Quotes from Emily Thornberry

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

Everybody gets paranoid about deselections. I do.

I went to this rubbish school. I asked the careers master what he thought that I was going to do with my life, and he said I could always visit criminals in prison.

Patients who have suffered appalling medical negligence, abused children ignored by social services, mistreated residents of care homes - they have all been given a voice by the Human Rights Act.

It is my view that our response to the Brexit vote should not have been to turn in on ourselves. At a time of grave constitutional and economic challenge for our country, it was incumbent on us to rise to this threat and ensure that the Labour party should defend the interests of our communities and not allow the Tories a free hand.

The Alternative Vote is sectarian and self-serving and it will not improve people's lives.

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

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

My awakening to the fight for women's votes came when I was 13, and the BBC screened a drama called 'Shoulder to Shoulder' about the suffragettes, with the great Sian Phillips as Emmeline Pankhurst. It made a huge impression on me - not just the history, but because of the debates it triggered at home.

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.

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.

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.

As I'm sure everyone would agree, carers who do the difficult job of looking after the elderly and vulnerable deserve to be paid a decent wage that they can actually live on.

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 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.

The U.K.'s reputation as a business destination will suffer if its authorities cannot be relied on to enforce the law.

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.

If you've just been sacked from work, with no money coming in and a baby to feed, clothe and keep warm, it's unlikely you'll have a thousand pounds or so to spare.

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

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.

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.

White collar crime must be taken as seriously as any other crime.

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

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