Words matter. These are the best Douglas Alexander Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Solidarity is the basis of my politics.
The depth of concern people feel about UKIP is not always matched by depth of understanding.
My vision for Scotland is one in which we fight together for the values we are care about: equality, fairness and social justice. Those values are the same whether you live in Dumfries or Carlisle.
Under Ed Miliband’s leadership, we are changing both our party’s structures and culture.
Newspapers can make their own judgment in terms of who they support in a general election. Our responsibility is to make a considered judgment about where the national interest lies.
The Olympics is a time primarily for sport and celebration, but diplomacy does not stop at the door of the U.N., and for it to work, it must be sustained and consistent.
Part of the reason I am so evangelical in our campaigning work is that I had an unshakeable faith in Labour values, but we needed a machine worthy of the message. I grew up with a peerless Conservative machine, with vastly superior resources.
Stories come and go. The challenge is to frame the questions that voters will be asking on polling day, such as who has avoided a global depression and worked here to deliver jobs.
Change is a process: future is a destination. People want a sense of hope, possibility and pride about Britain.
In an era of billion-person countries and trillion-pound economies, we need to find ways to amplify our voice. We are most likely to be heard when the Chinese negotiate with a £10 trillion E.U., not a £1.5 trillion Britain.
The Commonwealth is a vital and positive partnership between countries striving to develop trade relations and promote democracy and human rights, united by shared values.
When I joined Labour in 1982, I didn’t feel I belonged to a party born to power. My repeated experience was of bitter and repeated defeats.
It is already clear that, because of advances in technology, drones are going to play an increased role in warfare in the years ahead. It is therefore vital that the legal frameworks governing their use are robust and internationally recognised.
Kneejerk interventionism or kneejerk isolationism is the wrong course for Britain.
Of course the decision to commit British forces in Iraq was, for many MPs, a wrenching choice. However, our responsibility in the face of a growing ISIS threat is not to be paralysed by history, but to learn the correct lessons from it.
We’ll set our approach to borrowing, to spending, to taxation, in a sensible way on a sensible timescale.
I take UKIP very seriously. The truth is that UKIP presents an electoral challenge to all political parties. The way to defeat UKIP is not to be a better UKIP but to be a better Labour Party.
What people want is a sense of a better future to come.
The Conservatives are so busy focusing on yesterday, they’re not focused on tomorrow… on how elections are won in the 21st century.
Too often, the idea seemed to be that the cost of being part of Europe was being less like Britain. So after years of fighting to defend Europe against attacks from the Eurosceptic right, it would be fatal to retreat into the same arguments and begin the battle anew.
As Scots, we certainly want change today, but the change the Nationalists offer is not the change we want or need.
Of course we need to show we are a genuine alternative to an unpopular, Conservative-led government. But we need to set ourselves a higher standard than a party offering anger like UKIP.
The style of politics that Damian McBride represents has been discredited, and Labour has moved on.
It was here in Edinburgh that in the 1980s I joined with many others to protest against Margaret Thatcher as she arrived to address the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.
It would be wrong for us to offer difference from the Conservative Party at the cost of credibility, but equally it would be wrong to offer credibility at the cost of being clear that there remain very fundamental differences.
One of the big weaknesses of the Conservative Party is not just their ignorance of and lack of effective response to the cost-of-living crisis but a more fundamental error about what makes for success in the 21st century.
What matters in any campaign is that you have a strategic core that makes the judgements, decides the strategy, and can deliver.
I’m at one with Ed Miliband in saying that it’s important that people have the right to express their democratic voices and also their deep concerns about climate change because we have a planet in peril.
If Nick Clegg hadn’t been sitting around the cabinet table, we wouldn’t have had the bedroom tax; we wouldn’t have had the rise in tuition fees. We wouldn’t have had the mistakes we’ve seen in economic policy.
The Nationalists peddle a misplaced cultural conceit that holds that everyone south of the Solway Firth is an austerity loving Tory.
As shadow foreign secretary, I have been as clear in my support for the government when it does something we agree with as I am in highlighting that which we oppose.
In this age of growing interconnectedness, we understand that turning our backs on the world is simply not an option.
Labour’s task for government is to build consent for an outward-looking Britain as the best way to advance not just our interests, but also our values at a time of challenge, both at home and abroad.
If you talk to most people under 30, they don’t read a newspaper.
Just as people have long believed that strengthening ties of trade improves the prospects for peace and the free exchange of ideas, Facebook friendships or Twitter followings already transcend national borders.
