Top 1200 Labour Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

Explore popular Labour quotes.
Last updated on April 14, 2025.
I come from a generation of sceptics, who do not believe what politicians say. The Labour Party wants to convince people through actions, not words. The Nationalist party have given the country 25 years of lies, the Labour Party will build the country anew.
What one has most to work and struggle for in painting is to do the work with a great amount of labour and sweat in such a way that it may afterward appear, however much it was laboured upon, to have been done almost quickly and almost without any labour, and very easily, although it was not.
Much more should have been achieved by a Labour Government in office and Labour pressure in opposition. Against the dogged resistance to change, we should have pitted a stronger will to change. I conclude that a move to the Left is needed.
My mum's super Labour, and my gran. We all love Jeremy Corbyn in the family. Those are very deep roots and I feel like I could never not vote for Labour. Or I could never vote for the Tories because of that.
It is not the actual greatness of national wealth, but its continual increase, which occasions a rise in the wages of labour. It is not, accordingly, in the richest countries, but in the most thriving, or in those which are growing rich the fastest, that the wages of labour are highest. England is certainly, in the present times, a much richer country than any part of North America. The wages of labour, however, are much higher in North America than in any part of England.
Sound public finances are the essential foundation on which to construct a better-balanced economy from the wreckage of Labour's boom and bust. But it is economic growth that will create the jobs and the prosperity for the future and enable us to pay down Labour's debt.
Purchasing power is a license to purchase power. The old proletariat sold its labour power in order to subsist; what little leisure time it had was passed pleasantly enough in conversations, arguments, drinking, making love, wandering, celebrating and rioting. The new proletarian sells his labour power in order to consume. When he’s not flogging himself to death to get promoted in the labour hierarchy, he’s being persuaded to buy himself objects to distinguish himself in the social hierarchy. The ideology of consumption becomes the consumption of ideology.
Liberalism is a really old British tradition and it has a completely different attitude towards the individual and the relationship between the individual and the state than the collectivist response of Labour, and particularly Old Labour, does.
When New Labour came to power, we got a Right-wing Conservative government. I came to realise that voting Labour wasn't in Scotland's interests any more. Any doubt I had about that was cast aside for ever when I saw Gordon Brown cosying up to Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street.
When a Conservative government is presiding over unfair cuts to tax credits, chaos in the NHS and an unnecessary and ideological attack on trade union rights, it is natural that many in the Labour party should be sceptical of Tory talk on devolution - sceptical, even of government deals with Labour-led local authorities.
The programme of the British Labour Party under Neil Kinnock is so wildly irresponsible, so separate and apart from the historic NATO strategy, that I think a Labour government that stood by its present policies - and I rather doubt that they would - would, if it didn't destroy the Alliance, at least diminish its effective ability to do the task for which it was created.
It's become unfashionable to celebrate political achievement, and Labour achievement even less so. And it's positively uncouth to be proud of something that this Labour government is doing. So, slam me for saying so, but I'm really proud of the NHS.
When Blair was elected leader of the Labour Party, he said, "New Labour is a new political party" - that was the phrase he used, and I'm so glad he said it because he set up his own party and I'm not a member of it.
Oh, I could never leave the Labour party. I could no longer leave the Labour party than leave my own family. — © Liz Kendall
Oh, I could never leave the Labour party. I could no longer leave the Labour party than leave my own family.
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.
Conceived as a short-term remedy to the occasional ailment of acute labour shortages in key industries, the indentured-labour service had to be dismantled by the Conservatives owing to its inevitably scandalous abuse by disreputable employers. By 2012, there were 338,000 temporary foreign workers in Canada.
Labour is the source of all wealth, the political economists assert. And it really is the source -- next to nature, which supplies it with the material that it converts into wealth. But it is even infinitely more than this. It is the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself.
While loyalists and defectors overall said John Smith did a better job of standing up for Labour's values, they put Blair ahead on representing the whole country, appealing beyond traditional Labour voters and offering strong, competent leadership; switchers to the Tories gave him a clear lead in all categories.
What is easy to read has been difficult to write. The labour of writing and rewriting, correcting and recorrecting, is the due exacted by every good book from its author, even if he knows from the beginning exactly what he wants to say. A limpid style is invariably the result of hard labour, and the easily flowing connection of sentence with sentence and paragraph with paragraph has always been won by the sweat of the brow.
The National Socialist state refuses to admit female labour in factories merely because such labour is cheap. There is, of course, a certain amount of industrial work which can only be performed by women, but an essential condition is that this sort of work should not be injurious to health.
A majority of all defectors who voted Labour in 2010 but for a different party in 2015 said Ed Miliband had helped push them to another party. For those switching to the Tories, the second biggest reason was the fear that a Labour government would spend and borrow too much.
Millions of our fellow human beings continue to live as contemporary slaves, victims of abominable practices like human trafficking, forced labour and sexual exploitation. Countless children are forced to become soldiers, work in sweat shops or are sold by desperate families. Women are brutalized and traded like commodities. Entire households and villages labour under debt bondage.
Child labour is an issue of grave importance. It must become a top priority for all governments of the world. How can the world move into the twenty-first century with children still being exploited for their labour and denied their basic right to an education?
But how odd that in this heathen nation of empty pews, where churches' bare, ruined choirs are converted into luxury loft living, a Labour government - yes, a Labour government - is deliberately creating a huge expansion of faith schools.
I have always voted Labour and I always will. I have got to have one stupid, bovine part of me and that's the part that votes Labour.
Labour is ... not the only source of material wealth, i.e, of the use-values it produces. As William Petty says, Labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother.
Hard labour to succeed in the world? Hard labour no, no, human constitution, human physiology, human intelligence is made of infinite creative potential of Natural Law and therefore no-one has to work hard for success.
It has become an article of the creed of modern morality that all labour is good in itself -- a convenient belief to those who live on the labour of others. But as to those on whom they live, I recommend them not to take it on trust, but to look into the matter a little deeper.
We know, in Wales or in England - you simply can't trust Labour on the NHS. In England, we are delivering for patients while Labour just use the NHS as a political football. We won't let them; we'll always fight for the NHS.
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.
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.
The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniencies of life which it annually consumes, and which consist always either in the immediate produce of that labour, or in what is purchased with that produce from other nations.
It is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity. — © John Ruskin
It is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity.
Thus the labour of a manufacture adds, generally, to the value of the materials which he works upon, that of his own maintenance, and of his masters profits. The labour of a menial servant, on the contrary, adds to the value of nothing.
And, I hope now that everybody understands that the Labour Party - as it always has done - stands for free speech and individual Members of the Labour Party are entitled to exercise that free speech.
It is preferable to regard labour, including, of course, the personal services of the entrepreneur, and his assistants, as the sole factor of production, operating in a given environment of technique, natural resources, capital equipment and effective demand. This is why we have been able to take labour as the sole physical unit which we require in our economic system, apart from units of money and of time.
When it comes to protecting workers, labour conditions, labour legislation, the rights for collective bargaining, when you look at our environmental standards, when you look at our public disclosure laws and accountability and securities regulations to ensure that companies abide by the law, we don't have a level playing field with China.
So he with difficulty and labour hard Mov'd on, with difficulty and labour he.
A lot of things that we cannot buy and sell in markets used to be totally legal objects of market exchange - human beings when we had slavery, child labour, human organs, and so on. So there is no economic theory that actually says that you shouldn't have slavery or child labour because all these are political, ethical judgments.
When Labour leadership challenger Jess Phillips urged men to 'pass the mic' to a woman on the top job, telling Sky's Sophy Ridge it would 'look bad' if Labour failed to elect a woman, she more or less admitted not being up to the job.
LABOUR, like all other things which are purchased and sold, and which may be increased or diminished in quantity, has its natural and its market price. The natural price of labour is that price which is necessary to enable the labourers, on with another, to subsist and to perpetuate their race, without either increase or diminution.
The next General Election isn't about electing yet another Labour or Tory MP to join the hundreds of other Labour or Tory MPs in London. It will be about electing a candidate who will put solving people's problems before scoring political points. Someone who will fight for the future of our communities here in Clwyd West.
On the face of it, these look like bad times for Labour and for Ed Miliband's leadership. There seems to be no strategy, no narrative and little energy. Old faces from the Brown era still dominate the shadow cabinet and they seem stuck in defending Labour's record in all the wrong ways: we didn't spend too much money, we'll cut less fast and less far, but we can't tell you how.
Politicians said that with our cheap labour, we could be competitive in the world. Nothing could be further from the truth. We were the most uncompetitive country with that cheap labour.
Nothing should be made by man's labour which is not worth making, or which must be made by labour degrading to the makers.
The progressive historical role of capitalism may be summed up in two brief propositions: increase in the productive forces of social labour, and the socialisation of that labour. But both these facts manifest themselves in extremely diverse processes in different branches of the national economy.
I support a constitutional conversation, as the Labour Party does, which will allow New Zealanders to evolve a more mature and stable constitutional form, but that's not something that I, as Labour Party, would want to impose, either on the party or on the public.
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.
When he painted a road, the roadmakers were there in his imagination, when he painted the turned earth of a ploughed field, the gesture of the blade turning the earth was included in his own act. Whenever he looked he saw the labour of existence; and this labour, recognised as such, was what constituted reality for him. (On Vincent Van Gogh)
We are all in the Labour party because we want the Labour party to be a vehicle for social change. There is a thirst for debate in the party, and all those who have joined haven't joined without a purpose.
The argument in Labour around full membership of the single market is about whether it can be squared with delivering the desire of many of our voters to gain greater control over immigration. This is a proper concern - Labour must stand for those who voted leave every bit as much as we represent those who voted remain.
Labour was founded to make the lives of working people better and to create more opportunities for everyone. Whether it's aspiring to work as a nurse in a hospital or setting up and running your own business, Labour should be about ensuring fairness so that everyone has the same chance in life to reach their goals.
I joined the Labour Party not because it was Left Wing, but because it was definitely internationalists and would seem to be the group in the Labour Party which would serve my purpose best for propaganda along internationalist lines.
I've said in the primary race repeatedly that a Labour Party that I lead would be a true red Labour Party, be very clear about its social democratic roots and its social democratic agenda.
I joined the SDP as a founder member a few days after my 18th birthday in 1981. I was a councillor, activist and parliamentary candidate for the SDP and its successor party, the Liberal Democrats, for 14 years before joining Labour when Tony Blair became leader and abolished Labour's old clause IV - committing to general nationalisation - in 1995.
When Jeremy Corbyn won the Labour leadership - not once, but twice - and defied the mainstream media's expectations to gain Labour seats in the 2017 election, it was no surprise to those of us who have always backed Corbyn and his agenda for change.
Child labour may be distasteful to westerners, but does boycotting goods made with child labour improve or exacerbate the lot of third world children? Trusting the market to regulate may not ultimately be in our interest.
I had the good fortune to be thrown unexpectedly into something called the Labour Research Unit - a little known organisation set up to assist the fledgling labour movement. It was not a company, nor a statutory board, nor a government department - in fact it did not exist at all as a legal entity. Thus in slightly unorthodox circumstances I became part of that struggle.
The combination of the Liberal and Labour Parties is much stronger than the Liberal Party would be if there were no third Party in existence. Many men who would in that case have voted for us voted on this occasion as the Labour Party told them i.e. for the Liberals. The Labour Party has "come to stay"...the existence of the third Party deprives us of the full benefits of the 'swing of the pendulum', introduces a new element into politics and confronts us with a new difficulty.
People are fed up with Labour for taking them for granted for far too long, they are fed up of too much spin, and the people of Dunfermline and West Fife have spoken for the rest of the country with their views on the Labour government.
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