Quotes about labourer
page 10

J. Howard Moore photo
William Shenstone photo
Winston S. Churchill photo
Winston S. Churchill photo
Peter Kropotkin photo
Tony Benn photo
Tony Benn photo
Tony Benn photo
Roy Jenkins photo

“I have three great interests left in politics, a single currency, electoral reform, and the union of the Liberals with Labour. And all three are languishing.”

Roy Jenkins (1920–2003) British politician, historian and writer

Remark to Robert Harris (November 1999), quoted in Robert Harris, 'A Late Friendship', in Andrew Adonis and Keith Thomas (eds.), Roy Jenkins: A Retrospective (Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 311
1990s

Roy Jenkins photo
Roy Jenkins photo
Roy Jenkins photo
Roy Jenkins photo
Roy Jenkins photo
Roy Jenkins photo
Roy Jenkins photo
Hugh Gaitskell photo

“You can be assured of this. There will be no increase in the standard or other rates of income tax under the Labour Government so long as normal peacetime conditions continue.”

Hugh Gaitskell (1906–1963) British politician

Speech in Newcastle (28 September 1959) during the general election campaign, quoted in The Times (29 September 1959), p. 10
Leader of the Labour Party

Hugh Gaitskell photo
William Laud photo
William Laud photo

“Ever since I came in place, I laboured nothing more, than that the external public worship of God (too much slighted in most parts of this kingdom) might be preserved, and that with as much decency and uniformity as might be; being still of opinion, that unity cannot long continue in the Church, where uniformity is shut out at the church door.”

William Laud (1573–1645) Archbishop of Canterbury

Speech at his trial (12 March 1644), quoted in The Works of the Most Reverend Father in God, William Laud, sometime Lord Archbishop of Canterbury. Volume IV: History of Troubles and Trial (1847), p. 60

Enoch Powell photo
Enoch Powell photo
Enoch Powell photo

“Under the Labour Government in the last eighteen months Britain has behaved, perfectly clearly and perfectly recognizably, as an American satellite.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech in Falkirk (26 March 1966) during the general election campaign, quoted in Andrew Roth, Enoch Powell: Tory Tribune (1970), p. 337
1960s

Clement Attlee photo
Clement Attlee photo
John Bright photo

“He…made observations with regard to the Queen, which, in my opinion, no meeting of people in this country, and certainly no meeting of Reformers, ought to have listened to with approbation. (Cheers.) Let it be remembered that there has been no occasion on which any Ministry has proposed an improved representation of the people when the Queen has not given her cordial, unhesitating, and, I believe, hearty assent. (Cheers.) … But Mr. Ayrton referred further to a supposed absorption of the sympathies of the Queen with her late husband to the exclusion of sympathy for and with the people. (Hear, hear.) I am not accustomed to stand up in defence of those who are possessors of crowns. (Hear, hear.) But I could not sit here and hear that observation without a sensation of wonder and of pain. (Loud cheers.) I think there has been by many persons a great injustice done to the Queen in reference to her desolate and widowed position. (Cheers.) And I venture to say this, that a woman, be she the Queen of a great realm or be she the wife of one of your labouring men, who can keep alive in her heart a great sorrow for the lost object of her life and affection, is not at all likely to be wanting in a great and generous sympathy with you.”

John Bright (1811–1889) British Radical and Liberal statesman

Loud and prolonged cheers.
Speech in St James's Hall, Piccadilly, London (4 December 1866), quoted in The Times (5 December 1866), p. 7
1860s

C. L. R. James photo
Jeremy Corbyn photo

“We have long argued that a customs union is a viable option for the final deal. So Labour would seek to negotiate a new comprehensive UK-EU customs union to ensure that there are no tariffs with Europe and to help avoid any need for a hard border in Northern Ireland.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Jeremy Corbyn backs permanent customs union after Brexit https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-43189878, BBC News, 26 February 2018
2010s, 2018

Jeremy Corbyn photo

“We believe a leave vote will put many of those things seriously and immediately at risk. We also want to extend those rights and we best extend those rights by working with trade unions, labour parties and socialist parties all across Europe in the interest of the working people all across the continent.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Labour's Tom Watson: EU free movement rules must change https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-36523759 BBC News (14 June 2016)
2010s, 2016

Keir Starmer photo

“Labour would seek a transitional deal that maintains the same basic terms that we currently enjoy with the EU. That means we would seek to remain in a customs union with the EU and within the single market during this period. It means we would abide by the common rules of both.”

Keir Starmer (1962) British politician and barrister

Brexit: Keep single market for transition period - Labour https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-41064314 BBC News (27 August 2017)
2017

Leanne Wood photo
Stanley Baldwin photo
Johann Gottlieb Fichte photo
Joseph Strutt photo
Alex Salmond photo
V. V. Giri photo
Thomas Young (scientist) photo

“Besides these improvements,… there are others,… which may… be interesting to those… engaged in those departments… Among these may be ranked, in the division of mechanics, properly so called, a simple demonstration of the law of the force by which a body revolves in an ellipsis; another of the properties of cycloidal pendulums; an examination of the mechanism of animal motions; a comparison of the measures and weights of different countries; and a convenient estimate of the effect of human labour: with respect to architecture, a simple method of drawing the outline of a column: an investigation of the best forms for arches; a determination of the curve which affords the greatest space for turning; considerations on the structure of the joints employed in carpentry, and on the firmness of wedges; and an easy mode of forming a kirb roof: for the purposes of machinery of different kinds, an arrangement of bars for obtaining rectilinear motion; an inquiry into the most eligible proportions of wheels and pinions; remarks on the friction of wheel work, and of balances; a mode of finding the form of a tooth for impelling a pallet without friction; a chronometer for measuring minute portions of time; a clock escapement; a calculation of the effect of temperature on steel springs; an easy determination of the best line of draught for a carriage; an investigation of the resistance to be overcome by a wheel or roller; and an estimation of the ultimate pressure produced by a blow.”

Thomas Young (scientist) (1773–1829) English polymath

Preface
A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts (1807)

James Mill photo

“The distinction, between what is done by labour, and what is done by nature, is not always observed.”

James Mill (1773–1836) Scottish historian, economist, political theorist and philosopher

'Labour produces its effects only by conspiring with the laws of nature.'
It is found that the agency of man can be traced to very simple elements. He does nothing but produce motion. He can move things towards one another, and he can separate them from one another. The properties of matter perform the rest.
Ch 1 : Production https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/mill-james/ch01.htm
Elements of Political Economy (1821)

Al-Biruni photo
Oswald Mosley photo

“Capable of becoming either Conservative or Labour Prime Minister.”

Oswald Mosley (1896–1980) British politician; founder of the British Union of Fascists

Richard Crossman, New Statesman (27 October 1961).

Antoine Lavoisier photo
John Stuart Mill photo

“In those days I had seen little further than the old school of political economists into the possibilities of fundamental improvement in social arrangements. Private property, as now understood, and inheritance, appeared to me, as to them, the dernier mot of legislation: and I looked no further than to mitigating the inequalities consequent on these institutions, by getting rid of primogeniture and entails. The notion that it was possible to go further than this in removing the injustice -- for injustice it is, whether admitting of a complete remedy or not -- involved in the fact that some are born to riches and the vast majority to poverty, I then reckoned chimerical, and only hoped that by universal education, leading to voluntary restraint on population, the portion of the poor might be made more tolerable. In short, I was a democrat, but not the least of a Socialist. We were now much less democrats than I had been, because so long as education continues to be so wretchedly imperfect, we dreaded the ignorance and especially the selfishness and brutality of the mass: but our ideal of ultimate improvement went far beyond Democracy, and would class us decidedly under the general designation of Socialists. While we repudiated with the greatest energy that tyranny of society over the individual which most Socialistic systems are supposed to involve, we yet looked forward to a time when society will no longer be divided into the idle and the industrious; when the rule that they who do not work shall not eat, will be applied not to paupers only, but impartially to all; when the division of the produce of labour, instead of depending, as in so great a degree it now does, on the accident of birth, will be made by concert on an acknowledged principle of justice; and when it will no longer either be, or be thought to be, impossible for human beings to exert themselves strenuously in procuring benefits which are not to be exclusively their own, but to be shared with the society they belong to. The social problem of the future we considered to be, how to unite the greatest individual liberty of action, with a common ownership in the raw material of the globe, and an equal participation of all in the benefits of combined labour. We had not the presumption to suppose that we could already foresee, by what precise form of institutions these objects could most effectually be attained, or at how near or how distant a period they would become practicable. We saw clearly that to render any such social transformation either possible or desirable, an equivalent change of character must take place both in the uncultivated herd who now compose the labouring masses, and in the immense majority of their employers. Both these classes must learn by practice to labour and combine for generous, or at all events for public and social purposes, and not, as hitherto, solely for narrowly interested ones. But the capacity to do this has always existed in mankind, and is not, nor is ever likely to be, extinct. Education, habit, and the cultivation of the sentiments, will make a common man dig or weave for his country, as readily as fight for his country. True enough, it is only by slow degrees, and a system of culture prolonged through successive generations, that men in general can be brought up to this point. But the hindrance is not in the essential constitution of human nature. Interest in the common good is at present so weak a motive in the generality not because it can never be otherwise, but because the mind is not accustomed to dwell on it as it dwells from morning till night on things which tend only to personal advantage. When called into activity, as only self-interest now is, by the daily course of life, and spurred from behind by the love of distinction and the fear of shame, it is capable of producing, even in common men, the most strenuous exertions as well as the most heroic sacrifices. The deep-rooted selfishness which forms the general character of the existing state of society, is so deeply rooted, only because the whole course of existing institutions tends to foster it; modern institutions in some respects more than ancient, since the occasions on which the individual is called on to do anything for the public without receiving its pay, are far less frequent in modern life, than the smaller commonwealths of antiquity.”

Source: Autobiography (1873)
Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/230/mode/1up pp. 230-233

John Stuart Mill photo
John Stuart Mill photo
Jane Austen photo
Joseph Weizenbaum photo
Joseph Goebbels photo
Raewyn Connell photo
Raewyn Connell photo
Victor Hugo photo
Victor Hugo photo
Victor Hugo photo
T.S. Eliot photo
William Cobbett photo

“[T]he very best and most virtuous of all mankind, the agricultural labourers of this land, so favoured by God Almighty, and for so many ages the freest and happiest country in the world!”

William Cobbett (1763–1835) English pamphleteer, farmer and journalist

‘To the Labourers of England, on their duties and their rights’, Political Register (29 January 1831), p. 288
1830s

William Cobbett photo
Tom Watson (Labour politician) photo

“By backing a people's vote, by backing remain, I am sure we can deliver the Labour government the people of this country so badly need,”

Tom Watson (Labour politician) (1967) British politician

Labour party conference: Corbyn plays down divisions amid aide's exit https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-49786833 BBC News (22 September 2019)
2019

Tom Watson (Labour politician) photo

“There is no such thing as a good Brexit deal, which is why I believe we should advocate for Remain. That is what the overwhelming majority of Labour Party members, MPs and trade unions believe.”

Tom Watson (Labour politician) (1967) British politician

Brexit: Labour deputy Tom Watson calls for referendum ahead of election https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-49657006 BBC News (11 September 2019)
2019

Tom Watson (Labour politician) photo

“And you know, woe betide politicians that don't listen to what voters tell them. You know, I think a future Europe will have to look at things like the free movement of labour rules.”

Tom Watson (Labour politician) (1967) British politician

Labour's Tom Watson: EU free movement rules must change https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-36523759 BBC News (14 June 2016)
2016

Tom Watson (Labour politician) photo

“The Labour Party is about as united as it possibly can be in asking people to Remain.”

Tom Watson (Labour politician) (1967) British politician

EU referendum: Labour urges its voters not to back Brexit https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-36496288 BBC News (10 June 2016)
2016

“The skill and the art of the labourer have been overlooked, and he has been vilified; while the work of his hands has been worshiped.”

Thomas Hodgskin (1787–1869) British writer

Source: Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital (1825), p. 66

“The simple means of making the race frugal is to supply the wants of no man and to leave every man the produce of his own labour.”

Thomas Hodgskin (1787–1869) British writer

Source: Travels in the North of Germany (1820), p. 86, Vol. 2

Nikolai Bukharin photo

“Wealth owes its existence to labour, not labour to wealth.”

Leon MacLaren (1910–1994) British philosopher

Leon MacLaren, Nature of Society and Other Essays

“Some men work to maintain others who labour not. That is unjust.”

Leon MacLaren (1910–1994) British philosopher

Leon MacLaren, Justice.

Abimael Guzmán photo
Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay photo
Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay photo
Benjamin Disraeli photo
Neil Kinnock photo
Neil Kinnock photo
Neil Kinnock photo

“When I started to encounter Marxism at 16, the elementary truths of the surplus value theory and more than anything else, the logical argument that he produced that labour was the source of all wealth, gave me a political and intellectual justification for what I believed in a way that nothing else did.”

Neil Kinnock (1942) British politician

Shadow Secretary of State for Education and Science
Source: Interview with Sam Aaronovitch for Marxism Today (June 1983) http://banmarchive.org.uk/collections/mt/pdf/83_06_06.pdf

Neil Kinnock photo

“[Labour has] always believed that the community as a whole should have a greater control over these “commanding heights of the economy.””

Neil Kinnock (1942) British politician

Source: ‘Introduction’, in Why Vote Labour? (1979), p. 3, quoted in Tudor Jones, ‘Neil Kinnock's socialist journey’, Contemporary Record, Volume 8, Issue 3 (1994), p. 569

Michael Foot photo

“I first joined the Labour party in Liverpool because of what I saw of the poverty, the unemployment, and the endless infamies committed on the inhabitants of the back-streets of that city. I am horrified that the threat of unemployment and economic misery is now being deployed against the same kind of people once again.”

Michael Foot (1913–2010) British politician

Source: Press conference after his election as Labour leader (10 November 1980), quoted in Simon Hoggart and David Leigh, Michael Foot: A Portrait (1981), p. 57 and The Guardian (11 November 1980), p. 1

Michael Foot photo

“I am bitterly opposed to any form of legislation, particularly legislation introduced by a Labour Government, which involves an element of colour bar. It is an appalling thing to have happened. I want to see us returning as swiftly as possible to a situation where we wipe away this stain on the reputation of the Labour movement.”

Michael Foot (1913–2010) British politician

Source: Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1965/nov/23/schedule-acts-continued-till-end-of#column_370 in the House of Commons (23 November 1965)

Mashrafe Mortaza photo
James Thomson (B.V.) photo
William Morris photo
Joseph Chamberlain photo

“The goal towards which the advance will probably be made at an accelerated pace, is that in the direction of which the legislation of the last quarter of a century has been tending—the intervention, in other words, of the State on behalf of the weak against the strong, in the interests of labour against capital, of want and suffering against luxury and wealth.”

Joseph Chamberlain (1836–1914) British businessman, politician, and statesman

‘The Revolution of 1884’, The Fortnightly Review, No. CCXVII, New Series (1 January 1885), quoted in T. H. S. Escott (ed.), The Fortnightly Review, Vol. XXXVII, New Series (1 January – 1 June 1885), p. 9
1880s

Robert Menzies photo

“The highest production and living standards cannot be achieved without a new and human spirit in the industrial world. No industry can succeed without the co-operation of capital, management and labour. Each must be encouraged. Each must be fairly rewarded. Between the three there must be mutual understanding and respect.”

Robert Menzies (1894–1978) Australian politician, 12th Prime Minister of Australia

1949 election campaign speech https://electionspeeches.moadoph.gov.au/speeches/1949-robert-menzies, delivered in Melbourne on November 10, 1949
Wilderness Years (1941-1949)

Emily Thornberry photo

“Are we going to celebrate a Labour version of Brexit? No. We must have the Labour Party this week saying no to Brexit and we must lead the campaign to remain.”

Emily Thornberry (1960) British politician (born 1960)

Jeremy Corbyn faces calls to resolve Labour Brexit divisions https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-49787467 BBC News (22 September 2019)
2019

Samuel Johnson photo

“Optimism with regard to labour as an agency of social progress has been replaced by pessimism that sees little prospect of workers acting on their own behalf.”

Neethi Padmanabhan Indian academic

Globalisation Lived Locally: A Labour Geography Perspective on Control, Conflict and Response among Workers in Kerala https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263155852_Globalisation_Lived_Locally_A_Labour_Geography_Perspective_on_Control_Conflict_and_Response_among_Workers_in_Kerala, 2012, at ResearchGate

David Lloyd George photo

“No. A Liberal I was born and a Liberal I die. I will not join Labour.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Remarks to Tom Clarke, the editor of the Daily News (14 October 1926), quoted in Tom Clarke, My Lloyd George Diary (1939), p. 23
Leader of the Liberal Party in the House of Commons

“I always say that not all judges are corrupt there are some of them who labour night and day to give up their best and to make sure that judgments are based on evidence received and the applicable laws.”

Folake Solanke (1932) Nigerian lawyer

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6lqx-jLCac Folake Solanke speaks on the Corruption of Judges in Nigeria.

John McDonnell photo

“We can't say to people 'Labour wants you to share in the running of your workplace, your community and your environment, but we don't trust you to have the final say over Brexit.'”

John McDonnell (1951) British politician (born 1951)

Source: Labour Party conference: McDonnell promises 32-hour working week https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-49798357 BBC News (23 September 2019)

John McDonnell photo

“The values of Catholicism are the inherent values of the Labour Party and the inherent values of socialism...”

John McDonnell (1951) British politician (born 1951)

Source: https://www.thetablet.co.uk/news/11399/john-mcdonnell-acknowledges-debt-to-catholicism The Tablet (21 February 2019)

John McDonnell photo

“When Britain leaves the European Union, free movement of labour and people will then come to an end.”

John McDonnell (1951) British politician (born 1951)

Source: EU referendum result must be respected, says John McDonnell https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-36680463 BBC News (1 July 2016)

Friedrich Engels photo
Patrick Kavanagh photo