Economists From England

"The question is: why are there markets of food at all?"

"We are all familiar with the idea: Give a man a fish and you'll feed him for a day, but teach a man to fish and you'll feed him for a lifetime. That sounds reasonable enough. … But think of the model that rests on. It constructs people in developing countries that sort of people sitting by the rivers and eating fish and then they look at the river and said: "- So what's that? - It looks like a fish. - Well, how do we get it out? - Well I have no idea, we would have to wait for white man to come and tell us." It's important to remember that actually there are systems of governance that already exist. There are models of development that already exist in developing countries that actually are much more sustainable than the model of free markets that we have been trying to export."

"There are many pharisees in literature as well as in religion, wrapped up in the garments of self-idolatry, and making their very deficiencies the ground of their highest complacency. There are many blind wanderers through unbounded fields of instruction, who can discover nothing but nakedness—nothing but barrenness around them. Fertility itself offers no attractions to them—how much less can they understand the power of that benign principle which makes the waters gush forth, fresh, pure, and sparkling, from the very rocks of the desert."

"When you introduce markets in food, then you introduce two very simple rules. The first rule is this: if you have money you can get the food from wherever around the world. The other rule markets impose is this: if you do not have money, you will starve. This is an important point … The reason why people starve is because of poverty … not because of a shortage of food … but because the only way to access the food is through the market."

"In the cross of Christ I glory, Towering o'er the wrecks of time; All the light of sacred story Gathers round its head sublime."

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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 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."

"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."

"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 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."

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

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

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

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

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

"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?"

"[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"

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

"[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"

"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."

"[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."

"[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."

"The old have comprehensively shafted the young"

"We're being held to ransom by these pinstripe Scargills..."

"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,"

"The big, looming, monetary issue is "quantitative easing": that is, printing money. What happens is that the government borrows from the Bank of England, not from the markets. It expands the money supply to keep the economy going and also to counter deflation without simultaneously increasing government debt. The attractions are obvious, as are the dangers. The Robert Mugabe school of economics provides a salutary warning about uncontrolled monetary expansion in generating hyper-inflation. The road to Harare is not as long as we might hope. Monetary easing may prove to be necessary but will have to be managed with great skill and care: Too little easing and the crisis drags on – as in Japan. If there is too much, the authorities face the messy task of mopping-up liquidity by issuing bonds which add to the burden of borrowing or else we lurch back from deflation to inflation. So interest rates may soon become yesterday's story."

"The House has noticed the Prime Minister's remarkable transformation in the past few weeks from Stalin to Mr. Bean, creating chaos out of order, rather than order out of chaos."

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

"These masters of the universe must be tamed in the interests of the ordinary families whose jobs and livelihoods are being put at risk... The Tories won't say anything about the current crisis as they are completely in the pockets of the hedge funds."

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

"If a tax on malt would raise the price of beer, a tax on bread must raise the price of bread."

"A BOUNTY on the exportation of corn tends to lower its price to the foreign consumer, but it has no permanent effect on its price in the home market."

"But a tax on luxuries would no other effect than to raise their price. It would fall wholly on the consumer, and could neither increase wages nor lower profits."

"But it is clear that the price of labour has no necessary connection with the price of food, since it depends entirely on the supply of labourers compared with the demand."