Presidents Of The Board Of Trade United Kingdom

"I don’t remember minding. I remember thinking it was all a bit sad that those were his views. I probably thought it was a bit unfair – but, you know, life is unfair."

"But I’m under no illusions whatsoever that there will be a big screaming queue outside Keir’s door if we win."

"Every winter that I remember in my childhood, he was gravely ill and seemed to be nearly dying."

"I was an engineering apprentice when there were 20 of us [women] out of 2,000 – and I was the only woman on my course for a part of it. You would just get used to how bitchy men are."

"you had a discussion in shadow cabinet, John would always genuinely want to hear everybody’s point of view. Tony and Gordon not so much, especially if someone was long-winded and not pertinent"

"It’s this having your own facts. I’ve always believed in evidence-based policymaking, but if the evidence isn’t acceptable no matter how strong it is, that’s uncharted waters. Quite frightening waters."

"I knew that most of my shadow cabinet colleagues didn’t support me at all, and probably most of the PLP [parliamentary Labour party].” Why not? “I think some of them probably thought I shouldn’t have been deputy anyway, a mere woman"

"I was positive that the Labour party had much too much sense to elect him"

"What people overlook is the impact – not in the sense of: ‘You’ve rejected what we said, how dare you?’ but having to join the euro, having to be in Schengen, not having all the concessions that we had won through successive governments."

"I always resented the people who wrote in and said to new, young women MPs: ‘You ought to be campaigning on X or Y because that’s what a woman politician should do"

"Just because you get married doesn’t mean you don’t need to work."

"I thought that he ought to be able to see that he wasn’t suitable, he wasn’t up to the job. He wasn’t rude, but it had no effect."

"He said: ‘There’s a simple rule of thumb: if you can’t stop the story, especially if it’s untrue, then the chances are that there’s somebody on your side briefing it.’ And I pretty soon discovered that there was – one of my most admired colleagues"

"I never expected that I would ever in my life think: ‘I wonder if there’s somewhere better to live.’ I have thought it once or twice in the last couple of years, which to me is extraordinary."

"I remember one of my north‑east colleagues saying firmly in the tearoom one afternoon that there wasn’t a woman in the parliamentary party who was fit to be in the shadow cabinet"

"We meet on what neither of us knows will be the eve of the announcement of a snap general election. She decided, years ago, that she would retire at the next election, not because she was slowing down (at 81, she is as sharp as ever), but because Leo was. They always came as a package – he shelved his political ambitions to support hers, even attending her Whitehall meetings as an adviser – and she planned to spend her retirement looking after him, but he died in December 2021. Carrying on alone hasn’t always been easy."

"I remember when I was at college, at some do or another, people were passing round the bottle and I was – like everyone else – swigging out of it. And somebody was saying: ‘Oh no no no, you’re not somebody who should ever be seen swigging out of a bottle.’ It was the same sort of reaction,” she says, with a hint of satisfaction. There is a stubborn streak in Beckett, a dogged refusal to be pigeonholed or cowed, that has underpinned an extraordinary half-century in politics."

"There’s nobody there when you go home, which is the experience of everybody who is widowed,” she says. “It’s there not being anyone to do the zip up or catch that awkward necklace – and I’m starting to get a bit of rheumatism in my hands."

"He said to me: ‘You don’t do intimidation, do you, Margaret?’ And I hadn’t thought about it – haven’t thought about it since, really – but I sort of knew what he meant."

"My immediate response was that we must make sure that there’s no pressure on him to go – we must protect him, shield him, make sure he’s got through it, because I was confident that he could be got through it and carry on."

"I think probably we could have done more to help people to understand what was happening, and why, and that that would have laid a bit of foundation. Whereas support for what was being done was being taken for granted"

"must be my greatest achievement, because so many people who had nothing to do with it tell me it was their greatest achievement"

"I recall a phrase of that incorrigible cynic Labouchere, alluding to Mr. Gladstone's frequent appeals to a higher power, that he did not object to the old man always having a card up his sleeve, but he did object to his insinuating that the Almighty had placed it there."

"Democrats are told that they are dreamers, and why? Because they assert that, if power be placed in the hands of the many, the many will exercise it for their own benefit Is it not a still wilder dream to suppose that the many will in future possess power, and use it not to secure what they consider to be their interests, but to serve those of others? Is it imagined that artisans in our great manufacturing towns are so satisfied with their present position that they will hurry to the polls to register their votes in favor of a system which divides us socially, politically, and economically, to classes, and places them at the bottom with hardly a possibility of using? Is the lot (of the agricultural labourer) so happy a one that he will humbly and cheerfully affix his cross to the name of the man who tells him that it can never be changed for the better? We know that artisans and agricultural labourers will approach the consideration of political and social problems with fresh and vigorous minds For the moment, we demand the equahsation of the franchise Our next demands will be electoral districts, cheap elections, payment of members, and abolition of hereditary legislators When our demands are complied with, we shall be thankful, but we shall not rest On the contrary, having forged an instrument for democratic legislation, we shall use it."

"Labouchere was the incurable cynic who mocked, at everybody, including himself."

"This is all a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe. It has to be thwarted. This rushed take-over by the Germans on the worst possible basis, with the French behaving like poodles to the Germans, is absolutely intolerable." ... "When I look at the institutions to which it is proposed that sovereignty is to be handed over, I'm aghast. Seventeen unelected reject politicians [...] with no accountability to anybody, who are not responsible for raising taxes, just spending money, who are pandered to by a supine parliament which also is not responsible for raising taxes, already behaving with an arrogance I find breathtaking - the idea that one says, 'OK, we'll give this lot our sovereignty' is unacceptable to me. I'm not against giving up sovereignty in principle, but not to this lot. You might just as well give it to Adolf Hitler, frankly."

"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."

"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 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."

"At the [1983] election, Labour got stuck, thanks to P. Shore, as the party which favoured borrowing – another thing the British don't like."

"I'll tell you who I think has developed remarkably: Peter Shore. He's really become very impressive."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Peter was one of my very oldest political friends and a man of outstanding commitment and ability. He was someone who enriched public life."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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?"

"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!"

"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."

"Britain's relationship with the English-speaking Commonwealth was closer than that with the Continent. That is how the British people feel."

"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?"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Let us repress the spirit of hatred. We are justly indignant at the way in which the enemy Powers have waged war. We trust that our victory will warn the world that such methods must never be resorted to again, and that those guilty of them will be punished. But is it wise to talk of banning a whole people for all time to come? The German people are under a harsh and tyrannous rule, which has not only deceived and misled them, but silences any protest—and there are those who wish to protest—against its crimes. Some day, we hope, they will overthrow it, when they have learnt the truth. To indulge revenge will be to sow the seeds of future wars. Nations cannot hate one another for ever, and the sooner they cease to do so the better for all of them. We must of course take all proper steps to defend ourselves in future from any dangers that might arise if after the war the enemy countries were to resume an insidious hostility. That is at present no more than a possibility which may never arise."