Quotes from Emily Thornberry

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

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

By repealing the Child Poverty Act, which forced governments to take real action to tackle child poverty, this government brings a proud chapter of British history to an undignified end. In future the government will measure child poverty not by looking at whether they have any money, but by looking at their so-called 'life chances.'

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.

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.

The destructive impact of employment tribunal fees, which were introduced in 2013, is by now well known.

You have to be very poor and desperate, or very rich, or lucky, to live in Islington. We don't have the people in the middle, the people who serve the community.

One of the fundamental pillars of international humanitarian law is that proper distinction should be made between military targets and civilians. That is why indiscriminate bombing, let alone the deliberate targeting of residential areas or agricultural infrastructure, is considered a war crime.

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

It took LGBT activists 15 years to defeat section 28, but this is not a movement that's afraid of the long struggle. They know all progress is hard-fought, that discrimination against any individual anywhere is discrimination against all, and that the campaign for true, global equality must therefore be won one issue, case and country at a time.

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.

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.

If I had a row with my husband, it's not going to work my saying, 'Right, if you don't do what I want, I'm going to walk out.' It doesn't work on any level. What you do is you go in and you say, 'I have a problem. You have a problem. Let's try and sort this out together.' You don't come to an agreement with people who you're falling out with badly.

The notion of women being written out of history is as old as the Bible, but it always seems more galling when it is the history of progressive movements - such as the abolitionist campaign in Britain or the fight for African-American civil rights - in which the role of women has been diminished.

We should waive fees for those taking equal pay claims; they are our whistleblowers and should be encouraged.

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.

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.

We need to put human rights, a belief in multilateralism and respect for international law back at the heart of foreign policy.

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.

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

While scrapping the HRA would severely curtail people's ability to seek legal redress in U.K. courts for violations of their fundamental rights, the Tories' threat to withdraw the U.K. from the ECHR are far more frightening.

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 principle behind the Equal Pay Act is that if an individual woman finds a man doing similar work and being paid more she can take her employer to a tribunal and get paid equally and compensated. Sounds simple enough. But in reality this law has been hamstrung by a series of stupid loopholes that have developed over the years.

People like to think about MPs in very crass terms: you're either an uber-loyalist babe, or you're a rebel. There isn't any grown-up room to be thoughtful. There isn't space in public debate for that.