Quotes About Westminster

The high reputation of Westminster abroad is not entirely reflected at home.

I went to a branch of the City of Westminster College in Maida Vale to do drama, sociology and English literature. I stayed for three or four months.

In Westminster, we can sometimes forget just how much the public hate their money being wasted.

I've not hidden and I'll never hide the fact that I want Scotland to be an independent country. But as long as we're part of the Westminster system, it's really important to people in Scotland that we get good decisions coming out of Westminster. So we've got a vested interest in being a constructive participant.

There is a danger of Scottish politics being between two sets of dinosaurs... the Nationalists who can't accept they were rejected by the people, and some colleagues at Westminster who think nothing has changed.

Touch but a cobweb in Westminster Hall, and the old spider of the law is out upon you with all his vermin at his heels.

Cats are ideal for politicians. I had two when I arrived at Westminster, Sooty and Sweep, who had come with a flat I had bought six years earlier in Fulham from someone who was about to go abroad. There was a better offer ahead of me but she took mine because I would take the cats.

The U.K.'s debt belongs legally to Westminster, so Scotland, by definition, can't default on it.

Too often in the past, Scotland has been sidelined and ignored in the Westminster corridors of power, but that doesn't have to be the case anymore.

What happens when there is a conflict between the Scottish parliament, if it was established, and the Westminster parliament? Who is supreme?

I mean, you can't walk down the aisle in Westminster Abbey in a strapless dress, it just won't happen - it has to suit the grandeur of that aisle, it's enormous.

I didn't particularly want to go to Westminster - not that there were many seats available or chances for women to get elected. In 1987, Labour sent down 50 MPs, and only one of them was a woman.

The truth of the matter is that countries the world over have deficits. Let us remember this about Scotland's deficit: it was not created in an independent Scotland; it was created on Westminster's watch.

We will never vote for the renewal of Trident; that's a decision which will fall to be made in the next Westminster parliament. We will never vote for that.

The first thing I would like to say is that I don't think folk at Westminster - or for that matter at Holyrood - constitute an elite. They are representatives who are elected and who are at the service of voters who can fire them.

Being an MP is quite a strange job, because you do it in two different places. Half the time I'm in Westminster and the other half I'm in my constituency and the job is different in both of them.

I'm not sure when exactly it started to become the fashion in Westminster to skim-read documents, only bother with bullet points or, worse, to take them entirely on trust - but that, perhaps, was when we began as a country to lose our way.

Mice are everywhere at Westminster but many MPs, including me, did not report them because we were afraid of their possible fate.

New ideas rarely come from the moderate parties in The Hague or Washington, in Brussels or Westminster. The world's political centres are not the breeding ground for true change, but rather where it comes home to roost.

The creation of regional mayors has done little to reduce the sense that all power is concentrated in Westminster, and all investment in London.

Brexit has changed everything in British politics - it has blown open a cosy, zombie-like closed world of Westminster parliamentary politics. It has broken open the traditional line between left and right, which was already an exhausted tradition.

Westminster is gripped by a fanatical race towards a cliff-edge Brexit and nobody is stopping to think about the impact it would have on the everyday lives of the people we serve as politicians.

I think that political coverage generally comes in on a level that means if you live and breathe Westminster detail and diary, then you get it.

Westminster's hardly a billboard for people-centred politics. Given its makeup, the term 'Commons' is pretty ironic, too.