growth … is now our national mission.”"

"“This government was given a mandate. To restore stability to our country, and to begin a decade of national renewal. … To deliver that investment we must restore economic stability and turn the page on the last 14 years"

"“The government will change its self-imposed debt rules in order to free up billions for infrastructure spending … so that we can grow our economy and bring jobs and growth to Britain.”"

"“The most recent GDP … are very positive … That is good news and does show we are beginning to turn the corner.”"

"“Without growth, we cannot cut hospital waiting lists or put more police on the streets. … Without growth, we cannot meet our climate goals… or give the next generation the opportunities that they need to thrive.”"

"“I’m confident that our plans, far from increasing poverty, will actually result in more people having fulfilling work, paying a decent wage to lift themselves and their families out of poverty.”"

"“Today I am taking immediate action to fix Britain’s economic foundations. … By growing our economy we can rebuild Britain and make every part of the country better off.”"

"“That is why we on this side of the house are serious about taking the action needed to grow our economy. Backing the builders, not the blockers.”"

"I rather miss the old days"

"Unlike prime ministers, leaders of the Opposition suffer from the handicap that often their only weapons are words, not deeds. That's why their actions in how they deal with their own party are used as a proxy for leadership."

"My faith is the centrepoint of my life and it drives me to public service, it drives me in the way that I life my life and I see my life.I believe that life is a gift from God, but it's also a test. I feel like I've been very blessed in my life. But every blessing is a test. It's not just something you bank for yourself. You should almost fear your success because now you have to answer for it. You have to use it for good. And that's how I think about my political career."

"[On her decision not to serve in Jeremy Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet] I don't like anything that smells of fundamentalism in any way, religious or political or ideological, it doesn't really matter what it is, in the end. It's quite authoritarian in nature, and in my own life experience of people that are most intransigent and the most prescriptive about what everyone else can say and think and do tend not to be the best of people themselves."

"Hashtag movements are sometimes used to shut down debate and often many women have had to go to court, usually in employment tribunals, in order to clarify their rights to free speech.To clarify their right to believe that for example because you referenced JK Rowling, clarify their right to say that biological sex is real and is immutable – a position that I also agree with."

"I know what a Muslim looks like. A Muslim looks like me. I know what Muslim values are. Muslim values are mine."

"Mine is the patriotism of Orwell. Pride in a country that is forever changing, while also, ineffably, always the same. It is a love of this country as an open, tolerant and generous place. But that broad vision of who we are is increasingly disputed. Patriotism, a force for good, is turning into something smaller. Something more like ethno-nationalism, which struggles to accept that someone who looks like me, and has a faith like mine, can truly be English or British."

"AI and technology can be transformative to the whole of the law and order space.When I was in justice, my ultimate vision for that part of the criminal justice system was to achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon. That is that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times.Similarly, in the world of policing, in particular, we’ve already been rolling out live facial recognition technology, but I think there’s big space here for being able to harness the power of AI and tech to get ahead of the criminals, frankly, which is what we’re trying to do."

"The deputy head teacher, Mr Hurst, who was a very fierce character, sent a message to me in class and said he wanted to see me in his office immediately. He said he'd got the list of students who'd signed up for this trip to Oxford [University] and my name wasn't on it, and he expected my name to be on it by the end of the day. The year that I went to Oxford there were six of us that went to Oxford or Cambridge from my state school, which was the best they'd ever achieved."

"Before I was an MP I managed a women's refuge, so I know more than most how important it is that women, especially those who have experienced male violence, sexual violence and trauma, are able to access safe therapeutic spaces, and alongside that, that we make sure that everyone in our society is treated with dignity and respect."

"I speak for the government on this matter, and I can be crystal clear with you that we welcome the ruling."

"I think it is important and welcome that the supreme court have put beyond doubt that providers can make sure that is done on the basis of biological sex [...] I do believe it is important that when women have experienced male violence they are able to heal, that they are able to access the therapeutic support that is required. What they have said consistently, and what campaigners have worked for over many decades, is to ensure that that provision does exist and can be single-sex. And the ruling has made that clear, and made it clear beyond any doubt."

"Henry VII."

"This tweet from the BBC is crass and unnecessary. Do we really need silly innuendo about the race of the next Pope?"

"as Caribbean people we are not going to forget our history — we don't just want to hear an apology, we want reparation!"

"I am here, because you were there. We are here, because you were there."

"My own career in law and politics owes so much to the U.S., which gave me the honor of becoming the first black Briton to study at Harvard Law School. The land of the free has overwhelmingly been a force for progress around the world. When Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of his dreams for emancipation in the 1950s and 1960s, he empowered black people far beyond America’s 50 states."

"The president's threats to NATO and the U.N. are no more logical than arson. His trade wars with the E.U. and China could trigger the next great economic crisis of our times. Trump is not only a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathizing sociopath. He is also a profound threat to the international order that has been the foundation of Western progress for so long."

"The world does not need any more white saviours. As I’ve said before, this just perpetuates tired and unhelpful stereotypes. Let’s instead promote voices from across the continent of Africa and have serious debate."

"I would say that that wasn't strong enough... I don't care how elected they were: so was the far right in Germany."

"You're going to struggle to find any politician in the Western world who hasn't had things to say in response to Donald Trump."

""We cannot be blown off course by an imperialist fascist" (Talking about Vladimir Putin)"

"I believe fundamentally in people's right to self-ID. [...] I think that crimes that are recorded should be recorded as that person wishes, having gone through that process, received support and self-identified. I think trans women are women, I think trans men are men, so I think they should be accommodated in a prison of their choosing."

"No, I don't. I care deeply about safe spaces for women. I know from personal experience there is a generation of women who fought very hard to create and protect safe spaces, that it matters. Where you have women who want to have a genuine debate about how better to protect them, it's a very welcome debate. But that has to start with the recognition that trans men are men, trans women are women and that they exist."

"This is Schindler's List time. These women were in mortal danger. They were running courts on things like domestic violence and child marriage and many of them locked up [the] Taliban. As soon as [the] Taliban came back they had to flee."

"[On the situation for women in Afghanistan after the 2020–2021 U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan] They were not allowed to leave home without a male escort. They were not allowed to go to work. They were not allowed to continue with their education. Their sex became the limitation on what they could do or be. This is true for all women and girls in Afghanistan under the Taliban reign."

"I have still got women sending me the most tragic, terrible text messages and phoning me at all hours, saying "please help me, I am hiding in my basement, I didn't get on your planes in 2021 because my mother was dying, I couldn't leave at the time, but now they are after me.""

"Sometimes they are Afghanis who have worked for us. Sometimes they are Afghanis of a particular minority called the Hazara, who get slaughtered as soon as the Taliban look at them."

"Her fearlessness in the face of grave danger made her one of the few international journalists whom human rights activists and lawyers held in awe."

"We owed her a debt of gratitude for helping the West reach a far better understanding of the emerging landscape in post-Soviet Russia and for shining a clearer light on the true nature of the occupation of Chechnya, a brutal conflict wilfully misprepresented as Russia's private front in the war on terror. No democracy is worthy of the name if freedom of the press is curtailed or writers and journalists are crushed; yet here was a writer who – at great personal risk – defied state intimidation to speak truth to power."

"As this collection of her writings shows, the reach of her journalism extended far beyond coverage of individual cataclysmic events. She frequently lifted the veil on more systematic inhumanity which did not attract as much international interest. Her tenacious investigations involved dogged correspondence and days sitting in court."

"Anna painted a haunting portrait of Putin's Russia, a country governed by an administration which bore many of the hallmarks of Stalin's; here was a land whose own secret services suppressed civil liberties and where fear stalked universities, newsrooms and every corridor in which democracy might have flourished."

"I remember taking leave of her the night of the award [PEN] and asking whether she might not think of leaving Russia, at least temporarily. She held my hand, smiling, and said, 'Exile is not for me. That way they win'."

"The legislation was finally added to the Digital Economy Bill (now the Digital Economy Act) by a last-minute Government amendment following a long-running campaign by ALCS and SoA. We work from the basic position that creators should be rewarded for their work. If they are not, then they may decide not to create any more, which would be seriously bad news for the UK economy. It is estimated that our creative industries generate £8 million every single hour and that, by 2018, the annual figure will be £100 billion. Writers are at the very heart of this. Books, film, television, even computer games: where would any of these be without writers?"

"As I said earlier, we believe that writers should be rewarded for their work. PLR is not a huge income stream for most authors: it amounts to 7.82p per loan and is subject to an annual cap of £6,600 per recipient. However, writers will tell you that they find it extremely gratifying to know their books are being read and this provides a source of encouragement for them to continue writing. Writers, illustrators, photographers, translators and editors are also eligible for PLR. The Government has now guaranteed that an annual fund of £6.6 million will be made available for PLR up to 2019."

"With the development of e-books, we have long thought that PLR should be extended to the remote lending of e-books by public libraries. Previously, writers received no recognition at all of the value of their work to the public consumption and enjoyment of literature through e-books. To achieve our aim, it would require legislation. We therefore set about the task of lobbying Government ministers and both Houses of Parliament to persuade them there was a need for the moral rights of writers to be acknowledged in the age of developing technology which had facilitated the remote public lending of e-books."

"The new arrangements will officially take effect from 1 July 2018, and any payments arising from the newly eligible loans will be made in February 2020."

"The great thing is that remote e-book loans will receive the same PLR rate per loan as print titles and audio titles, and the terms for receiving PLR will also remain the same."

"We have been lucky to be supported by so many members of both Houses of Parliament, and Government ministers too. The Rt Hon John Whittingdale MP, former Culture Secretary, and the former Creative Industries Minister, the Rt Hon Ed Vaizey MP, deserve thanks for all their efforts to make this happen. So too does Lord Clement-Jones, who helped to move an earlier amendment in the House of Lords, and has worked tirelessly to help us on this and many other issues of concern to writers; and Baroness Tessa Jowell, who has been a valuable source of advice. Also members of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, particularly Paul Farrelly MP, and current chair, Damian Collins MP. Kevin Brennan MP also helped tremendously. But it would be remiss of me not to mention especially the late Baroness (Ruth) Rendell, who served as secretary of the All Party Writers Group for many years and was always ready to wade in on our behalf. And finally, Dr Jim Parker, former head of UK PLR and now coordinator of PLR International."

"The All Party Writers Group has 61 members now, across both Houses of Parliament and all political parties, including many published writers. It is an invaluable source of support to enable us to speak up for writers, and ensure they are properly rewarded for their work and that their concerns are brought to the attention of those who can make a difference on their behalf."

"There will always be more work to be done. We are currently turning our attention to unfair contracts for writers and trying to make sure that writers are aware of their rights and how to ensure they are enforced. As the mother-in-law of a successful published writer, I am well aware of the need to campaign on this!"

"As a former minister in the Department of Culture, Media & Sport, I would like the Department to be taken more seriously across government. It tends to be regarded as a small, and relatively inconsequential, government department. Nothing could be further from the truth. It deals with issues that directly affect everyone’s quality of life. The enjoyment of literature and the wider contribution of the creative industries generally is central to that. We will continue to stand up and campaign for that on behalf of the creative industries, but, in particular for the 90,000 writer members of ALCS."

"Janet Anderson is a former MP for Rossendale and Darwen, as well as a former Minister in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). She chaired the All Party Parliamentary Writers Group from 2009 – 2010 and is currently assisting ALCS in our lobbying activities."

"Superficially, he is a black man. He went to Eton, I think; he went to a very expensive prep school, all the way through, the top schools in the country. If you hear him on the Today programme, you wouldn't know he is black."

"Feminism is, by its very nature, about the validation of difference and Otherness - the female as 'the first step on the road along abnormality'. All I am doing is arguing that we go down that road a little further and pick up a few more allies and friends; if for no other reason than the fact that half of the disabled community are our sisters."

"The ideological driven philosophy of the Conservatives that 'if we do not legally have to do it - don't do it at all' is the opposite of what any fair, equal and just society should be."

"We [Wolverhampton] have been a city for 19 years and they need to catch up. Are they that out of touch that they did not bother to look it up?"

"What is certain is that disability, the wheelchair, is often much more fascinating than the dullness of the ordinary, i.e., the 'normal'."

"The Labour Party has strayed from the core values I once shared with the Party. My political beliefs prevent me from compromising my principles for a party that appears to have none. The democratic fabric of the Labour Party has been compromised under your leadership, Keir Starmer, becoming increasingly autocratic that marginalises diverse voices, especially those of women, people of colour, Muslims, and Jews. This betrayal of democratic ideals, along with the party's major shift towards antisemitism and islamophobia, is unacceptable."

"The Labour Party’s commitment to continued austerity and Brexit will further undermine jobs, education, and opportunities in our city. This abandonment of the working class is inexcusable."

"The Labour Party's stance on Palestine is morally wrong and ignores the suffering of the Palestinian people. I support the United Nations and the UN Human Rights Council calls for an immediate and permanent ceasefire, as well as an immediate ban on arms sales to Israel as well as sanctions."

"This honour is not just for me, but for Wolverhampton itself—a city of resilience, creativity, and community spirit. It belongs to every individual and organisation that works tirelessly to make our city a better place."

"It is a sad woman who buys her own perfume."

"I'll continue to use the platform [i.e. TikTok] because I think it's really effective in reaching out to newer audiences, younger audiences and getting out political messages."

"The only way we can actually change things is to have a Labour government that is bold and ambitious. … I think it's really important to take inspiration from previous governments, especially the Attlee government of '45. We saw a country that was completely destroyed by war and the answers of that Labour government weren't to tinker around the edges."

"We should be becoming a more decentralised country because that's where people feel like they can actually change things. Otherwise, things seem distant; things seem like they just happen in Westminster. If we could give combined authorities more power at local government, then that would be really positive."

"We're not here to beg for crumbs off the table, we're taking the fucking lot."

"Billionaires already have three parties fighting for them. It's time the rest of us had one."

"I had never previously thought of myself as privileged, but I realised that because of the sheer accident of where I was born and what passport I held, I was treated differently by the Israeli authorities. I watched as they harassed and abused Palestinians and then related to me as a regular human being."

"Between 2015 and 2019 I had friends and colleagues who worked at the top of the Labour Party, and they can tell you that in parts it was a highly dysfunctional working environment with toxicity and bullying – not from Jeremy, but from some people around him. Power was too centralised. This is not what we need for this emerging project. … Everyone has to feel that they’re involved and the organisation has to be representative of wider society. That also means we can’t soft-pedal our anti-racism. Some people want us to focus solely on the 'economic issues'. But if the politics of class is detached from the politics of race then it is bound to fail – because when our neighbours are being simultaneously targeted for eviction and deportation, that struggle is one and the same."

"What are our long-term goals? More time with our loved ones, more green space, universal childcare, free public transport, not worrying about bills. These are things that Farage and Starmer don't talk about."

"What we need is a politics of fun and joy. We're not interested in meetings where everyone's got a point of order and they talk for twenty minutes each. Do you think the sixteen year-olds who are soon to get the vote will want to sit through that? The new project should engage that generation by embedding itself in mass culture."

"The biggest threats we all face today aren't military invasions. It's the rise of the far right, it is global pandemics, it is climate catastrophe and economic crises. And NATO cannot solve any of these."

"My grandparents came to this country after Britain's rulers looted their homeland. We're here, as Sivanandan said, because you were there."

"The people running Labour at the moment need to ask themselves why a young, articulate, talented, extremely dedicated socialist feels she now has no home in the Labour Party and has to leave."

"First, a police force which has consistently put protecting itself above protecting people harmed by Hillsborough. Second, collusion between that force and complicit print media. Third, a flawed judicial system that gives the upper hand to those in authority over and above ordinary people. Shamefully, the cover-up continued in this Warrington courtroom. Millions of pounds of public money were spent re-telling discredited lies."

"What we've seen today is a deliberate act of levelling down. I don't believe we can proceed through this pandemic by grinding people down. We need to carry them with us, not crush their spirit."

"[on seeking permission to stand as an MP in 2026] It brings with it a poison we should not let enter our city-region. I see this by-election as the frontline of that fight for the Manchester Way and feel I owe it to a city which has given me so much to lead it from the front, despite the risks involved. With your permission to stand, I would run a hopeful and unifying campaign with broad appeal to voters, focusing on the positivity around what we have achieved, whilst at the same time being honest about the alienation people feel from politics."

"Yesterday Andy Burnham sought such permission from the NEC to stand in the Gorton and Denton parliamentary by-election, which would have led to a mayoral by-election in Greater Manchester.The NEC has decided not to grant Andy Burnham permission to stand. The NEC believes that causing an unnecessary election for the position of Greater Manchester mayor would have a substantial and disproportionate impact on party campaign resources before the local elections and elections to the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Senedd in MayAlthough the party would be confident of retaining the mayoralty, the NEC could not put Labour’s control of Greater Manchester at any riskAndy Burnham is doing a great job as mayor of Greater Manchester. We believe it is in the best interests of the party to avoid an unnecessary mayoral election."

"We just didn't understand that they [the Islamists] were not just anti-Western but on a different plane altogether and this is still not widely understood in the UK... We can be as nice as pie to them but that's not the issue. They are on a mission that has taken them outside anything we can say, a mission to destroy completely our way of life... Because they think it's 'just a few extremists,' they are continuing to track the threat of big spectacular attacks, looking for example at transfers of materials for bombs, whereas what they should be looking at is what's going on inside people's heads."