Labour Party Uk Politicians

"Yes, to-morrow every Duchess in London will be wanting to kiss me!"

"The desolation of loneliness is terrible. Was I wise? Perhaps not, but it seemed as though anything else was impossible."

"What we have to do is to doom the slums. And we have done it. It is going to take a year or two. We are not only going to doom slums, we are going to doom overcrowding. Next Session the House of Commons will...pass legislation which is going to doom overcrowding as we have already doomed the slums."

"I do not intend to carry on when we are through this mess. As soon as we have turned the corner I will get out, but I do not want to leave the Labour Party in a bad position."

"If we refuse...what are the prospects? Repression, and nothing but repression, and it is a very uncomfortable repression; a kind of repression from which we shall get neither credit nor success. It is the repression of the masses of the people, the great proportion of these masses being women and children. It is the repression not of organisations and not of bodies; it will develop into the repression of the whole of the population... If, on the other hand, you wish to bind India to you by bonds of confidence, to make her happy within your Empire and Commonwealth, if you wish to hear her praise you in gratitude and remain with you in pride, then accept the work that has been done by the Conference, and instruct the Government to proceed with it to a complete conclusion."

"We are going to Geneva determined, by persuasion, by arguments, by appeals to what has been written, appeals to measures already taken, appeals to history, appeals to common sense, to get the nations of the world to join in and reduce this enormous, disgraceful burden of armaments which we are now bearing from one end of the world to the other."

"The Socialist Movement in this country is going to rack and ruin, because it is being controlled by people who are nothing more than critics of the Government, inspired by the idea that all you have to do is to hand out largesse to the community. All sense of principle, of communal organisation, and of service given with one's whole heart to the community, has gone and we are in danger of drifting into a Poor Law frame of mind."

"As a result of a careful examination of ideas they had come to the conclusion that the great work of every constructive Government must be to put the population on the land. Here was something permanent. They took men body and soul off the pavements, which had no rootable capacity, and put them in the fields to till and sow and harvest. In the worst time they would produce their own food there. It might not be luxurious, but it was healthy."

"The substance of Germany's general case has a background of reason and human nature. I cannot be accused of ever having approached it in the "mind of Versailles," nor in the spirit of one who assumed that a powerful and a proud people could be kept subordinate by force (even by what seems to be an overwhelming force), nor have I ever seen anything but disaster issuing from and to the League of Nations if it is used by victors to perpetuate the position and mind they were in on the day of their victory... But, be that as it may, Germany has acted in such a way as to destroy the feeling of mutual confidence in Europe. It has broken up the road to peace and has beset it with terrors. It claims a measure of armed power which puts most of the nations of Europe at its mercy. Every reflecting and reasonable German must see the force of the point I am making. He must know in his heart that Berlin is not enough—that, in fact, it has upset very much more than it has pacified."

"All this humbug of curing unemployment by Exchequer grants is one of the most superficial and ill considered proposals that has ever been foisted upon the Party. There is no more Socialism in it than there was in the cup of tea that I had at breakfast this morning."

"If we yield now to the TUC we shall never be able to call our bodies or souls or intelligences our own."

"Mr. MacDonald’s health and capacity had declined to a point which made his continuance as Prime Minister impossible. He had never been popular with the Conservative Party, who regarded him, on account of his political and war records and Socialist faith, with long-bred prejudice softened in later years by pity. No man was more hated or with better reason by the Labour-Socialist Party which he had so largely created and then laid low by what they viewed as his treacherous desertion in 1931. In the massive majority of the Government he had but seven party followers. The disarmament policy to which he had given his utmost personal efforts had now proved a disastrous failure. A general election could not be far distant, in which he could play no helpful part. In these circumstances there was no surprise when, on June 7, it was announced that he and Mr. Baldwin had changed places and offices, and that Mr. Baldwin had become Prime Minister for the third time. The Foreign Office also passed to another hand. Sir Samuel Hoare’s labours at the India Office had been crowned by the passing of the Government of India Bill, and he was now free to turn to a more immediately important sphere. For some time past Sir John Simon had been bitterly attacked for his foreign policy by influential Conservatives closely associated with the Government. He now moved to the Home Office, with which he was well acquainted, and Sir Samuel Hoare became Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs."

"Unemployment cannot be cured by relief work nor by patchwork of any kind. We must develop national resources and improve trade so that there will be increased employment and a tremendous revolution in industry and in power by the use of electricity and petrol, which must be accompanied by reorganisation of transport, including the making of roads, the reconditioning of railway plant and equipment, an extension of pensions which must enable the more aged workers to retire, the raising of the school age with necessary maintenance grants. We must dam the influx of premature people into industry."

"We do not believe that a nation can flourish on the poverty of its masses. Empty pockets are not only poverty, but breed poverty. Our own backs and stomachs still are the most neglected and yet the most profitable of our markets. Those who believe that safeguarding or protection is any aid to the development of that market had better study protected countries, where wages are low, unemployment is habitual, and poverty even worse than it is here. Unemployment insurance is not a dole, it is a benefit which has been paid for just like life insurance. These payments must be made adequate for the purpose in order to safeguard our people against the demoralisation of charity. We have concentrated this policy into two points and they stand as representing our purpose. Work first of all, but if no work, maintenance."

"One of the great reasons why I belong to the Labour Party and hold the Socialist views of what a wise and just social structure is, is because I detest class politics and want to end them in real national unity. In bringing that about we have to consider the claims of the great mass of our people, who, on account of their poverty, cannot adequately protect themselves. What has national unity meant to them? A change in a machine can make them outcasts; a change in fashion can make them paupers... The Labour Party wants to bring within the bounds and the meaning of this national unity the bottom dog, as he is called. For this purpose we have organised our great public services. The Labour Party wishes to develop them."

"There can be no security until the Great Powers have agreed to settle their disputes, which have hitherto led to war, by conciliation and arbitration. This was the policy which the Labour Party was working up to in 1924, and which it will pursue again when it is in office."

"Let us declare boldly in favour of disarmament. Let us put down our own proposals, arguing them, fighting for them, persuading people to join us, appealing not only to the reason but to the moral sense of the world. Great Britain marching clear away at the head of the great movement for international peace, that is our idea."

"We want no injustice done to other people. I do not appeal to you merely as a class, but I do appeal to you workers to form yourselves into an organisation which will use political power in order to protect our human conditions and give you fair play in life."

"I am so much concerned for the quiet development of industry, the peaceful mind and confidence both at home and abroad, that I will use every ounce of influence I have to prevent another election for the next two years... I wish to make it quite clear that I am going to stand for no monkeying."

"[I]f we lose our chance now, which really means if this Government is to be continued in power, that chance will not return either to us or to our children. The memories of the last War will grow dim. The world will get back into its old rut, familiar professions and piety about peace will again soothe us to sleep, and the various countries will once more base their security upon military preparation. So they will all, in the end, find themselves drifting hopelessly upon those currents that make for war—1914 will be repeated... And remember what the next war is to be like. The old lines which divide combatants from non-combatants, the weak and the diseased from the strong and the robust, men from women and children, will all be obliterated and civilization itself assailed, and from sea and sky will be brought to a heap of ruins."

"The policy of Great Britain is not the policy of alliances with any certain set of nations. It is a policy of friendship with those nations that believe in democratic forms of government and democratic development. The policy of Great Britain now is, and must be, and will be, that all nations in good will, in singleness, and in disinterestedness of heart will meet together, consider the great problems of Europe and the problems of the whole world, and agree, as the result of cooperation, discussion, and joint exchange of opinion, on a common policy which will make alliances absolutely a thing of the past."

"What the Liberals have done to the Labour Party's programme is to come along like a gipsy, steal our child, get it in gaudy attire, and then produce it on platforms to perform at the General Election."

"I see that Mr. Lloyd George last night confessed that he read the betting news in the papers. (Laughter.) Ah! I shake my head at the Rake's Progress. (Laughter.) ... The only Liberal contribution to the programme advocated by Mr. Lloyd George is its headline... It is just a certain amount of improvised jazz—that is their programme."

"I can assure you that, whatever your political colour may be, in the Old Country political parties, even in the heat of battle, never obscure national or Imperial interests."

"The day is coming when we may have to give up orthodox free trade as we inherited it from our fathers."

"During all my political life I have anchored myself firmly upon the conviction that if progress is to be well-rooted, it can only be carried on by what is called political or constitutional ways... I can see no hope in India if it becomes the arena of a struggle between constitutionalism and revolution. No party in Great Britain will be cowed by threats of force or by policies designed to bring government to a standstill; and if any sections in India are under the delusion that that is not so, events will very sadly disappoint them. I would urge upon all the best friends of India to come nearer to us rather than to stand apart from us, to get at our reason and our good will."

"Political leaders, irrespective of party...were beginning to see that, unless in Europe they could create an enormous federation of free-trade nations, there was not a single nation in Europe which could flourish in the industrial standard it ought to occupy."

"In 1918 Mr. Lloyd George let himself produce such a programme of development as would astonish his rivals. He was going to hang the Kaiser. You said, "That is the man who has the ear of the public." He was going to build one million houses. He was going to make the land fit for heroes to live in, and you said, "That's the thing." He was going to search the pockets of Germany for the last penny, and you said, "That the stuff." My friends, it was stuff. (Cheers and laughter.) ... If unemployment had been tackled in a business-like fashion in the first three years after the War, it would not have grown to the proportion it had now reached... Mr. Lloyd George has been in office, nay in power, with a majority of 300; Mr. Baldwin has been in power with a majority of 200. What have they done? Have they broken the tale of heartbreakening worsening? Nowhere. It is only to the Labour Party that you can look for the solution of your troubles."

"Mr. Lloyd George's campaign in its gross demagogic vulgarity has also increased both the number and the value of the reasons why we should have nothing whatever to do with his Party."

"We do not believe that military alliances are going to bring security. We believe that a military alliance in an agreement for security is like a grain of mustard seed—small to begin with. That is the essential seed of the agreement, and that seed with the years will grow and grow and grow, until at last the tree that has been produced from it will overshadow the heavens, and we shall be back exactly in the military position in which we found ourselves in 1914."

"The League takes upon itself as its first task the creating once again of the European system, and that European system never will exist until our late enemies have ceased to be our enemies and have come in to take their cooperative part in that system."

"I do think...that the way the Daily News and the Westminster Gazette behaved [during the election] was contemptible. We expect nothing better from the Daily Mail and such miserable products. The result, however, of the whole fight has been to dig both deeply and broadly a ditch between Liberalism and Labour. From all over the country I hear from my friends who fought that the Liberal fight was dirtier than the Tory, and I have seen leaflets like that issued by [Sir Henry] Webb who fought [Hugh] Dalton in Cardiff, which are simply amazing in their dishonesty. The line he took was that whilst we pitied the poor German who was being asked to pay £2,000,000,000 we had no qualms in imposing a Capital Levy upon Englishmen to the extent of £3,000,000,000."

"They were going to work their own country for all it was worth, to bring human labour into touch with God's natural endowments, so that the land would blossom like the rose and have houses and firesides where there would be happiness and glorious aspirations."

"When Mr. Lloyd George talked...about unemployment he forgot that he was the cause of it. Unemployment...and the increased cost of living were all due to causes that had been begun during Mr. Lloyd George's régime. Mr. Lloyd George went to Paris to try to make good the nonsensical pledges he gave in 1918, and supported a Peace Treaty which had been the cause very nearly of Britain's bankruptcy, and certainly the bankruptcy of many other nations. He, and he alone, was responsible for that... Everything that had happened had been the outcome of Mr. Lloyd George's blunderings, and he was using the calamities of his own policy as a reason why they should send him back to office."

"I am in favour of arbitration—I see nothing else for the world. If we cannot devise a proper system of arbitration, then do not let us fool ourselves that we are going to have peace. Let us go back to the past, let us go back to competitive armaments, let us go back to that false, whited sepulchre of security and of military pacts—there is nothing else for us—and let us prepare for the next war, because that is inevitable."

"He was a free-trader, because he felt it was the best, with all its drawbacks. There were higher wages in protected America, but there was corrupt politics. Protection in America meant more sweating in America than free trade did in England. The very worst of conditions and slums in England were a paradise compared with the conditions of steel workers under protection in Pittsburg. The whole of the protection system was meant not for workers, wage-earners, or the wives of working men, but to make capitalists millionaires."

"In youth one believes in democracy, later on, one has to accept it."

"Were I a German Minister I should sign [the Treaty of Versailles] only after making it clear that my signature was obtained under compulsion and that the provisions were such that I could not guarantee they would be carried out."

"Felt the virtues of the Victorian times so condemned by Mr Strachey. The simple honesties can always be made a butt by the impish unrealiabilites."

"[The Kellogg Pact is] a mighty moral bulwark against war – and we must never underestimate the effectiveness of moral bulwarks with no bayonet nor bludgeon behind them. The entry of the United States into the Permanent Court of International Justice, the growing confidence in the court, and the increase in the number of nations who have signed the Optional Clause mark definite and, I believe, irrevocable steps in the displacement of military power by judicial process in the settlement of international disputes. Public servants like us will fail in our duty if we do not diminish military power in proportion to the increase of political security... I dare affirm that, in the naval programme of the leading naval powers, there is a margin between real security needs and actual or projected strength, and the world expects this Conference to eliminate that margin."

"We will endeavour to unite the whole country in opposing French aggression... We cannot stand by and allow the resources of Germany to be deteriorated by French action. The British occupation of the Rhine, if it is part of the French policy, cannot be allowed to continue."

"Although we have differed in late years on political matters, I hope that in the bitterness of spirit you must feel at present, you will recall that there are thousands who, like myself, remember with pride and gratitude your work for Socialism and the cause of Labour in days when it was neither easy nor popular to be a pioneer."

"We are here preparing, as I see it, this international armaments conference. That ought to be our project. If we can remove the obstacles in the way of that we shall have done a tremendous amount of work that, in its very nature, once it is done, is bound to be permanent, because the reason and morality of the world will stand by it so loyally."

"The Socialist, therefore, cannot consistently address himself to class sentiment or class prejudice. He ought, indeed, to look away from it, because any victory won as the result of siding with one party in the struggle only perpetuates what he desires to eliminate. The appeal to class interest is an appeal to the existing order, whether the class addressed is the rich or the poor. It is the anti-Socialist who makes class appeals; the Socialist makes social appeals. Class consciousness is an asset of the defenders of the existing order of exploitation."

"[T]he Labour Party stands for a contributory scheme so far as this Bill is concerned. Moreover, we are in favour of a contributory scheme with reference to sickness, whilst we were in favour of a non-contributory scheme in reference to old age pensions."

"Mr. Lloyd George will not resign on anything anti-German. He is anti-German, and the trust which the reasonable Peace people place in him is altogether misplaced."

"Greater liberty will be given to localities to regulate their own affairs, to acquire property for that purpose, to promulgate byelaws and more particularly to organise themselves as markets after the manner of co-operative societies."

"The economic truths of Socialism, its industrialism, and its sociology, must remain the vainest of vain dreamings unless we preserve among the people the political frame of mind which can appreciate democratic liberty and worth. When "a man's a man for a' that" is recited without making the blood tingle, the man has ceased to be."

"The State does not concern itself primarily with man as possessor of rights, but with man as the doer of duties. A right is the opportunity of fulfilling a duty, and it should be recognised only in so far as it is necessary to the performance of duty... Nor should the State grant the "right" to the franchise unless by doing so it is promoting its own ends...as man approaches the fullness of liberty which he can enjoy only when he is perfect, his rights become more ample... The State regards the man as a carrier of human life between the Past and the Future, and assigns to him the work of realising the Future from the Past. It shows him the path."

"I have been mixed up a good deal with Army officers, and I never met an Army officer in that time without being told by some of them that they were going to stop Home Rule if that was to be applied to Ulster. I have met them on board ship going out to India, and I have been nearly assassinated by them. I remember one day on the way out to India we got a marconigram saying that Larkin had been sent to goal, and I said I could understand it if it had been Sir Edward Carson. The result of my saying that was that I was very nearly thrown overboard."