Top 393 Labour Quotes

When it comes to jobs, investment, growth, security and our influence in the world we are clearly stronger in Europe. But we are also making a Labour argument about workers’ rights that really matter, to millions of working people and the trade unions that represent them.

But the branches of industry are so multifarious, the divisions of labour so minutes and manifold, that it seems at first almost impossible to reduce them to any system.

If the Tories are serious about ensuring everyone has the opportunity to learn, regardless of their background, then the only thing they need to review is Labour’s manifesto.

Acting is such a strange, vague profession, but my kids know it’s hard labour.

My parents were interested in history and the world. My father read Graham Greene and Georges Simenon and was a strong trade unionist and Labour supporter.

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.

My parents were Northern Ireland Labour party people. We read the ‘Guardian’ and the ‘New Statesman,’ listened to the BBC. The house was full of books. We didn’t get a television until ‘That Was The Week That Was’ started. There was nothing to do but read.

Music should come from the heart. It should happen. That should be automatic, and if you labour on creating music, it will not have soul.

It took 15 years and a Labour government to finally see Section 28 taken off the statute books. But this victory belongs to the LGBT+ activists who campaigned for so many years, fighting for change from the ground up.

If any further proof were needed that the Liberal Democrats live up to neither part of their name, then the treatment of Roman Catholic Robert Flello would have provided it. They were glad enough to have him when he defected from Labour but have now deselected him because he supports neither abortion nor gay marriage.

There’s a way that we can deliver a Brexit that works for our country, and the really interesting thing is the amount of Tory MPs working with Labour MPs, forming that consensus.

Scarce any problem will appear more hard and difficult, than that of determining the distance of the Sun from the Earth very near the truth: but even this… will without much labour be effected.

The industrial revolution allowed us, for the first time, to start replacing human labour with machines.

There is this big yawning gap in the middle of British politics, the Conservative and Labour parties have gone to the edges. In this divided, polarised world, the pragmatic centre ground is a bit unloved.

I don’t like either the Labour Party or the Conservatives, but I did really like Tony Benn.

I’ve said in the primary race repeatedly that a Labour Party that I lead would be a true red Labour Party, be very clear about its social democratic roots and its social democratic agenda.

Globalisation, technological change, and the move to flexible labour markets has channelled more and more income to rentiers – those owning financial, physical, or so-called intellectual property – while real wages stagnate.

Labour was formed to be the voice of community organisers, civic leaders and workplace activists, whose fight against poverty and injustice involved organising for their values, their principles and their loved ones.

Corbyn has reignited Labour.

Supporting Spurs is a bit like being in the Labour Party. It’s a labour of love, believe me.

Work is what structures adults’ lives: it gives us purpose, focus, a set of responsibilities, and an identity. So when people are not participating in the labour market, all sorts of other things often start to go wrong.

But how odd that in this heathen nation of empty pews, where churches’ bare, ruined choirs are converted into luxury loft living, a Labour government – yes, a Labour government – is deliberately creating a huge expansion of faith schools.

When economist William Beveridge dreamed up the postwar welfare state he wanted to fight five ‘giant evils’ – want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. Fast forward 65 years and it seems the last New Labour government grew an Unfair State that fuelled – not fought – one of those evils: idleness.

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.

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.

When it comes to getting more women into parliament, politicians have at least started to take active measures. The British Labour Party introduced all-female shortlists in 1997.

The taste of the times is, unhappily, to give to children something of book-learning, with a view of placing them to live, in some way or other, upon the labour of other people.

Surveillance legislation fit for the 21st century, which strikes the right balance between privacy, security and democracy is a prize worth fighting for, and Labour will work constructively with the government to achieve it.

At the age of nineteen and a half, I went to the Land of Israel to till its soil and live by the labour of my hands. As I did not find work, I sought my livelihood elsewhere.

The cyber security strategy for the United Kingdom is a master of the formulaic jargon we have come to associate with the Labour government, and is almost totally devoid of substance.

I love not knowing what’s going to happen next. With work, you never know. You rehearse and strive and get it right sometimes, and still you never know. Some people are like that with their marriages. They work and strive and labour and toil at them. God, what a bore! What an unromantic bore!

When Labour loses we do one of three things. We decide we didn’t win because we weren’t leftwing enough: fantasy. We decide we can avoid the really tough decisions because they are too uncomfortable: a fudge. Or we decide that winning is too important.

While Labour Party orators readily remember the 1980s for Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s free-booting variety of entrepreneurial meritocracy, what gets forgotten is that Thatcher also gave the heave-ho to the old establishment’s notion of merit – good breeding, a posh school, and so on.

Welsh voices and Welsh communities were heard in 2016 in their tens of thousands, in their droves. They voted to leave the European Union and since then they have had that slapped in their face actually often by Labour MPs who basically said we know better than you.

Denis Healey refused to contribute an article to the ‘Guardian’ about his intentions, and was punished by the electorate – and then all Labour MPs – for his presumption in assuming they already knew everything about him. He became famously the best prime minister we never had. Perhaps.

When New Labour came to power, we got a Right-wing Conservative government. I came to realise that voting Labour wasn’t in Scotland’s interests any more. Any doubt I had about that was cast aside for ever when I saw Gordon Brown cosying up to Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street.

The Labour Party is and always has been an instinctive part of my life.

Our problem in the 2015 general election was that for all the good stuff that was in the Labour manifesto, we were still going to be freezing public sector wages, cutting council expenditure, laying off civil servants. We were offering ‘austerity light’ instead of a real alternative.

If a Labour movement, on a bourgeois basis, has hitherto existed in the country where the new movement is awakening it will certainly not disappear all at once.

Many other countries have tried this and getting businesses to work in partnership in prisons, in prison and with prison labour, and to actually be able to make an economic return is extremely difficult.

Labour believes that every trade deal should come before parliament for a full debate on the floor of the House of Commons, with a vote at the end of that debate.

The prices of raw materials do not fluctuate directly with the labour cost of producing them.

I don’t labour over my lead guitar solos; they’re better just caught in the moment.

Shining through tears, like April suns in showers, that labour to overcome the cloud that loads ’em.

A multi-tier social protection system must be based on a modest basic income so as to enable the precariat to build lives involving a balance of different types of work, not just labour in jobs.

The first of all commodities to be exchanged is labour, and the freedom of man consists only in the exercise of the right to determine for himself in what manner his labour shall be employed, and how he will dispose of its products.

There are a lot of people who probably enjoyed ‘Conversations with Friends’ who are part of the system that is actively exploiting other people’s labour. I am sure there are landlords who read it and thought it was a great read. Am I happy that I have given those people 10 hours of distraction? Not really!