People From York

"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."

"[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"

"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."

"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"

"The old have comprehensively shafted the young"

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"We are supreme and irresistible in our force. We can do what we like. We can crush these Dutchmen in the Transvaal, and you will have to crush the Dutchmen all over South Africa. You may send out a corps d'armée and you can do that; of that there is no doubt. But that, I hope, is not the question. For us it is not what we can do, but what is right we should do and what we ought to do. That is the only supremacy which I claim for the English nation."

"As regards the principle of the Bill, I, for one, am entirely in accord with it... Why, it is the great principle of the "three acres and a cow" which we fought out at the Election of 1885. ... The principle of the Bill, as I take it, is to be this—that the Local Authority is to have power by compulsion to acquire land for the advantage of the community in letting it out, or otherwise disposing of it to individuals. ... This was the great charge of Socialism which was brought against my right hon. Friend the Member for West Birmingham; but, happily, we are all Socialists now."

"It is this practice of allowing one set of people to dictate to another set of people what they shall do, what they shall think, what they shall drink, when they shall go to bed, what they shall buy, and where they shall buy it, what wages they shall get and how they shall spend them, against which the Liberal party have always protested."

"If there be any party which is more pledged than another to resist a policy of restrictive legislation, having for its object social coercion, that party is the Liberal party. (Cheers.) But liberty does not consist in making others do what you think right, (Hear, hear.) The difference between a free Government and a Government which is not free is principally this—that a Government which is not free interferes with everything it can, and a free Government interferes with nothing except what it must. A despotic Government tries to make everybody do what it wishes; a Liberal Government tries, as far as the safety of society will permit, to allow everybody to do as he wishes. It has been the tradition of the Liberal party consistently to maintain the doctrine of individual liberty. It is because they have done so that England is the place where people can do more what they please than in any other country in the world."

"Socialism is the legitimate and inevitable corollary of Mr. Bright's doctrine. If want is the crime of the Government, then the duty of the Government must be to provide against want. This is Socialism pure and simple. It begins with national workshops, and ends with what Mr. Carlyle calls a "whiff of grapeshot." Mr. Bright may pretend to direct his attacks against the aristocracy alone, but it is the possessors of capital, the employers of labour, the great middle class of this country who have real cause to dread his revolutionary language."

"His literary knowledge gave a fine flavour to his speeches, and he made by far the best adaptation of a quotation that I heard in the House of Commons."

"Harcourt had many advantages as a speaker: a commanding presence, a classical style, a caustic humour, considerable erudition, and a wide knowledge of affairs. I heard him make many powerful speeches, but he was not naturally eloquent. I doubt if he ever moved an audience either to deep feeling or to tears—which might serve as a definition of oratory; and he failed to convince his hearers of sincerity or conviction—an impression which was encouraged by some of the circumstances of his political career. In satire, raillery, and scorn, not always highly refined, he was proficient. I remember calling upon him once in his rooms at Cambridge, where he was Professor of International Law, in 1879. He handed me a copy of a speech in this vein which he had just delivered at Southport in Lancashire—a place I was later to represent in Parliament—with the remark: "That speech will make me Home Secretary in the next Administration"—and so it did. Though he was very effective in improvised retort,—more so I think than when prepared—he became in later years so much a slave to his MS., that he lost all appearance of spontaneity."

"Harcourt was the last of that long train of reasoners, debaters, orators, law-makers, great from Somers and Sir Robert Walpole onwards. New elements of feeling were edging their way into the public mind. The old plain, hard, secular, commonsense, after the Reform Bill of 1832 had revolutionised the foundations of parliamentary aristocracy, has become deepened and enriched, but changed. Harcourt was the last stout-hearted representative of the parliamentary polity of a long and not inglorious era."

"As militant pamphleteer Harcourt was of the first order—as good as Junius or Swift or Bolingbroke, in weight, scorn, directness, trenchant stroke. When any ecclesiastical pretensions irritated the Erastianism that was the deepest and most undying of his political tenets, his pen made prelates and their crosiers shake."

"He who foresees calamities suffers them twice over."

"Teach him how to live, And, oh still harder lesson! how to die."

"War its thousands slays, Peace its ten thousands."

"One murder made a villain, Millions a hero. Princes were privileged To kill, and numbers sanctified the crime."

"In sober state, Through the sequestered vale of rural life, The venerable patriarch guileless held The tenor of his way."

"Of all the plots and conspiracies that ever entered into the mind of man, the Gunpowder plot stands pre-eminent in horror and wickedness. The singular perseverance of the conspirators is shown by the fact, that so early as in Lent of the year 1603, Robert Catesby, who appears to have been the prime mover of the plot, in a conversation with Thomas Wintour and John Wright, first broke with them about a design for delivering England from her bondage, and to replant the Catholic religion."

"Remember, remember, the 5th of November The Gunpowder Treason and Plot; I know of no reason why the Gunpowder Treason Should ever be forgot. Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, 'Twas his intent. To blow up the King and the Parliament. Three score barrels of powder below. Poor old England to overthrow."

"... to blow you Scotch beggars back to your native mountains."

"A desperate disease requires a dangerous remedy."

"The Fifth of November is Guy Fawkes' Day in England. In peacetime it is celebrated with bonfires on the greens, fireworks in the parks and the carrying of "guys" through the streets. "Guys" are stuffed, straw figures of unpopular persons; and after they have been shown to everybody they are burnt in the bonfires amid great acclamation. The children black their faces and put on comical clothes, and go about begging for a Penny for the Guy. Only the very meanest people refuse to give pennies and these are always visited by Extreme Bad Luck. The Original Guy Fawkes was one of the men who took part in the Gunpowder Plot. This was a conspiracy for blowing up King James I and the Houses of Parliament on November 5th, 1605. The plot was discovered, however, before any damage was done. The only result was that King James and his Parliament went on living but Guy Fawkes, poor man, did not. He was executed with the other conspirators. Nevertheless, it is Guy Fawkes who is remembered today and King James who is forgotten. For since that time, the Fifth of November in England, like the Fourth of July in America, has been devoted to Fireworks. From 1605 till 1939 every village green in the shires had a bonfire on Guy Fawkes' Day. … Since 1939, however, there have been no bonfires on the village greens. No fireworks gleam in the blackened parks and the streets are dark and silent. But this darkness will not last forever. There will some day come a Fifth of November — or another date, it doesn't matter — when fires will burn in a chain of brightness from Land's End to John O' Groats. The children will dance and leap about them as they did in the times before. They will take each other by the hand and watch the rockets breaking, and afterwards they will go home singing to the houses full of light..."

"Vote Guy Fawkes — The Only Man Ever To Enter Parliament With Honest Intentions"

"Guy Fawkes was a man of desperate character. In his person he was tall and athletic, his countenance was manly, and the determined expression of his features was not a little heightened by a profusion of brown hair, and an auburn-coloured beard. He was descended from a respectable family in Yorkshire, and having soon squandered the property he inherited at the decease of his father, his restless spirit associated itself with the discontented and factious of his age."