Quotes About Labour

What perhaps began as a consensual, communal undertaking evolved into a highly centralised, highly unequal society. There was probably no sudden change or power grab: each generation built on the work of the last, and strides in efficiency were paid for with small sacrifices of freedom and equality. Rewarding labour with grants of food from the benevolent temple became, in time, a way of compelling hard work through the control of rations.

The word 'socialism' on my poster has not lost me a single vote. People will support you if you're serious. My complaint about the Labour movement is that it hasn't done any teaching for 40 years; it has always been on the defensive. Thatcher was successful because she was a teacher. Her values, of course, were rotten.

Middle class Labour leaders are recaptured by the establishment when they die.

Essentially we need a new social consensus for economic reform as New Labour has achieved in Britain.

Labour accepts that the European Court of Human Rights needs reform.

We just have to be crystal clear that if we were to abandon all the reforms made over some very painful years in the Labour party, we would be consigned back to opposition.

If very fundamental reforms take place, especially when it comes to factors of production like land, labour, then a higher growth rate is possible.

In the interests of competitiveness in a globalizing world economy, governments of all complexions introduced labour-market reforms that promoted flexibility but accentuated the precariat's insecurities.

There are high hopes of France and what they're trying to achieve there by liberalising the labour market and other reforms. You lose some, you gain some.

Labour's Climate Change Act and our other reforms, including the Green Investment Bank, have been the foundation for the huge growth of Britain's green industries.

Denis Healey refused to contribute an article to the 'Guardian' about his intentions, and was punished by the electorate - and then all Labour MPs - for his presumption in assuming they already knew everything about him. He became famously the best prime minister we never had. Perhaps.

Blair - except at the edges - was a Thatcherite. Brown, in contrast, regarded Thatcherism as something that had to be taken on board while at the same time seeking to retain as much as possible of the Labour legacy, or 'Labour values,' as he would put it.

If the quantity of labour realized in commodities, regulate their exchangeable value, every increase of the quantity of labour must augment the value of that commodity on which it is exercised, as every diminution must lower it.

Both Conservative and Labour politicians in Britain are rather too fond of praising the relative 'classlessness' of American society and of urging their own people to emulate it. There is a certain falseness about such arguments, and also a certain hypocrisy.

The world view of economic development has completely changed: it is no longer believed to be driven by human labour, as Karl Marx said, or by capital, as Alfred Marshall stated, but is knowledge-driven.

I was shaped by a pit environment and the Second World War. My playground was on the pit tip at Clay Cross and I grew up with that mining background. My father was a miner and my granddad was a miner, and I would say three out of ten on the street where I was born were working in the pits.

From the ruins of the second world war, Labour rebuilt Britain and set it on course for European co-operation and membership of the E.U.

Cooking and eating at home is made even better by the fact that you don't have to worry about driving after a couple of bottles of very nice wine. For me that's the ideal combination: working hard and enjoying the fruits of your labour.

The more worrying feature of the new global corporate structures is their capacity to devastate national labour markets by transferring their operations to cheaper locations overseas.

In a way I'm almost more rueful about the notion of having a non-ideological Labour party than I am about the personality of Tony Blair.

We spent too much time attacking Gordon Brown and Labour rather than setting out our own plans. People had decided they wanted change - the thing they were not sure about was the alternative we were offering, so going on and on about Labour missed the point.

The proportions, too, in which the capital that is to support labour, and the capital that is invested in tools, machinery and buildings, may be variously combined.

The Tories have been offering us a cocktail of incompetence and malice and Labour haven't done anything to draw attention to it. It's been like watching Mesut Ozil drop perfect crosses on to the head of an increasingly frustrated Stephen Hawking.

Do you defend free markets, or do you reform them? It's the same issue that Labour had in the mid-Seventies, and it's the same issue the Tories had after 1945. How do you interact with this new ideological term?