Top 203 Quotes & Sayings by George Osborne - Page 3

Working people of this country want economic security. The worst possible thing you can do for those families is bust the public finances, have some welfare system this country can't afford.

I've always thought that good politics follows from good economics and good policies.

There is lots of evidence that it is this fear of going into debt that most puts people from poorer backgrounds off going to university.

I fought passionately to remain in the E.U., and I warned of the economic risks if we left the E.U.

Britain is an open and tolerant country, and I will fight with everything I have to keep it so.

The Conservative party is at its strongest when it's not the party that says there is no role for government and the state should just get out of the way. That is not a strand of Conservative thinking that, by itself, is enough.

I came into politics partly because I want to be able to reduce taxes so that individuals have more of their money to spend, so that businesses have more of their money to create jobs, but I believe that lower taxes are sustainable when you get the public finances in order, so I will only make promises I can keep on taxation.

I'm tempted to say that Conservative governments are normally elected to clear up the mess left by Labour governments.

Margaret Thatcher's government redistributed money from rich to poor. And that's the nature of a modern western democracy.

I am a social liberal.

It's not enough to tackle just the symptoms of poverty. You have to tackle the causes of poverty.

Tony Blair was a good politician but not a good Prime Minister, and that's what we don't want to be. We don't want to be just people who are good at winning elections: we want to be good at governing. I think we benefit from having seen the mistakes that we think Tony Blair made in 1997.

Of course the Liberal Democrats are going to say things to try and get attention - but I don't think the country is paying much attention.

I do not want Britain to turn its back on Europe or the rest of the world.

If the country's poorer, it's got less money.

To all companies large and small, I would say this: the British economy is fundamentally strong; we are highly competitive, and we are open for business.

Leaving the E.U. was not the outcome that I wanted or campaigned, but now that democracy has spoken, we must act on that result. I will fully respect that result.

I serve at the discretion of the prime minister.

We need strength and success elsewhere in our country - not by pulling London down but by building the rest of the country up.

The former pension minister, the Liberal Democrat Steve Webb said I was trying to abolish the lump sum. Instead, we are going to keep the lump sum and abolish the Liberal Democrats.

I would also like to see children aged between 11 and 18 taught financial education in a structured way in schools. I would also say that that is not enough. You have also got to improve numeracy skills, mathematical skills in schools.

Britain is China's best partner in the West.

We have to be pretty tough with mortgage companies and say you have got to give people the chance to work out their debts, sort out future mortgages.

We support the auto-enrolment but we have our doubts about the way the National Pension Scheme is going to be structured.

There are those who are trying to create an anti-business culture in Britain - and we have to stop them. At stake are not pay packages for a few but jobs and prosperity for the many.

The Foreign Office is a very important arm of the British state and I think Britain has a fantastic diplomatic service. We are the only country in the world spending 2% of our national income on defence and 0.7% of our national income on aid. We are the only country in the world doing both of those things.

When you look at the things people are really fed up with, like the collapse of the pension system, like the failure to get money to the frontline of the health service, Gordon Brown is more responsible for that than any other politician including Tony Blair

I was shocked to see that some of the very wealthiest people in the country have organised their tax affairs, and to be fair it's within the tax laws, so that they were regularly paying virtually no income tax. And I don't think that's right.

British taxpayers should not bear the costs of problems in the Eurozone.

You need to have a state pension that doesn't drag more and more people into means-testing each year and make it very difficult for people on low to medium term incomes to save and not see their savings clawed away.

I am actually quite encouraged and I think, actually, the UK is coping with globalisation a lot better than most other European countries. And that is reflected in the fact that (whilst of course there are people who are still unemployed) our unemployment rate is low and (whilst of course we need to export more) we are attracting a huge amount of inward investment into Britain.

Our first benchmark is to cut the deficit more quickly to safeguard Britain’s credit rating. I know that we are taking a political gamble to set this up as a measure of success. Protecting the credit rating will not be easy The pace of fiscal consolidation will be co-ordinated with monetary policy. And we will protect Britain's credit rating and international reputation.

I'm not saying "job done" but I am actually pretty confident that Britain can be one of the biggest winners from these big global changes that are taking place and indeed become the richest of the major economies in the world in this coming generation.

One big theme for me is that we have got to move from an economy built on debt to one where we save and invest in the future.

At the moment we are hard-wired into the European markets - 50% of our exports go to Europe - and that has not been good for the UK. So I'm not saying "make Britain entirely dependent on China". I'm saying "let's diversify a bit". When I became chancellor, China was our ninth largest trading partner. This is the world's second biggest economy. China was doing more business with Belgium than it was with Britain.

Whether [people] run their own business, work for a business, go out there, pay their taxes and see the money wasted, fed up with the money going to the next door neighbor sitting permanently on out of work benefits. There needs to be a coalition of change.

We have supported the banks, they should be supporting the economy now.

We will also target tax evasion and off-shore tax havens... Everyone must pay their share.

Well look, no one takes pleasure from people making money out of the misery of others, but that is a function of capitalist markets.

It is not fair that people who are born in the UK to parents who are domiciled here, can later in life claim to be non-doms and live here, it is not fair that non-doms with residential property here in the UK can put it in an offshore company and avoid inheritance tax.

Why don't we save and invest in our future and start making the things that millions of Chinese consumers are going to want in the future.

I very much support financial education in schools.

There are plenty of people who don't want change - the Labour Party, some of their militant trade union friends like Unite busy causing strikes at the very beginning of a fragile recovery.

I did meet Mickey Mouse in California, and he seems to be writing the Labour party's economic policy at the moment.

Britain needs a simpler tax system which is simple to understand, where there are no loop-holes, where the very rich do not avoid tax by employing expensive accountants

If you're looking for ways to cut waste in government, you can start with John Prescott.

What I'm interested in is Britain projecting itself abroad, and through that its values and the things it holds dear. And I don't think you do that by refusing to talk to the world's second-largest economy [China]. In fact, that is positively counter-productive in my view.

Even a China growing at 7% or indeed less is still adding to the world economy an economy equivalent to the UK or more.

Just as it wouldn't be right to only to have an economic dialogue with China, equally you shouldn't restrict your dialogue solely to issues around, say, human rights. You can raise all those issues, and that is what reflects a mature discussion. So I don't think essentially we have to choose between being partners in China's economic development and being proud defenders of British values.

People know that billions of pounds are wasted. Billions of pounds never get near the families that need it. It is an absolute outrage that hard-working people go out to work every day, get up early, come back late, don't see enough of their families in order to pay taxes to fund vast bureaucracies that are inefficient in order to fund a welfare system which allows too many people to sit for the whole of their lives on out-of-work benefits without going out to look for work.

What makes people angry and we are on the side of hard-working people who want to get on in life and they see how government is wasting their money.

Let's also teach people about pensions and savings, insurance and the like. But if they aren't already familiar with numbers that won't be as effective as it might be.

No other chancellor in the long history of the office has felt the need to pass a law in order to convince people he has the political will to implement his own Budget.

Put on top of that the fact that the whole world is looking at Britain and saying how is this country going to pay its way in the future. They are looking at other countries like Greece who can't pay their way in the future and you see savage spending cuts, big cuts in pay.

I see no real argument in Britain that is concerned that an Indian company owns our most successful car manufacturer or that the sewer system under London is being renewed in part by Chinese investment. There are the odd voices that express concern but they are very marginal and they are not being listened to by the British people.

You also want to look at how the tax system encourages and rewards pension saving. I have set as an ambition reversing the effects of Gordon Brown's tax raid which heralded the beginning of the age of responsibility. We are looking at some very specific tax measures on how we can encourage saving.

China is absolutely one of the biggest players in the world and if Britain wants to be connected to the world it has to be connected to China.

Printing money is the last resort of desperate governments when all other policies have failed.

There is a big problem. The problem is the country borrowed too much. We went on a borrowing binge, there was a housing boom. You want to help people de-leverage and deal with those debts over time.

I think Britain needs to get out there on the world stage and make itself heard. And for much of my political career, there has been a sense of retreat from the world stage because of what happened in the Iraq War.