Women Politicians In The United Kingdom

"[On her parents] They owe everything to this country and they have taught me a deep and profound love of Britain and British people. Their tolerance, their generosity, their decency, their fair play. That also means that we must not shy away from saying there is a problem. There is a huge problem that we have right now when it comes to illegal migration, the scale of which we have not known before. I won’t apologise for the language that I have used to demonstrate the scale of the problem. I see my job as being honest with the British people and honest for the British people. I’m not going to shy away from difficult truths nor am I going to conceal what is the reality that we are all watching."

"Let's be clear about what is really going on here: the British people deserve to know which party is serious about stopping the invasion on our southern coast and which party is not. Some 40,000 people have arrived on the south coast this year alone. Many of them facilitated by criminal gangs, some of them actual members of criminal gangs. So let’s stop pretending that they are all refugees in distress. The whole country knows that is not true. It’s only the honourable members opposite who pretend otherwise. We need to be straight with the public. The system is broken. Illegal migration is out of control and too many people are interested in playing political parlour games, covering up the truth than solving the problem."

"I get a lot of abuse. I get trolled, Twitter has a very strong left wing bias [...] Actually for me, my barometer, it's got to this point where if I get trolled and I provoke a bad response on Twitter I know I'm doing the right thing. Twitter is a sewer of left-wing bile and there's very little sensible, moderate voices either way actually get drowned out. The extreme left pile on is often a consequence of sound conservative values."

"[On her parent's arrival in the UK] My father came to the UK to escape the Kenyan Asian crisis in 1968. His arrival probably saved his life. My mother was recruited in Mauritius as a girl of 18, and she has just passed her 45th year of service as a nurse. More passionate patriots cannot be imagined. It is clear that immigration has brought huge benefits to this country. We have a proud tradition of offering refuge, opportunity and a better life to those who take the risk of leaving their homeland."

"Her Majesty's reign and her devotion to public service remains an inspiration to many Islanders."

"We cannot discriminate. We must not, and we must strive to ensure equality."

"As a nation, we have moved forward substantially in the past 40 years (since the 1982 Falklands War between the United Kingdom and Argentina) and it is right that we celebrate how, in exercising our liberty, we have built a prosperous and peaceful country - one which has not simply survived, but thrived."

"A safer Anguilla when we all work together."

"Shirley is surrounded by a beatific light that shields her from the harm and criticism which would be heaped on ordinary people."

"Shirley is, without doubt, the most reactionary person I know."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"There can be a Fascism of the Left as well as Fascism of the Right."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"[Brexit is] our opportunity to take back control of a whole area of democratic decisions"

"It is entirely unacceptable that in 2019 women and girls are still paying more than men for basic products, such as razors and deodorant. Products marketed at women are on average considerably more expensive than those marketed at men. Often the only difference is the colour, yet this unfair price gap will have a significant financial impact on a woman over the course of her life. My bill would remove this outdated and sexist tax on women once and for all."

"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,"

"I stayed in cabinet and fought to try and get a deal and to try and build a consensus, both in my party and but also in Parliament. What we have learnt though is if you are trying to get that objective, you can't take no deal off the table."

"What happened was completely wrong and the prime minister has rightly apologised for that, apologised to veterans but also to all of us, because he was representing all of us. I'm from Portsmouth, I have also been defence secretary and my wish is, at the end of this week, is that all of our veterans feel completely treasured."

"It is, of course, a mystery why a workaholic with no social life and four cats is not a massive draw."

"First of all, let me address the comments the honourable lady makes about my facial expressions: my resting face is that of a bulldog chewing a wasp, and people shouldn’t read too much into that."

"In recent days, in my discussions that I have had with people on the EU side of the negotiating table, I am really optimistic and I think they understand they have to move on some things. I voted to Leave and I still remain optimistic that we can get a good deal for the UK."

"We asked the people to decide, they decided... that means we can't come up with something else in Parliament"

"From safeguarding parental leave to tackling discrimination in the workplace and bringing an end to violence against women and girls, our EU membership is critical in helping protect and further the rights of women around Britain. A vote to leave would put all of this at risk."

"[Having to choose between deal and no-deal] appears to be an attempt by the executive to frustrate our sovereign Parliament"

"A Canada-style deal would take years to negotiate and might not give the kind of access its supporters hoped for"

"[The UK is being asked to experiment with a new trade policy without any idea of its costs. That is not a manifestation of democracy, it is a tyranny, a distortion of the referendum result and MPs should call it out."

"All this sabre-rattling this weekend is not coming from the section of the party that I represent. It is coming from the pro-Brexit section of the party. And it is deeply unhelpful."

"It's going to happen, we are going to leave the European Union"

"As a constituency Member of Parliament, I receive a barrage of views on both sides of the EU debate all the time, so I am very conscious, even if it may not be my own personal position, of what other people in the country and my constituency are thinking."

"Of course one of the things the last couple of years has shown is that making predictions about British politics or international politics is incredibly difficult at the moment. But I think the Conservative party - having started on the Brexit road - really is going to own the negotiations, is going to own the shape of Brexit. That is clearly going to be something that will be, if not the issue of the election, will be something that we will be standing on that record in terms of the party going into the next election."

"Seriously? Our two most senior female politicians are judged for their legs not what they said #appallingsexism"

"It's incumbent on politicians to make the case that it is not for blaming immigrants about jobs and housing. Actually, it is up to us to provide the solutions and support to people."

"We would have been better off if we had stayed, but that is what democracy is all about and the British people have been clear and I will accept that decision."

"If parents and grandparents vote to leave, they'll be voting to gamble with their children and grandchildren's future. At a time when people are rightly concerned about inter-generational fairness, the most unfair decision that the older generation could make would be to take Britain out of Europe and damage the ability of young people to get on in life."

"It's clear, that if Britain leaves Europe it will be young people who suffer the most, left in limbo while we struggle to find and then negotiate an alternative model. In doing so we risk that lost generation becoming a reality."

"I think all of us agree what we don't want Britain to be: anti-competitive with more laws made overseas and with people travelling here for the benefits on offer rather than to pay their way. But we also don't want our children to inherit a Britain cut off from the world, where their prospects are limited and their opportunities end at our shores."

"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"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"[Labour must] lead the campaign to remain"

"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."

"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?"