Women Activists From England

"Men are not as scared to lose and they’ve got a lot more time to devote to, not exactly pointless things, but to being good at things like Countdown."

"More than other subjects there’s a myth that you have to be an absolute genius to be good at maths and to enjoy it, so I think it’s less accessible for people. Even the word “maths” makes people screw their face up."

"I’m really interested in male and female brains and whether female brains or male brains are better at maths. You sit men and women down and give them a maths test and they will do fairly equally. Then you set up the same test, but with different people, and make them tick a box to say whether they are a man or a woman, and the women do significantly worse in the maths test than they did previously in a group set."

"I just passed two cars in West London driving with Palestinian flags flying from each window, bouncing up and down in their cars, seemingly celebrating like they were having a party. Make no mistake, this is a dangerous and terrifying time for all Jews around the world."

"When you tell people that you are studying maths at uni, they are like, “Oh …”. Especially a blonde Essex girl."

"Would I employ you if you were obese? No I would not. You would give the wrong impression to the clients of my business. I need people to look energetic, professional and efficient. If you are obese you look lazy."

"The difference between most mothers and me is that I didn't sit around drinking coffee at baby group for 12 months after the birth of my baby. No, in three weeks I was back in my suit, back at my desk earning profit for my business and I don’t see why other women shouldn't do the same."

"I'm not sorry for stealing my husband from his wife."

"Women don’t want equal treatment, they couldn’t handle it if they got it. It’s a tough world out there. What a lot of women are actually looking for is special treatment. What women need to realise is that they have to toughen up."

"Ramadan typically brings a spike in violence in Middle East. I get grumpy when I don't eat - but I don't blow things up. Religion of peace?"

"If we were in government and David [Cameron] didn't give me a front bench position, I would barricade myself inside his office until he did."

"I started blogging because I believe my constituents, who pay me, have a right to know what I get up to in Westminster. Many MPs are so secretive about how they spend their time but I say b******s to that."

"Do you know the people who have no voice in this country? Who are never written about, who journalists never talk about? The mums. Mums who decide that they will give up their careers and stay at home and look after their children."

"I am not an MP for any reason other than because God wants me to be. There is nothing I did that got me here; it is what God did. There is nothing amazing or special about me, I am just a conduit for God to use."

"[In the 2005–2010 parliament, it was] very difficult to talk about the family unit, and to talk about mothers and children . . . as the foundation of society, because it was seen as a very unsexy, untrendy thing to do and the opposite of what a woman should be doing."

"On the pro-life side of the fence, the public takes little notice of those who want to abolish abortion. They are dismissed as extremists. If I were to argue that all abortions should be banned, the ethical discussions would go round in circles because one person’s opinion is as valid as another's. My view is that the only way forward is to argue for a reduction in the time limit."

"My blog is 70% fiction and 30% fact. It is written as a tool to enable my constituents to know me better and to reassure them of my commitment to Mid Bedfordshire. I rely heavily on poetic licence and frequently replace one place name/event/fact with another."

"Nadine Dorries has exposed the split in the Conservative party between vulgarity and conformity. The decision of the MP for Mid Bedfordshire to go on I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here! is an astonishingly rude attack on the well-bred, self-controlled establishment headed by David Cameron."

"Let us examine first the case of the Tory MP Nadine Dorries, who was cleared last month by the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner of wrongly claiming some £60,000 in second-home allowances. Central to Dorries's defence was her assertion that she spent the bulk of her time in her old house in the Cotswolds (billed as her primary home) rather than her Bedfordshire constituency, which she stated was her secondary residence (and, therefore, allowable for expenses). Here, though, Dorries ran into an apparently insuperable problem: she had incriminated herself in her blog by giving the strong impression that she spent the majority of her time in Bedfordshire. Miss Dorries got around this difficulty by informing the parliamentary standards commissioner [about her blog being "70 per cent fiction and 30 per cent fact...".]"

"In other words, her blog was, for the most part, a lie, designed to give constituents the impression that she was doing her duty as a diligent MP in Bedfordshire when actually she was in another part of the country altogether. This is a wretched state of affairs and if David Cameron were a Tory leader who valued integrity and honesty, he would surely have ordered Miss Dorries to apologise personally to her constituents, and stripped her of the party whip there and then. Instead, he has done nothing."

"As complex as it is to calibrate how much Dorries can take credit for normalising extreme MP moonlighting, ... her achievement in juggling political duties with the relentless production of novels, a third career on TalkTV and a fourth one as a Daily Mail columnist, looks almost uniquely harsh on affected constituents. Her website features, in the absence of surgery dates and political content, promotions of her TV slots and books. Add to that her all-purpose put-down (her own money being proletarian) of "posh boys", her employment on the public payroll of two daughters, her loyalty to the groper and wife-beater Stanley Johnson and a sideline in aggressive and misleading tweets, and you can almost understand Dorries’s incredulity on being finally, after all that, thwarted. At the point she was denied her peerage, she hadn't even been condemned by the privileges committee for her part in an "unprecedented and coordinated" attack on its members!"

"It has now been 395 days since the MP spoke in the Commons, 102 days since she voted and a remarkable three years and five months since she held a surgery — though her local office has continued to function. In that time, one pandemic and two prime ministers have been defeated. In addition, Dorries is reported to live 100 miles away from her constituency, in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire."

"[As the Conservative candidate for Mid-Bedfordshire in 2005] The circumstances of this selection are disputed: Dorries has since claimed that the candidate shortlist was made up mostly of men, whereas contemporary reports say it was largely women. This is noteworthy because, before she was selected, Dorries advocated all-women shortlists, but after her election she criticised David Cameron when he floated the idea of using them. Changing her mind has been a feature of Dorries's political career. She argued and voted against gay marriage, for example, dismissing it as a policy pursued "by the metro elite gay activists". She has since said that her opposition to the gay marriage bill was her "biggest regret"."

"It is a modus operandi established by your allies which has targeted Boris Johnson, transferred to Liz Truss and now moved on to me. But I have not been a Prime Minister. I do not have security or protection. Attacks from people, led by you, declared open season on myself and the past weeks have resulted in the police having to visit my home and contact me on a number of occasions due to threats to my person. Since you took office a year ago, the country is run by a zombie Parliament where nothing meaningful has happened. What exactly has been done or have you achieved? You hold the office of Prime Minister unelected, without a single vote, not even from your own MPs. You have no mandate from the people and the government is adrift. You have squandered the goodwill of the nation, for what?"

""The slide" began in 2012, after Dorries' appearance on I'm a Celebrity, when eating ostrich anus seemingly went to her head."

"It is a fact that there is no affection for Keir Starmer out on the doorstep. He does not have the winning X factor qualities of a Thatcher, Blair or a Boris Johnson, and sadly, prime minister, neither do you."

"This expert legal opinion shows that the inquiry was a biased, Kafkaesque witch hunt – it should now be halted before it does any more damage. (Daily Mail, 1 September 2022)."

"[T]hey [the privileges committee] have nothing. He protested his innocence all along and he was right. It was a gross miscarriage of justice, at the very least. (Twitter, 3 March 2023)."

"I don’t think there was ever a world in which this committee was going to find Boris innocent. The committee have demonstrated very clearly that they have decided early on to find him guilty. (TalkTV, 23 March 2023)."

"It is my belief that when Rishi Sunak told Boris Johnson he would sign off the list returned to him by Holac, he was using weasel words [...] He already knew who was and wasn't on that list because he had engineered it via his aide [[w:James Forsyth (journalist)|[James] Forsyth]]. I'm not going to lie. I believe sinister forces conspired against me and have left me heartbroken - but that emotion gives me all the strength I need to keep on fighting."

"I can personally tell you that the Prime Minister, when he stands at the despatch box and makes quotes like the one you just quoted, is because the researchers and his advisers will have given him that quote, and that's... and he was truthful, to the best of his knowledge, when he made that quote [...] The Prime Minister does tell the truth."

"[On how well Channel 5 was doing] they were privatised a small number of years ago, three years ago, five years ago maybe."

"[W]e also need to keep a close eye on the careers of the Conservative MPs who sat on that committee. Do they suddenly find themselves on chicken runs into safe seats? Gongs? Were promises made? We need to know if they were. Justice has to be seen to be done at all levels of this process. (Twitter, 15 June 2023)."

"There is a process and the last thing I would want to do would be to cause a by-election in my constituency."

"Be seen within a mile of my daughters and I will nail your balls to the floor... using your own front teeth. Do you get that?"

"There is perhaps an element of the unreliable narrator about the part-time novelist."

"[On relaxed EU restrictions on immigration from Bulgaria and Romania] There has been no tidal wave but there might be tomorrow, there might be next year - we don't know – and that is the problem. We could have a tidal wave from Yugoslavia."

"This deal gives us no voice, no votes, no MEPs, no commissioner."

"Gay marriage is a policy which has been pursued by the metro elite gay activists and needs to be put into the same bin [as reform of the House of Lords]."

"[On the question of privatising Channel 4, later an abandoned policy] I would argue that to say that just because Channel 4's been established as a public service broadcaster, and just because it's in receipt of public money, we should never kind of audit the future of Channel 4 and we should never evaluate how Channel 4 looks in the future, and whether or not it's a sustainable and valuable model, it’s quite right that the Government should do that."

"Unfortunately, I think that not only are Cameron and Osborne two posh boys who don't know the price of milk, but they are two arrogant posh boys who show no remorse, no contrition, and no passion to want to understand the lives of others - and that is their real crime."

"I am grateful for your personal phone call on the morning you appointed your cabinet in October, even if I declined to take the call."

"Dr Who: "Contains some of the sickest, most horrible material""

"The natural repugnance which most people feel when homosexuality and lesbianism is mentioned can result in a harshness of attitude and thinking which is, at least, unhelpful and certainly as unchristian as the perverse practices which are condemned. But to go to the other extreme and elevate people suffering from such abnormalities into a norm for society not only threatens society but is dangerous to the individuals themselves, since it excludes them from the consideration of treatment."

"Jackanory: "Completely irresponsible""

"[The] flak from Mary Whitehouse...was quite unwarranted. I think the kind of person who would have been upset by Doctor Who would have been upset by anything."

"[Television] may teach self-interest rather than philanthropy, violence rather than gentleness, a disregard for human dignity rather than a respect for it. It may not always teach the truth but teach it does, and it is more than time that responsible people both within and outside the broadcasting professions said boldly what is so obvious in commonsense terms — we cannot understand what is happening in international, cultural, economic, political and social affairs without coming to grips with the way in which television influences virtually all our behavioural and thought processes."

"Hey you, Whitehouse / Ha ha, charade you are ... You're trying to keep our feelings off the street ... Mary, you're nearly a treat / But you're really a cry"

"Till Death Us Do Part: "I doubt if many people would use 121 bloodies in half-an-hour." "Bad language coarsens the whole quality of our life. It normalises harsh, often indecent language, which despoils our communication.""

"It is a deliberate affront to the people to whom it gave so much offence by its near pornography and calculated bias. It would seem the BBC are out to test whether they have managed to condition people into accepting now what they rebelled against last year."