Top 70 Emily Thornberry Quotes

By creating a perception that the U.K. places a higher premium on striking commercial deals than it does on promoting and protecting human rights, our reputation in the world suffers.

The Tories have long since abdicated any pretension of principled global leadership.

Our courts’ decisions do not permeate the public consciousness – we have no equivalent of the Brown v Board of Education ruling which outlawed racial segregation, or of Roe v Wade, which enshrined a woman’s right to choose not just into law but into the public imagination as well.

When you’ve made a mistake, you have to admit you’ve made a mistake, and correct it.

It’s unfortunate that the U.K. and Europe don’t have the kind of culture which esteems legal protections enforced by the courts in the same way as, for example, the U.S. does.

I’ve been in politics a long time and the only way you survive is by getting the hide of a rhino.

Food banks have become such a powerful symbol in part because they’re inescapable.

Carving out our own role, distinct from America’s, might not be easy. But we must ask ourselves: what alternative is there? Unthinking, uncritical loyalty to the U.S. under Donald Trump is a far less appealing idea.

The Fraud Act 2006 makes it perfectly clear that Libor rigging is prosecutable as a criminal offence.

The welfare state, which grew out of post-war solidarity, has for decades been based on the principle that those who pay into the system are entitled to expect that the safety net will be there for them when they fall on hard times.

All the evidence shows that establishing the habit of voting as early as possible is a vital tool in making sure that it’s maintained throughout people’s lives.

I don’t think you negotiate with people by going around telling them that they’re like Nazi guards or it’s all about prosecco.

If we were to allow the Chris Grayling and his cronies to tear up the Human Rights Act and withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights from which it is derived, we would set back the cause of victims’ rights by decades.

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.

This sounds ridiculous, but my political inspiration is not Marx or Engels or ­anything like that. It was my mum.

Mum was on benefits for a few years. Then I failed the 11-plus and I went to the secondary modern. And that was hard because the expectations were so low in the school.

In passing the National Minimum Wage Act in 1998, the then-Labour Government did more than just establish the legal right to a minimum wage, significant as that was. More importantly, the Act made non-compliance a criminal offence.

Everybody gets paranoid about deselections. I do.

Whether it’s in Jobcentres or in Whitehall, young people are constantly coming up against a narrative that portrays them as lazy and feckless, when in reality nothing could be further from the truth.

I wear the chips that I have on my shoulder with pride.

My European constituents are among the most politically engaged people I represent.

We need a foreign policy which responds to challenges like forced marriage, and which speaks to the particular needs of women and girls at risk of being sold into slavery.

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.

I think there are many people on £70,000 who may well feel that their circumstances are such that they are not rich.

We have all these strong men in politics – whether it’s Brazil, or the Philippines, or Trump, or Putin. They’re all big men: it’s let’s look up to them, don’t be afraid, they’re looking after things. It’s so fundamentally anti-democratic.

The most prominent – and by far the most controversial – part of ‘Help to Work’ essentially forces people to take unpaid work placements as a condition of receiving their benefits.

Help to Work’ always felt like a singularly inappropriate name for a scheme which had the express intention of ‘stepping up the pressure’ on the long-term unemployed, rather than actually helping them into work.

Why the Tories are happy to subsidise home ownership for middle class graduates and affluent social tenants, but not for widows on low incomes, is simply beyond me.

A scam is a scam. A fraud is a fraud. Different rules don’t apply in the City than they do for you and me.

Where there are breaches of human rights, you need to speak out about it, no matter where it is.

It is up to Labour to keep alive the belief that government should be for the whole nation and that no section of society should place itself beyond scrutiny and above the law.

It’s often been said that politics in Islington, in many ways, begins and ends with housing, and it’s not hard to see why. Despite the borough’s image of exclusivity – the stereotype that it’s all Georgian squares and cappuccino bars – the reality is much more complex.

You can take the girl out of the estate, but you can’t take the estate out of the girl.

People don’t seem to be safe inside Pentonville, and now it transpires inmates can escape. That is the final straw. If they don’t have control of the place, what is the point of it being there? This was built in 1842 and is totally inappropriate for modern needs.

It is clear that too many bankers think that laws are for the little people.

Laws protecting this right – whatever the level of the minimum wage, and whatever the Government chooses to call it – are only as strong as the threat of enforcement is both real and feared.

We must apply the same standards to countries such as Saudi Arabia, Israel and Egypt that we apply to Iran, Russia and Syria.

When I was starting out as a barrister in the 1980s, Lord Denning was the most famous judge in the land, and the supposed role model for every lawyer. But not for me.

As the MP for Islington South and Finsbury, I have the privilege of representing one of the most diverse constituencies in the U.K.

The social safety net was created by a united society in the aftermath of the Second World War. It came out of a British sense of fairness.

There’s a particularly nasty element when lots of men get together sometimes.

Labour is fundamentally a Remain party but it is in our interests to negotiate as good a deal as possible.

Taxpayers’ and ‘people on benefits’ are not two separate and distinct groups of people.

We need to have a system whereby, when a victim walks into a police station, she can be confident that she will be believed and that every effort will be made find evidence to support her in court.

I was born into the Labour party. I was delivering leaflets by the age I could reach the letter box.

The ‘Welfare Reform and Work’ Bill does nothing to address low wages, or underemployment, and I haven’t even got started on how it undermines the provision of affordable housing.

AV does not bring you greater proportionality – and there is a tendency for parties to gang up on one of the major ones to run an ‘anyone but’ campaign.

Low pay is a serious problem, and its victims need a genuine solution.

We got evicted from our house in Guildford. We were chucked out and had nowhere to go. We ended up in social housing. And it was very hard for my mum. My brothers were five and three.

To give him his credit, I never thought I’d say this, but Donald Trump was talking about the importance of investing in jobs and infrastructure and in the economies across the country, not just the main cities, and that’s right.

For centuries, the courts took the view that preserving the discretion of the authorities trumped the rights of victims to hold them to account. It was because of the Human Rights Act that this began to change.

I was 10 when the Equal Pay Act was passed. It was pretty inspiring stuff.

So how helpful has ‘Help to Work’ actually been? Not very.

Equal constituencies’ sound fair. So why is Labour so against the constituencies bill and why do we call it gerrymandering? Because, like so much Tory rhetoric, it sounds good, but if we look beyond the soundbites it becomes clear that it covers policies that promote narrow sectional interests.

There are some very plain, very simple offences in the Fraud Act 2006 that can be applied to price manipulation. For example, there’s fraud by false representation. This is aimed at people who say something misleading to line their pockets or cause financial harm to someone else.

The Human Rights Act has not just given a voice to victims, but to the families who have to fight for the victim where the victim has died.

Even though I’ve had the odd terse word to say about Donald Trump, I still get invited to events at the U.S. embassy. I always attend, because as long as they’re prepared to hear the opposite viewpoint, then I’ll never miss that chance when I can.