Women Politicians In The United Kingdom

"I am a secular, immigrant Jew. I have never been active in the Jewish community; my two marriages were to non-Jews. I have visited Israel a number of times and have been a vocal critic of successive Israeli governments on many counts. But I am a Jew. My grandmother and my uncle were murdered by Hitler and many cousins and other relatives were slaughtered in the gas chambers. Indeed, my grandfather was one of six siblings; we are the only surviving line left and that was because my parents were in Egypt when the war broke out. I joined the Labour party to fight racism. In the 1960s the Labour party was the natural home for Jews. To find myself 50 years later, in 2018, confronting antisemitism in my own party is completely and utterly awful."

"[After the 2019 general election] Had Corbyn won then, I think things would have been different; I couldn't have stayed in the party."

"They can't get a home for their children, they see black and ethnic minority communities moving in and they are angry [...] When I knock on doors I say to people, 'are you tempted to vote BNP?' and many, many, many - eight out of 10 of the white families - say 'yes'. That's something we have never seen before, in all my years. Even when people voted BNP, they used to be ashamed to vote BNP. Now they are not."

"[Is Labour never having a female leader "shameful"?] Yes. [...] Oh, it’s horrible. There’s still sexism, which is why you can never take your foot off the accelerator."

"The terrible truth is that [Mr Corbyn] constantly makes himself the centre of the argument. What we need to root out is anti-Semitism, and for as long as he is one of the individuals who refuses to accept the extent of anti-Semitism in the party, who constantly says that people like me have been politically motivated and are attacking him personally instead of attacking the anti-Semitism that he expressly tolerates, and has allowed to spread right through the party - that's really the problem."

"[T]he government proposes to outsource the registration of companies to the professionals working in this space, like accountants, lawyers and company service providers. While most professionals act with integrity, it is people in these very jobs who have been responsible for creating the web of opaque corporate structures that obscure illicit financial flows. So why does the government refuse to put in place robust systems to regulate, check and discipline the professionals involved so that the few bad apples can be eliminated?"

"Kishinev. Babi Yar. Munich. The sites of Jewish massacres throughout history. Now there is another place that will for ever be associated with the slaughter of innocent Jews: Kfar Aza. Kibbutz Kfar Aza was home to about 800 people and was established in 1951 by Jewish refugees from Morocco and Egypt (where I was born and from which my family escaped in 1949). Like so many kibbutzim, its founders were idealists, living communally on a model with socialist foundations. Its name – literally meaning "Gaza Village" – reflects its location, just over three miles from the city of Gaza."

"What has happened in Barking and Dagenham is the most rapid transformation of a community we have ever witnessed. Nowhere else has changed so fast. When I arrived in 1994, it was a predominantly white, working class area. Now, go through the middle of Barking and you could be in Camden or Brixton. That is the key thing that has created the environment the BNP has sought to exploit. ["Mrs Hodge claimed the anger is not down to racism"] It is a fear of change. It is gobsmacking change."

"On Saturday, the worst nightmares of the people of Kfar Aza were realised. A barrage of rockets sent men, women and children into their safe rooms. Then hundreds of Hamas terrorists breached the security barrier. A group of them, fully armed, went from house to house in Kfar Aza, searching for Jews to slaughter. People were burned alive in their homes and cars. Babies and young children were killed and mutilated. Others were dragged into Gaza as hostages. These heinous crimes are unspeakable, and yet we must speak them. The world must know what happened to the people of Kfar Aza."

"[T]wo of my granddaughters are of secondary school age, so they go to a single-sex girls secondary school. And because it's single-sex, there's a very large Muslim population there. The school originally put up some sort of display where they had an Israeli flag and a Palestinian flag. Good stuff. But the Muslim girls tore down the Israeli flag and replaced it with another Palestinian flag. So, only two Palestinian flags. The girls came home — they live next door to me — and they said, "We're not going to tell anybody we're Jewish." So then we had a bit of a discussion about that. They went back the next day and the one who is — she's just 12 — some of these Muslim girls came up to her and said: "Are you Jewish?" So she says, "Yes". So they said, "Which side are you on?" Terrible. So she sort of said, "I’m not on either side," and then they started poking her with a Palestinian flag."

"I will not shut up. I will not be silenced by men who prioritise applause from Stonewall over the safety of women and girls. A rich, lefty, white male celebrity so blinded by ideology he can't see the optics of attacking the only black woman in government by calling publicly for my existence to end. Tennant is one of Labours celebrity supporters. This is an early example of what life will be like if they win."

"Culture is more than cuisine or clothes. It's also customs which may be at odds with British values. We cannot be naïve and assume immigrants will automatically abandon ancestral ethnic hostilities at the border, or that all cultures are equally valid. They are not. I am struck for example, by the number of recent immigrants to the UK who hate Israel. That sentiment has no place here."

"I would be congratulating Prime Minister Netanyahu. I think what they did was extraordinary. Israel is showing that it has moral clarity in dealing with its enemies and the enemies of the West as well. [...] Hezbollah is a terrorist organisation, and I think that being able to remove the leader of Hezbollah, as they did, will create more peace in the Middle East."

"The law is confused because times have changed and words in law are being re-interpreted to meanings quite different from what legislators intended. Clarification is required. Not just to protect the privacy and dignity of women and girls, but also to protect those people with gender dysphoria for whom the law was set up to protect. These transpeople were going about their lives in peace, until predators started exploiting loopholes in the law by calling themselves trans with no evidence beyond their self-identification. Sex and gender, terms once used interchangeably in the law, now mean different things with significant implications. This is being exploited by all sorts of activist organisations, most notably Stonewall for their own agenda. That is why we are today pledging that, if we form a government [[w:2024 United Kingdom general election|after the [general] election]], we will clarify that sex in the law means biological sex and not new, redefined meanings of the word. The protection of women and girls' spaces is too important to allow the confusion to continue."

"We live in a multiracial society, we're very, very comfortable with that because if were weren't we wouldn't have the prime minister, we wouldn't have the home secretary or business secretary that we have. But we have to be very careful about how we explain and express immigration policies so that people aren't getting echoes of things that are less palatable."

"It wasn't until predators started exploiting the loopholes that we are having to tighten this. It is the behaviour of people who are choosing to exploit rights given to transgender people — because the definition is very loose — that we are now having to look at what we can do in order to protect women and children who are the most vulnerable in those single-sex spaces. It is not easy, the ideal situation would have been if the predators had not chosen to exploit this loophole. [Badenoch "insisted she was not saying transgender people were predators."] But there are more people who are predators than there are people who are trans."

"[On civil servants] There's about 5-10% of them who are very, very bad. You know, should-be-in-prison bad. [...] Leaking official secrets, undermining their ministers … agitating. I had some of it in my department, usually union-led, but most of them actually want to do a good job. And the good ones are very frustrated by the bad ones."

"[Predators exploitation of loopholes] We see it with men exposing themselves in bathrooms. We see it with people trying to access single-sex spaces such as women's prisons when they have been convicted for violence against women, and their victims are being forced to refer to them with female pronouns. That is not right. So we have to make sure that we can sweep all that away and when we do, life will get better for transgender people."

"[About planned changes within her party:] It's not going to happen overnight. I get lots of criticizm of 'You haven't changed anything!' You know, it's been four weeks I think, I have four and a half years to do this, maybe a bit less, but there is a plan. But you have to do things systematically and properly. I'm a systems analyst, I don't rush into things. And I think this is the biggest challenge for people: Having an engineer and a systems analyst in charge rather than a politician or a lawyer who just talks, talks, talks. I'm not somebody who starts with the rethoric."

"One of the reasons I don't like the term 'woke' is because I think it disguises just how bad this stuff is. This is civilization ending philosophy, where really bad ideas are being smuggled in under the guise of civil rights and so on."

"[On Robert Jenrick's defection to Reform UK] I realised he wasn't just leaving because he was unhappy, he wanted to burn the Conservative Party to the ground. That is what Reform wants, not to hold Labour to account or transform this country for the better, but to destroy our party. I am never going to let that happen."

"Reform is the party of traitors. You can’t trust them. Nigel Farage is doing my spring cleaning."

"[T]hey are a flash in the pan if I have anything to do with it. We cannot have people running our country who lie and lie and lie so easily, deceive their colleagues and people around them. We need to have honest people and that is what I am doing."

"He is catching arrows rather than stopping the archer."

"[I]n the United Kingdom, my party is starting the largest renewal of policy and ideas in a generation. ... If we get this right, we stand at the dawn of a new conservative century with so much opportunity and possibility. If we throw this opportunity away because of anger or self-doubt or weakness [o]ur country and all of western civilisation will be lost. And that is why we, the next generation of conservatives, must lead the world back from the precipice."

"Parliament needs to be able to decide who comes into the country, for how long, and who needs to leave, and that does include travel bans.>br />On a country-specific basis it's much tougher, it's often more vague. But I think there are scenarios where that is viable. That doesn't mean that I agree with what Donald Trump has done, I haven't actually seen the list of countries that he’s banned people from. I'm much more focused on (...) what’s happening here."

"How do you know what an authoritative source is when everyone is trying to make the news rather than report the news? That's the new thing it our age. A lot of media doesn't want to observe and report. It wants to influence. It wants to be on the pitch rather than reporting."

"The middle-class now has changed. It has become a lot more bureaucratic and we are producing more and more people from universities who are going into a bureaucratic job rather than a genuine producing job where you're adding value. And that, I think, is why the growth is reducing at the same time as we're facing increased competition from other countries that are not spending a lot of time on bureaucracy. The EU is the classing of this genre; It's all about pumping out regulation."

"What's decompressing, what’s that? ["Does she break for lunch?"] What's a lunch break? Lunch is for wimps. I have food brought in and I work and eat at the same time. There's no time… Sometimes I will get a steak ... I'm not a sandwich person, I don’t think sandwiches are a real food, it's what you have for breakfast. [...] I will not touch bread if it's moist."

"I find it interesting that everybody defines me as being Nigerian. I identify less with the country than with the specific ethnicity [Yoruba]. That's what I really am. I have nothing in common with the people from the north of the country, the Boko Haram where the Islamism is, those were our ethnic enemies and yet you end up being lumped in with those people."

"Well, take a look at President Trump. He's shown that sometimes you need that first stint in government to spot the problems, but it's the second time around when you really know how to fix them. And it starts by telling the truth."

"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."

"[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."

"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."

"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."

"[[w:Flag of Ireland|[T]he tricolour]] is not my flag ... I genuinely don't feel Irish. Is there something wrong with that?"

"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."

"I don't fit into a mould."

"I was always very cynical about the European Union."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."