Quotes from David Lammy

I'm not one of those people for which politics is my sole preoccupation.

Family policy is not a zero-sum game: any gain for dads need not come at the expense of mums.

A loving family matters. So do male role models.

Active dads make a positive contribution: they are good for children and they are good for mothers.

Many single mothers do a heroic job looking after their children, as mine did with us; but as she found, it becomes twice as hard to set boundaries with half the number of parents.

Unemployed people should be treated as potential to be realised, not a problem to be solved.

To tackle the scourge of young unemployment we need to be ambitious.

As the MP for an area like Tottenham you quickly learn that the factors leading to unemployment are as numerous as they are diverse.

The New Labour doctrine that skills training was the responsibility of employers was flawed. The idea that employers should take on a bigger role ignores the reality that employers have no incentive to train staff to leave. We can hardly expect Tesco to train checkout staff to become dental nurses.

People who have no stake in society are the least likely to have respect for it.

Universities are not like supermarkets: their job is to serve the country, not just the customers who happen to walk through their doors.

I tend not to read fiction - I'll read one novel a year during the summer - but I do read a lot of nonfiction.

Mum worked nonstop, doing two, sometimes three, jobs throughout the 80s.

The 1980s were tough for most of Britain, but nowhere more so than Tottenham.

I certainly knew the hard side of urban life, stop-and-search.

Many black youths are defying stereotypes, achieving good academic results, finding employment and contributing to their communities. But helping those who fall behind is not an exercise in political correctness, it is a precisely what a compassionate - and sensible - state should concern itself with.

It is hard to speak the truth about valued national institutions. But when they are not fit for purpose, we must speak out.

A good life depends on the strength of our relationships with family, friends, neighbours, colleagues and strangers.

My father was a taxidermist, not a run-of-the-mill profession for a West Indian immigrant. Having given up on becoming a vet, he settled for working with dead animals rather than live ones. Dad was a true craftsman, an artist.

I'd always been the kind of lawyer that was attracted back to policy.

I'm a legislator, but it's hard to legislate when my party's out of power.