Top 106 Quotes & Sayings by Keir Starmer

So if you want a really effective criminal justice strategy, you don't build bigger prisons, you invest money in young kids - and you accept that it's going to take years to work through, but it's a more effective strategy.

I wouldn't characterise myself as a bleeding heart liberal, whatever that is.

For many progressives, 2016 will go down as a year of electoral shocks and profound disappointment. In the U.S., France and many other parts of Europe, the right enters 2017 with newfound confidence while the left recoils in fear of the future, unsure how to get back on the front foot.

My background is not typical of a lawyer or a DPP. My dad was a toolmaker before he retired, so he worked in a factory all his life.

If you lose your job because there has been an influx of labour from another country, that is a legitimate cause for concern.

I'm absolutely fine with the rough and tumble of politics.

I was a human rights lawyer for 20 years, I believed those values of dignity, equality and non-discrimination were a given. believed the only question in my lifetime would be - how much further do we extend those values? I did not think in my lifetime we'd actually be having an argument about those values.

Human rights only have meaning if they are universal.

Our five-year-old son thinks I ought to work in the local bookshop, and I can see the appeal of that.

There are potentially many offences that journalists could commit in the course of their business. It would be very unhealthy if you had a situation where a journalist felt that they needed to go to their lawyer before they pursued any lead or asked any question.

The framework for everything I've done has been human rights. That is about protecting the vulnerable and giving people access to courts where they wouldn't otherwise have access to courts.

Access to our civil courts has been severely restricted by the combination of: the removal of legal aid from some cases based on their type, not their merit; a high financial threshold for the receipt of legal aid in other cases; and a failure to deliver a safety net for vulnerable individuals by the exceptional funding arrangements.

I spent five years prosecuting some of the most dangerous terrorists in this country, so it would be quite difficult for people to pin the charge of being soft on terrorism on me.

As we leave the E.U., freedom of movement falls away, because it's an E.U. rule... What we then have to say is, 'What then is on the blank piece of paper that is an immigration policy?'

I am well aware of different views across my own party and across parliament on pretty well all Brexit issues.

In the absence of a written constitution, we still rely far too heavily in the U.K. on unwritten and unenforceable 'constitutional conventions.'

It will be increasingly difficult to keep Scotland as a part of the U.K. I hope that doesn't happen, but everyone knows David Cameron has put that at risk.

I think most people accept that it is necessary to have some surveillance in a democratic society. I think most people accept that it's important to have limits and clear safeguards on that.

We cannot allow Brexit to be driven by narrow and divisive Tory ideology.

Defining of the public interest is always very, very difficult.

If the vote that is progressive is split then all that does is open up the path for the Brexit party and allow it to pretend it represents the majority view in this country.

If you go into a police station and report a burglary the first question is not: 'Are you telling the truth?' If you are the victim of a sexual offence, very often in the past that has been the first question.

The nature of the final Brexit deal really matters. It is, as I have said before, the battle of our times.

For far too long, victims' rights have been discussed only in the context of sentencing. Sentencing is very important, but the debate obscures something much more fundamental: most victims have so little faith in our criminal justice system that they do not access it at all.

The Max Clifford case shows that when the police and prosecutors quietly hold their nerve they can succeed, whatever the public profile or popularity of the accused.

The Chilcot report is damning. It exposes a litany of failures over a long period, including reliance on flawed intelligence assessments, lack of planning and insufficient foresight of obvious consequences. But the report also exposes a chilling lack of rigour and a political culture of deference.

You don't win elections by telling people what you're against. We're very good at listing things we don't much like about what the Tories are doing. But you win elections by telling them what you're for, what you're going to change, what's going to be better.

Brexit is so important, it would have been neglect of duty to simply sit it out.

Surveillance legislation fit for the 21st century, which strikes the right balance between privacy, security and democracy is a prize worth fighting for, and Labour will work constructively with the government to achieve it.

I campaigned to stay in the E.U. I voted to stay in the E.U. and I was very disappointed by the outcome. And if there was another vote I would vote to remain in.

There is very, very little chance of bespoke transitional arrangements being negotiated at the same time as the rest of Article 50.

I am not a pacifist and I would back a lawful, coherent and compelling case for the use of military force by the U.K. against Isis.

If immigration is simply seen as a numbers game, nobody will ever win that debate. The question should be: what is it we want to achieve? What do we expect of those who are arriving? What is the basic deal?

I don't subscribe to the view that people who are better off don't want to live in a more equal society.

I would reject wholeheartedly any notion of a Labour Party that is not committed to returning to power at the first opportunity. Of course that needs to be principled power. But standing on the sidelines looking for the purest ideology is a dereliction of the duty for any Labour member.

Just when we need a strong government, what do we see? Division. Chaos. And failure. No credible plan for Brexit, no solution to prevent a hard border in Ireland and no majority in Parliament for the Chequers proposals.

I keep an open mind.

For better or worse, when I was director of public prosecutions I had to deal with every challenge that came up, and come up with an answer. Being in opposition, you're not taking the decisions; you're saying what you would do if you were in power, and that's deeply frustrating.

We need a transitional Brexit deal that provides maximum certainty and stability. Labour will deliver it.

Part of the reason I moved from law to politics was an increasingly profound belief that how we rebuild after the 2008 crash is going to define us for a generation.

Brexit can be stopped.

The Human Rights Act is a really important constitutional document, it isn't just a villain's charter.

You can't meet Labour's tests by failing to provide answers.

Rights compliance helps effective outcomes, it does not hinder them. That should come as no surprise because the 'human rights' in the Human Rights Act are the rights adopted in the aftermath of the horrors of the second world war, and are designed to protect all of us from oppression.

As we exit the E.U., there must be a new approach to immigration that has the consent of the British people and is managed in their interests.

To state that lethal force should not be used without a proper legal justification is to state the obvious.

From a victim's point of view, our justice system is hardly fit for purpose. No doubt individual failings by police and prosecutors provide part of the explanation.

I always say, it's better to be asked why you're leaving, rather than when you're leaving.

Labour has repeatedly emphasised that in order to avoid a cliff edge for our economy there will need to be a time-limited transitional period between our exit from the E.U. and the new lasting relationship we build with our European partners.

Significant cuts to funding for the police, for the Crown Prosecution Service, for probation etc, have put the long-term viability of our criminal justice system in doubt.

By remaining inside a customs union and the single market in a transitional phase we would be certain that goods and services could continue to flow between the E.U. and the U.K. without tariffs, customs checks or additional red tape.

My parents didn't have the opportunities they would have liked, but they didn't complain about that because they thought they were part of a society where the next generation would have those opportunities.

It's really important we make the case that this is not the country of Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson. That intolerance and hatred and division is not representative of our country.

We will vote down a blind Brexit. This isn't about frustrating the process. It's about stopping a destructive Tory Brexit. It's about fighting for our values and about fighting for our country.

If you really probe, people are anxious about their job, anxious about their home, their children's future. Obviously it gets translated into things like immigration, but that is nothing new.

The pursuit of an extreme Brexit cannot come at the cost of peace in Northern Ireland.

Labour's priorities are clear: jobs and the economy must come first; not party interests or ideological fantasies.

We have to make the argument that the only economically sound place to be is within Europe - we have to remember, it's history again, that there are reasons we bound ourselves together as a set of European nations and it all came out of the second world war.

If you find yourself in a position you would rather was not there, you have to make it work.

We need to remind ourselves that Europe will be our biggest trading partner for the next several decades and probably beyond, so getting the deal with Europe right should be our primary focus.