Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The original sin of Brexit - the lies, contradictions, half-truths and omissions on which it was built - have come back to haunt the Thatcherite Tories who started all this with Nigel Farage and Ukip.
My mum's super Labour, and my gran. We all love Jeremy Corbyn in the family. Those are very deep roots and I feel like I could never not vote for Labour. Or I could never vote for the Tories because of that.
When I fought the Tories over climate change and won, more than trebling renewable power with a new subsidy policy combining state intervention with competitive market forces, it was world-beatingly radical.
Left to their own devices, the Tories will squash the life out of what Brexit really represents in terms of the chance to shake up political life and overturn a complacent status quo. We cannot let that happen.
Do you defend free markets, or do you reform them? It's the same issue that Labour had in the mid-Seventies, and it's the same issue the Tories had after 1945. How do you interact with this new ideological term?
The Tories claim that they have changed. Their stance on foxhunting makes it absolutely clear that they haven't. They know the public doesn't agree with them. They know that this is about animal cruelty, pure and simple.
I come from a generation that suffered school lessons in portacabins and crumbling hospitals. I tell you one thing, for the eighteen years they were in power the Tories did nothing to fix the roof when the sun was shining.
As the economy faces such difficulties, more tough questions need to be asked about what the Tories would do if elected. Their ideology of free markets and small government needs challenging. That has to be part of our job.
Of course, it's absurd that we trust the Tories with our day-to-day reality, as so many of them don't really inhabit it. Why elect people to run our schools and hospitals who choose not to go to those schools and hospitals?
While scrapping the HRA would severely curtail people's ability to seek legal redress in U.K. courts for violations of their fundamental rights, the Tories' threat to withdraw the U.K. from the ECHR are far more frightening.
Conservatives like to talk about 'the strivers' who share what they like to think of as Conservative values. But as I found in my Blue Collar Tories research in 2012, such people no longer see the party as their natural ally.
The Tories and the Lib Dems talk about social mobility, but, short of winning the lottery, the only way to guarantee young people from all backgrounds the opportunity to do better and to raise aspirations is through education.
There has always been something less than wholesome about New Labour. But Blair for a long time had an easy ride. There was the whopping majority. There was the relief that the Tories were finally gone. There was the grand hyperbole.
A coalition with Tories and Liberal Democrats together is a golden opportunity to create the sort of planning reform that means not only can we have more environmentally sensitive planning, but we can have more homes and more schools.
Although there's a lot of focus on the Lib Dems, we need to keep our eyes on the far right of the Tories, who I suspect will become increasingly impatient in their appetite for tax cuts, deregulation and shrinking the state even further.
I think the fact that people are even talking about the prospect of the Tories coming second is less about anything the Tories have done and more about the failures of Labour to set out, in any kind of coherent sense, what it's for anymore.
The fact of the matter is that when governments fail - as the Tories have done - to tackle the root causes of working peoples' need for welfare support, like low pay and high rents, the number of working people relying on benefits increases.
The Tories have been offering us a cocktail of incompetence and malice and Labour haven't done anything to draw attention to it. It's been like watching Mesut Ozil drop perfect crosses on to the head of an increasingly frustrated Stephen Hawking.
The Tories have built a system defined by insecurity - from wages to job contracts to housing to the welfare state. If they want to understand why socialism - long dead, never coming back, or so they thought - has undergone a revival, this is why.
When the Tories came to power in 2010, the ground-breaking Equality Act had just become law. But the newly appointed Equalities Minister wasted no time in systematically undermining both the Act itself and the Commission responsible for enforcing it.
In the Fall of 1774 & Winter of 1775, I was one of upwards of thirty, chiefly mechanics, who formed ourselves into a committee for the purpose of watching the movements of the British soldiers, and gaining every intelligence of the movements of the Tories.
I've met Theresa May, and I think she's a good person. I'm not someone who goes, 'Ooooh, boooo, the Tories,' or 'Ooooh, boo' anyone, actually. You sit down and have a sensible conversation, and she is really, really capable of having a sensible conversation.
You don't win elections by telling people what you're against. We're very good at listing things we don't much like about what the Tories are doing. But you win elections by telling them what you're for, what you're going to change, what's going to be better.
A majority of all defectors who voted Labour in 2010 but for a different party in 2015 said Ed Miliband had helped push them to another party. For those switching to the Tories, the second biggest reason was the fear that a Labour government would spend and borrow too much.
In these difficult times, when tough decisions are required, the differences between Labour and the Tories are becoming much clearer. One party believes in intervention to reduce social and economic costs and the other believes in market forces and letting things take their course.
I clearly believe a lot more than some of my coalition colleagues - Tories - in redistribution and using the tax system for that purpose. I also believe in the government having an active role in the economy, which is having an industrial strategy. I'm not a believer in laissez-faire.
There was a time when a certain type of Tory could have been relied on to swing from the chandeliers in defence of the rights of freeborn Britons. I suppose a lot of those Tories would have been what you might call 'one-nation Tories.' That tradition has died in the Conservative party.
The best way of realising our high ideals is to show that we have an alternative in government that is credible, that is radical, and is electable - is neither a pale imitation of what the Tories offer nor is it the route to being a party of permanent protest rather than a party of government.
All socio-political phenomena in the U.K. come laden with the baggage of a class-based theory or two attached to them. In the case of gay Tories, there is one particularly silly variant of the category, which asserts that gayness is bred in public schools and thus fits with Conservatism like hand in glove.
While loyalists and defectors overall said John Smith did a better job of standing up for Labour's values, they put Blair ahead on representing the whole country, appealing beyond traditional Labour voters and offering strong, competent leadership; switchers to the Tories gave him a clear lead in all categories.
The Tories must stop focusing on their ideological obsession with a hard Brexit and their internal party divisions and start focusing on what is best for our country and our economy. Their absurd proposal that the U.K. should become the E.U.'s tariff collector is neither practical nor palatable across the Channel.
If the Tories and Lib Dems fought together, they'd keep their ministerial offices and limousines, and continue to do the right things for the U.K. But too many backbenchers in both parties yearn for Opposition, preferring hallucinogenic ideological purity and political irrelevance to the mucky reality of governing.
I was elected by people voting Labour! The idea that you come to Parliament and the first thing you do is that you're hand in hand with Tories and Liberals - I can't understand it! I came here and I made my mind up that I wasn't going to collaborate with the people I'd fought against in the election. It wasn't a difficult thing.
Tory supporters are not spontaneously ashamed; they have been made to feel ashamed. British leftists fiercely believe they are right - in the sense of correct but also in the sense of just. Conservatives likewise believe they are right-as-in-correct. Yet Tories are less confident about whether their politics are right-as-in-just.
It is my view that our response to the Brexit vote should not have been to turn in on ourselves. At a time of grave constitutional and economic challenge for our country, it was incumbent on us to rise to this threat and ensure that the Labour party should defend the interests of our communities and not allow the Tories a free hand.
When I started knocking on Highland doors in May 1983, two things struck me more than any other. First was the sheer depth of hostility towards the Tories in general. Second was the particular hostility towards Margaret Thatcher and her local ministerial spear-carrier, energy minister and incumbent MP of 13 years' standing, Hamish Gray.
We need a sustainable system of student finance that promotes opportunity, encourages aspiration, increases social mobility and is governed by fairness. But all the Tories can offer is unsustainable, mounting debt, punishing students for wanting an education. And discouraging thousands of young people from climbing the ladder to a better life.
In the 1990s, the Lib Dems won a string of byelections at the expense of struggling Conservative governments. Christchurch, Ribble Valley and Eastbourne went straight back to the Tories at the next general election, but the Lib Dems held their later byelection gains - Eastleigh, Newbury and Romsey - in at least two subsequent general elections.
