Top 44 Dennis Skinner Quotes

I remember at one time there were 44 mining MPs.

I have worked out that I am living in London on £27 a day while David Cameron is claiming a damn sight more for his big house in Oxford.

I always work on the principle that if my heart and my head are together on an issue, write it, say it.

I used to be very athletic when I was a young man.

In the public sector, there are a million people in the health service. There ought to be a couple of dozen or more on the Labour side, who learned their trade in different parts of the health service, and the public sector, and local government. And bus drivers, and people on the Underground.

I’ve never made a perfect speech or a perfect anything. I always think after, I should have done it that way or this way.

My life hasn’t been all about politics.

There are fads in life and old people indulge things to excess sometimes.

Environment does shape you. My environment, in a pit family, in a pit village, with nine kids in total.

I’ve never been to a dinner that’s laid on anywhere. I don’t want to waste what few hours I’ve got.

There are only so many things you can do in life, and if you think I’m going to spend my waking hours thinking about some decency in some Tory or other, forget it.

I am naturally disciplined. It started early; you can’t be all free and easy in a family of 10.

We have all lost before and we will win again.

I don’t think you should celebrate age.

I realised that you could get into trouble with a dull speech.

The personality cult of the ego does not work down a coal mine and it does not work in the Labour party.

I refused to pair with a Tory MP, I refused all foreign junkets and I’ve never had a drink in a Westminster bar.

We’re allowed to say wonderful things about the Royal Family in the House of Commons. What you’re not allowed to say is: anything that might be truthful, but that might upset them. So from time to time I’ve been pulled up because I’ve said things which I think are important.

We dragged the National Health Service from the depths of degradation. I’ve got a United Nations heart bypass to prove it and it was done by a Syrian cardiologist, a Malaysian surgeon, a Dutch doctor and a Nigerian registrar.

When posh boys are in trouble they sack their servants.

I was shaped by a pit environment and the Second World War. My playground was on the pit tip at Clay Cross and I grew up with that mining background. My father was a miner and my granddad was a miner, and I would say three out of ten on the street where I was born were working in the pits.

I still think carefully about what I’m going to say. I use me heart and head technique, in which the heart says, ‘get stuck in, Dennis!’, and the head says, ‘just a minute… ‘ But I probably don’t use this as often as some others.

I’m not going to be putting my expenses on the Internet. I wouldn’t know how.

I worked in the pit for more than 20 years and never had a serious injury.

I’ve never bothered about what people say about me.

When Cameron said to me ‘you’re a dinosaur,’ several people in Parliament said to me ‘you’re trendin’, Dennis, you’re trendin’ – and I didn’t know what it meant. I know now what it is.

I do rely on my instincts a lot and my imagination.

I did marathons long before they were popular, when people running round the streets were looked at oddly.

I remember arguing with kids on the street who were talking about Santa Claus. I said don’t be so daft – Santa Claus doesn’t come down our chimney. He’s an economic Santa Claus; he goes down chimneys where they’ve got money.

I hate to say it because I voted against everything Thatcher did, but she had principles she believed in.

I’ve never done any cross-party stuff. I’ve no interest in sitting down discussing pensions or whatever with Tories.

When I swapped studying for a wage and a proper job, Mam and Dad were devastated. I was rejecting an opportunity they never had. But their eldest son, at 16, wanted only to follow his father down the pit. It was to be the biggest education of my life.

Cameron called me a dinosaur you know? Well I’m the only dinosaur who can ride a bike 12 miles a day.

If I am doing a speech at a Labour party meeting – I think I have done every constituency – I’ll look for a happy face, and talk to that face. In the Commons, with all the anger, I’ll fix on a blank panel above their heads.

If I’d not been a coal miner in the past, getting up very early, I wouldn’t have been able to have done what I’ve been doing.

I’m not gregarious. I spend a lot of time in the parks when it is fine. I do know almost every blade of grass.

I’ve never sent an email to anybody. I believe in keeping the postman in work.

Isn’t it essential in any prelude to a war to be sure of your allies and be sure of your objectives?

Parties are organised happiness but happiness is accidental. You can’t legislate for it.

I’m up at the crack of dawn.

I wouldn’t take Father of the House even if I was offered it.

Well, I don’t believe in patronage.

I never, ever romanticise life in the pit. It was a hard, dirty, noisy, tiring, dangerous job in a confined space, a very dark world with no toilets or running water to drink or wash with.

I have bought my flat myself and never charged a penny of it to the taxpayers.