Top 60 Clive Lewis Quotes

Good businesses are the lifeblood of the economy. But, as responsible business people up and down the country know, the system too often allows good businesses to be undercut by bad.

Labour needs to lead – lead on Brexit, lead in Europe, lead for the people.

When Jeremy Corbyn won the Labour leadership – not once, but twice – and defied the mainstream media’s expectations to gain Labour seats in the 2017 election, it was no surprise to those of us who have always backed Corbyn and his agenda for change.

Labour are determined to create a fair, sustainable tax system in an economy that works for everyone.

The U.K. could become a global leader in decommissioning skills and technology as we move to a net-zero-carbon economy.

It’s sad to say, but the story of Royal Mail’s privatisation is a story of our times: the loss of democratic control; the transfer of wealth and power to the richest in society; and the growing pressure on working people to work harder and faster for less.

A lot of people would like to see the monarchy scaled down.

The top-down, vertical power relationships of the past are being replaced by a more evenly distributed, bottom-up variety.

The genius of the market is supposed to lie in its ability to allocate society’s resources to their most efficient uses without central direction. Labour has long recognised that efficiency doesn’t always correspond with what is socially optimal or, in other words, ‘fair.’

I’m fed up with the top-down style of politics, where discussion in our party is stifled because of sectarianism and tribalism.

We are looking at ways to shift the balance of taxation away from work and on to the practices that are destroying the environment on which a healthy economy depends.

We need to defeat not just antisemites but antisemitism.

Like many black people, I initially viewed the armed forces with a degree of suspicion.

In politics, sometimes, you dig your heels in and draw a line in the sand and refuse to compromise.

On their deathbed, do people think: ‘I wish I’d spent more time with my Ferrari’? Or do they say: ‘I wish I’d spent more time watching my kids grow up, I wish I’d spent more time country walking?’ It’s about the things that matter in life, and how we have an economy that better reflects that.

There is nothing efficient about destroying the planet as we know it because vested interests want to keep us addicted to fossil fuels.

Many of us mistakenly believe a coup d’etat is the only kind of coup possible. But a coup doesn’t always require tanks on a lawn and senior ranking military types appearing on your TV and radio declaring that democracy as you knew it, is now over.

Understandably, the electorate places great faith in the professional soldiers and strategists that run our military.

With its brutal empire and legalised slavery, the Roman Republic was hardly a towering beacon of progressive values.

I’m known for wearing tweed jackets, khaki pants and suede shoes. I’ve only worn a suit in parliament under duress, when I was on the front bench.

I couldn’t watch ‘BP’ for a long time, until I started doing this job, because I knew in my heart that ‘Blue Planet,’ as beautiful as it was, at the end they would always have the human impact, and I struggled to watch it because I felt so powerless.

In a liberal democracy rapid, radical and fundamental economic change must benefit the many not the few, if it is to gain popular, long-term political support.

Tackling climate change can make us world leaders in burgeoning markets for green technology.

I would like the Labour Party to issue a pamphlet to all its members explaining what antisemitism is. The pamphlet could go through each way that antisemitism manifests itself, point by point, explaining what each means.

Billionaire’s shouldn’t exist.

Leadership and punching above your weight doesn’t necessarily always have to mean gunboat diplomacy and bombing other countries into the stone age. It can actually mean leading by example, and helping other countries.

Frankly, I want to be in government with Caroline Lucas, not against her – and certainly not in permanent opposition.

Ultimately, if BEIS fails in the historic tasks Theresa May has given it, we will all pay a heavy price.

As in many British organisations, subtle institutionalised discrimination may well prevail. But in all my time in the army I’ve never experienced overt racism.

People have to remember that the armed forces do as democratically elected governments tell them to do. They don’t arbitrarily go into countries and kick off. These are decisions that are made by our politicians.

Every time the Tories are in government, our democracy takes a battering.

Serving your country in the U.S. brings not just peer respect but also the chance to learn new skills and receive a college education. The U.K.’s armed forces offer a similar deal.

Labour has a complex history with racism and internationalism. Political education about antisemitism and all forms of racism can help us reckon with that history, and ensure a socialist politics based on real equality becomes the common sense across the party.

Unanimous votes are rare in parliament.

During his time at BHS, Sir Philip Green treated the company as his own personal plaything. Instead of investing in its branches and developing its brand, he ran down the pension scheme and used the company to line his own pockets.

It’s obvious the Green Industrial Revolution will challenge orthodox political and economic thinking. That requires bravery from both politicians and electorates.

Labour can and must offer hope: not the falsehood that it will do everything, but the real promise that it can help us help each other.

The need for heroes, to admire them, to be inspired by them, runs deep in our cultural and social make-up.

My message to Thunberg and all of her British counterparts is simple: the Labour party’s door is open. We hear you, and we will work with you to do what needs to be done.

Heathrow is conveniently located for airlines to shuttle the global elite between different routes. These flights disturb the peace of millions, disrupting lessons across west London and dumping toxic gases on people living around the airport. Their passengers don’t pay a penny in taxes.

My feminist values are rooted in my socialist values. The number of women CEOs in Britain’s biggest companies is irrelevant if they pay their women workers poverty wages or discriminate against black employees.

Boris Johnson tried to prorogue parliament to get his disaster of a Brexit through, bringing hundreds of thousands out onto the streets for the ‘Stop The Coup’ protests, and seeing his cynical strategy overturned by the Supreme Court in the process.

Political status does not necessarily depend on nuclear capability.

Parliament must do a better job at holding the Government to account than it managed in the Article 50 debates.

Ultimately, Boris Johnson and the political and financial support behind his Brexit project are probably the biggest threat to both British democracy and the post-war welfare state settlement we’ve faced in the post-war period.

I think many of the virtues and values of the army are very similar to the virtues and values of socialism, of the Labour Party. It’s about looking out for each other, it’s about working as a team, it’s about understanding.

On everything from climate change to the housing crisis, we need solutions that are credible, bold and radical.

While as black people we’ve paid for our right to be in this country many, many times over, I still can’t help but feel we psychologically still see ourselves as outsiders. I believe this is our country. As such we need to embrace it fully.

A leadership competition is not an ideal context for honest reflection. The aim is, after all, to win, not to learn and build.

Poor people don’t drive the toxic form of economic ‘growth’ that is destroying our environment.

I’d rather see us as citizens than subjects in the 21st Century.

Chasing new runway capacity to cater to ever more frequent leisure flights by Britain’s wealthiest households isn’t just iniquitous – it’s bad economic policy.

Central to being a humanist, which I am, is the core understanding that doubt and criticism are essential attributes in the quest for knowledge.

E.U. law provides agency workers with the right to equal treatment, and all workers with maximum working hours. It forces governments to take environmental legislation seriously, and to protect air and water standards.

In the U.S., requiring voters to produce photo ID in order to vote is just part of a much wider and more open system of discrimination against poor and ethnic minority voters.

There is nothing efficient about firms spurning more productive technologies because years of unrelenting attacks on social safety nets and collective bargaining have created cheap labour in abundance.

The only time that Labour has convincingly come from opposition to win has been in 1997 in the post-war period. And to do that we had to tack quite substantially to the right.

The creation of millions of secure, well-paid jobs must be at the forefront of any Green Industrial Revolution.

We were the first country in the world to carbonise our economy and to reap the huge economic rewards that followed and it is right that we now invest some of that wealth in fully decarbonising.