Quotes About Politics

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

Churchill may have made some horrendous mistakes - Gallipoli, for one - but he had a sense of the profundity and integrity of the English experience. By contrast, Blair believes he excised the past in 1997, though what no one on the left seems to have realised is that his historic mission was to destroy the Labour party, not the Tories.

But political parties must claim to be radically different from one another, and political journalism must play along, or else why exist? So the Liberals and Tories concentrate on what does distinguish them: their leaders. That in itself just about guarantees a campaign of ad hominem gooning.

If we don't take effective measures now, the Netherlands could be torn between two extreme rights.

Short of a space-alien invasion or an Oklahoma tornado, there is almost no problem that a democracy can tackle in a year. But that isn't why we have a government. We have a government to solve the problems that greedy, short-sighted businessmen like me can't.

Have you ever heard the expression 'one hot mess?' I think the term was custom-made for the mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford.

I teach students that what people say about failure in politics is mostly wrong. People always told me, 'They'll praise you on your way up and kick you on your way down.' That wasn't my experience. I can't walk down the street in Toronto without someone coming up and saying hello.

Toronto deserves Rob Ford; they put him in office. Toronto deserves everything it gets.

When I was selected as a Labour council candidate in 2009, people publicly challenged how I could possibly represent anyone from the Bengali community because of my faith and since my selection and election as the member of parliament for Liverpool, Wavertree, I have received a torrent of anti-Semitic abuse.

Democrats are like a big tortoise that's on its back and can't get up; you can't make jokes about that.

The Bush administration will go down in history as the Torture Team.

What's surprising is that the people who fought against torture here are the communists.

I'm a one-nation Tory.

No attempt at ethical or social seduction can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.

Britain has supported theocrats and dictators as long as it served British business interests, whether under Tory or Labour rule.

My dad is like my one-man focus group: a Sun-reading Essex Tory.

The Tory party must learn from its own history that when we fight each other, you can guarantee to lose.

Sinn Fein will not do Tory austerity.

Working class people vote Tory because they think it makes them look a bit posh.

Tory MPs largely do not care about these poorer people. They don't care about the NHS. And the public has kind of cottoned on to that.

I heard one woman say to another in the queue at a book signing: 'I shouldn't be buying this. He's a former Tory MP, you know.'

People think, and by the way I think most people are right: 'The Tory party is run by people who basically don't care about people like me.' That is what most people in the country have thought about the Tory party for decades. I know a lot of Tory MPs and I am sad to say the public is basically correct.

The Sun' and the 'News of the World' fell in line behind New Labour in the run up to the 1997 election, 'The Times' stayed broadly neutral and 'The Sunday Times' unenthusiastically Tory. After the election, 'The Times' quickly fell in line as the New Labour house journal.

What I enjoy doing is challenging stereotypes of what people believe a Tory must be. You don't have to say every Tory is in it for themselves - it's pathetic caricaturing that has no place in the 21st century, and if we can challenge that stereotype, then great.