Labour Party Uk Politicians

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

"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."

"(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."

"[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."

"[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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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?"

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

"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."

"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.""

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

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

"[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."

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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.'"

"Someone up there likes me."

"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."

"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."

"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.""

"Wankers and whingers."

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

"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.""

"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."