That’s what I think regions are about, making central government more accountable and fairer.

Contrast that with the call of the Liberal Democrats in April, when they were prepared to call upon the British people to participate in a 24-hour strike. It shows how far to the right the...

The day of small nations has long passed away. The day of Empires has come.

When you’re in a hole, stop digging.

There are always great dangers in letting the best be the enemy of the good.

First of all, in our first period of office, we were concerned about the renovation of all those old properties you talked about.

The choice is not normally between the north and south. It might be between Britain and Europe.

If you’ve got an industry where you’ve got massive investment, it doesn’t matter whether you bring in alternative supplies. You still lose the money on that industry.

You cannot teach old dogs new tricks.

The world is blessed most by men who do things, and not by those who merely talk about them.

A social democratic party without deep roots in the working class movement would quickly fade into an unrepresentative intellectual sect.

I don’t make decisions by the Attorney-General. The Attorney-General makes the decisions in these matters. There’s not even a war either.

There is progress taking place, growth is better. We’re only talking about two years there.

In 1984, the miners’ union, which was down to about 180,000, was able to sustain a national industrial dispute for one year and four months.

Learn to think impartially.

Industry, economy, honesty, and kindness form a quartet of virtues that will never be improved upon.

The great disadvantage of our present electoral system is that it freezes the pattern of politics, and holds together the incompatible because everyone assumes that if a party splits it will be electorally slaughtered.

I have only been seeking to get them to the negotiating table and, thank God, that’s where they are.

We are making the fundamental changes. It was like the decent housing target. We said by 2010, we’d have taken a million houses and refurbished them into decent housing.

The labour movement had the best opportunity in 50 years to transform not merely an industrial situation and win an important battle for workers in struggle, but an opportunity to change the government of the...

London is the clearing-house of the world.

Smoking is the now the principal avoidable cause of premature death in Britain. It hits the worst off people hardest of all. Smoking is one of the principal causes of the health gap which leads...

The Labour Party is and always has been an instinctive part of my life.

I was the one that brought it in, but not only for the north-east, for every area so we can develop all the regional economies, lift up the national productivity, get greater wealth and share...

We believe the 36, nearly 40, billion pound discount given for a right to buy houses took a million houses out of the public housing sector which is desperately needed for rent.

The trade unions and the Labour Party… failed miserably. Instead of giving concrete support, and calling upon workers to take industrial action, they did nothing.

We would fight not for the political future of a distant city, rather for principles whose destruction would ruin the possibility of peace and security for the peoples of the earth.

All businessmen are scum.

The permissive society has been allowed to become a dirty phrase. A better phrase is the civilised society.

I love tennis with a passion. I challenged Boris Becker to a match once and he said he was up for it but he never called back. I bet I could make him run around.

If you look at Newcastle or Gateshead, even over twenty years, even with the previous administration, it has moved quite remarkably in transforming itself.

We’ve given more resources. On housing, we are now establishing a regional housing pot.

The trouble with the Labour Party leadership and the trade union leadership, they’re quite willing to applaud millions on the streets of the Philippines or in Eastern Europe, without understanding the need to also produce...

However much we may sympathize with a small nation confronted by a big and powerful neighbours, we cannot in all circumstances undertake to involve the whole British Empire in a war simply on her account.

There are alternate definitions of manhood in the West.

We must not expect a full-scale peaceful revolution every time a Labour Government is elected.

My chances of being PM are about as good as the chances of finding Elvis on Mars, or my being reincarnated as an olive.

In a sense, what we do with the regional development agencies is to give them resources to look at the deficiencies in the economy in the regional areas, so they can address themselves to that.

What government has been doing, we’ve got major programmes now, of billions of pounds, which are directed by central government into these areas of deprivation.

There’s a feeling that strength is determined by the size of a union. That clearly is nonsense.

In war, whichever side may call itself the victor, there are no winners, but all are losers.

I am not against Muslim schools. But as I believe in integration, I think we would be better off overall if we did not have denominational schools at all.

My friends, as I have discovered myself, there are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.

In the north east, there, they have had quite a bit of government offices moving in. It’s not a new policy.

Why can’t we, with a more intelligent policy, actually have houses that are affordable, built at higher densities than they are at the moment and built on brownfield sites.

Yet what you need is not marches, demonstrations, rallies or wide associations, all of them are important. What you need is direct action. The sooner people understand that, the sooner we’ll begin to change things.

How horrible, fantastic, incredible, it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.

The present system of protecting NHS patients was a bit of a shambles.

The dreadful truth is that when people come to see their MP they have run out of better ideas.

It’s moving in the right direction. It was in decline under the previous administration.