Liberal Democrats Uk Politicians

"If I was a Brexit voter, I would feel increasingly betrayed that I voted in the belief that all these Brexiteers knew what they were doing"

"In 2007 after a night of disappointing election results for our party in Edinburgh, Alex Cole Hamilton said this: if his defeat was part-payment for the ending of child detention, then he accepted it with all his heart. Those words revealed a selfless dignity which is very rare in politics but common amongst Liberal Democrats. If our losses today are part payment for every family that is more secure because of a job we helped to create, every person with depression who is treated with a compassion they deserve, every child who does a little better in school, every apprentice with a long and rewarding career to look forward to, every gay couple who know that their love is worth no less than anyone else’s and every pensioner with a little more freedom and dignity in retirement then I hope at least our losses can be endured with a little selfless dignity too."

"[Leaving the EU would be a] terrible thing for the British economy"

"The home secretary and the Home Office – they can try to make the case as many times as they like but this idea, which was the idea of the heart of the snooper's charter, that every single website that you visit and every single website that anyone visits in this country is logged somewhere, that's just not going to happen while I'm in government."

"[I promise] real remedies for the way the world is today not dangerous fantasies about a bygone world that no longer exists. And that is why I'm going to do everything I can to make sure that we remain part of the European Union because that is how we protect the Britain we love."

"What people have dubbed the snooper's charter - I have to be clear with you, that's not going to happen."

"Years of uncertainty caused by a future EU referendum would hit jobs and growth and this is not in the national interest"

"Human Rights Act are not, as some would have you believe, foreign impositions. These are British rights, drafted by British lawyers. Forged in the aftermath of the atrocities of the Second World War. Fought for by Winston Churchill. So let me say something really clear about the Human Rights Act. In fact I'll do it in words of one syllable: It is here to stay."

"We don't believe that the expansion of civil nuclear power is the great panacea the government makes it out to be. For a start, all the experts agree that where there is going to be an energy crunch between supply and increasing demand, will be around... 2016 or so. By the most optimistic scenarios from the government itself, there's no way they are going to have new nuclear come on stream until 2021, 2022. So it's just not even an answer."

"Maybe he one day - perhaps we will have to wait for his memoirs - could account for his role in the most disastrous decision of all, which is the illegal invasion of Iraq."

"If the legislation is passed I will lead a grassroots campaign of civil disobedience to thwart the identity cards programme ... I, and I expect thousands of people like me, will simply refuse ever to register."

"We would support the government by not voting for a referendum [on the Lisbon treaty]. We would vote against a referendum on the treaty and vote in accordance with our long-held position that the real referendum that needs to be had is whether we stay in the EU or not."

"[While deputy prime minister] He's there to serve a very important ceremonial function as David Cameron's lapdog-cum-prophylactic protection device for all the difficult things that David Cameron has to do that cheese off the rest of the ... [ending absent] He’s a kind of shield. He’s a lapdog who’s been skinned and turned into a shield to protect."

"The immediate preoccupation is to work with people in other parties to stop Brexit, but in the longer term there may well be realignment because of the deep splits in the parties and I want my party to be at the centre of it."

"We have to be careful of Vince Cable, he's extremely sharp and clever. In fact, he's almost as sharp and clever as he thinks he is."

"The House has noticed his remarkable transformation in the past few weeks from national treasure to Treasury poodle."

"Brexit will make us poorer and risks breaking up our United Kingdom. We must stop it and we will."

"I'm afraid the referendum resolved nothing and we do have to go back to the people and ask if what is now on offer is what they really voted for. We have got completely different views about what Brexit actually means. What has emerged over the last three years is that the prospectus on which the Leave vote was achieved was based on a tissue of lies to be frank."

"I understand how angry people are on both sides. There are some angry Leavers and there are some very angry Remainers too, particularly young people who feel their future has been taken away from them on the basis of a very narrow majority, where a significant majority of the electorate did not vote and many young people did not get an opportunity to vote."

"[Young people felt their future had been] taken away from them by a very narrow majority"

"We need a proper referendum that will come to a resolution on the issue, with remain on the ballot paper."

"[We should] go back to the people [with another referendum]"

"We have long argued it is the right and logical thing to do for the people to have the final say on Brexit."

"Are we going to make a terrible mistake, leaving behind our influence in Europe's most successful peace project and the world's biggest marketplace?"

"We are absolutely solid that we need to vote against Brexit and stop it"

"Brexit is not inevitable - it can and it must be stopped,"

"We're absolutely solid that we need to vote against Brexit and stop it."

"Whether you see yourself as a liberal, social democrat, progressive, or centrist there is a home for you here, particularly as we fight Brexit together"

"I think it's very clear that people in Scotland, as in other parts of the United Kingdom, don't want Brexit to happen. They want to stop it and it can be stopped, and the best mechanism for stopping it is to have a people's vote. I think momentum is building up behind that and I'm trying to work with people in other parties to make sure it happens."

"Liberal democracy itself is under threat notably in the USA, in eastern Europe and perhaps here. Authoritarians and extremists of both right and left are on the march."

"I think the interesting thing about Windrush is that perhaps for the first time the public opinion has been ahead of the politicians in seeing that there is a terrible injustice here and it should not be allowed to pass."

"[Regarding an EU referendum], it's a distraction. It's a serious distraction. We are recovering from the worst economic crisis for the best part of a century. The last thing we need now is massive levels of uncertainty in the business community."

"[There is a] fundamental economic issue of whether any company which uses data from individuals to make money should pay the owner of that data for its use... The new oil is data. Data is the raw material which drives these firms and it is control of data which gives them an advantage over competitors"

"nostalgia for a world where passports were blue, faces were white and the map was coloured imperial pink"

"There is another word for that - masochism. It isn't illegal. I am told some people pay good money to indulge in it. But unlike masochists, the Brexit ideologues usually envisage someone else bearing the pain. And that pain will mainly be felt by young people who overwhelmingly voted to Remain."

"In a Britain increasingly dominated by extremists and ideologues, I want us to fill the huge gap in the centre of British politics."

"I love slightly dangerous things. High energy, edgy things. I learned to ski when I was 63, which is a bit hazardous. But I go off once a year to the place where the Russian mafia assemble in the Alps, and go out on the slopes. I've got into red runs. One of my unfulfilled life ambitions is to do serious black runs. So, you know, a bit of danger, a bit of speed."

"On his central point, the £350m a week, this is a lie. He knows it is a lie and endlessly repeating it does not make it the truth."

"No-one has come up with a plausible explanation about how leaving [the EU] will make us better off than we are inside. Nobody has come up with a plausible explanation about how this process can be managed in a way that does not cause enormous cost and enormous damage."

"We are the party of remain. We believe membership of the EU is in our country's interest."

"Growing inequality is linked to poor economic performance, greater instability, more social tension, insecurity and unhappiness."

"We haven't yet heard about 'Brexit jihadis' but there is an undercurrent of violence in the language which is troubling."

"The old have comprehensively shafted the young"

"[I am] struck by the heavily Remain sentiment in colleges and schools, and the heavily Brexit mood of church-hall meetings packed with retired people"

"Some of the brightest and most interesting people in British politics recently have been relatively old,"

"We must fight for the British public to have a final say on the government's deal with a chance to stay in the EU if the deal is not good enough. To achieve this, we will need to work with like-minded people in other parties."

"[London] is becoming a giant suction machine draining the life out of the rest of the country"

"The destruction of the British building society movement – or much of it – in the two decades after the late 1980s … was one of the great acts of economic vandalism in modern times. And the commercial banks largely abandoned locally based relationship banking in the decade before the recent financial crisis. There is now no institutional structure in place to offer countercyclical lending, particularly small and medium sized businesses, in place of the banks."

"I have declared war on Mr Murdoch and I think we are going to win."

"We didn't break a promise. We made a commitment in our manifesto, we didn't win the election. We then entered into a coalition agreement, and it's the coalition agreement that is binding upon us and which I'm trying to honour,"