Labour Policy Quotes

Labour parades compassion for the poor, but it practised casual cruelty by consigning millions to benefits. Yet there's nothing compassionate about being trapped on benefits, being robbed of the dignity of work, and shut out from the choices that brings.

I'm working with the New Dems, who are talking about the future of work, which is something I'm very interested in in New Jersey.

The Labour perspective is often very preoccupied with either the super-rich or those who don't have work - but doesn't have nearly enough to say to those who do have work, on incomes that may not mean they get benefits or tax credits, but are not well off people.

Blair's support for the Americans should not be seen as an aberration; on the contrary, it is closely linked to the main contours of New Labour policy. This has been a government that has majored on hyperbole, but in fact, from the outset it was hugely timid and cravenly orthodox.

Labour economic stability has replaced Tory boom and bust

We will not try to out-Ukip Ukip. Labour is not going to offer false solutions, such as leaving Europe.

The Scottish Government will continue to do all it can to get people into work.

More frightening to me than any policy or politician is the ease with which the public is played for fools with words. The latest example is the 'Employee Freedom of Choice Act,' a bill that will do away with secret ballot elections among workers voting on whether to be represented by a union. It is an open invitation to intimidation - which is to say, loss of freedom of choice.

New Labour has created a society increasingly oppressed by the worry of personal debt.

Crime is only the worst example, but it is a paradigm for other Labour policy disasters. No one tells the voters that crime is falling: let them stay scared senseless.

Labour ministers often look puzzled when reports show that Britain has one of the lowest levels of social mobility in the developed world. They just don't get it. They see poverty, inequality, fairness, as all about income. For the past 12 years, they have relied on tax credits to solve this. But tax credits do not solve poverty: they mask it.

Maintenance grants, a proud Labour achievement which made it easier for children from lower and middle income families to go to university, have been abolished in one fell swoop. To be replaced with loans.

Labour believes that every trade deal should come before parliament for a full debate on the floor of the House of Commons, with a vote at the end of that debate.

New Labour has deregulated, liberalised and privatised - but every time the private sector fails it is the taxpayer who pays.

Building a country that worked for everyone was supposed to be about supporting ordinary working class families, which is exactly what Labour's plan to bring back the maintenance grant would do.

The New Labour doctrine that skills training was the responsibility of employers was flawed. The idea that employers should take on a bigger role ignores the reality that employers have no incentive to train staff to leave. We can hardly expect Tesco to train checkout staff to become dental nurses.

Many European countries and Japan need to free their labour markets and liberalise services to boost productivity growth.

Instead of an end to austerity, Labour has made clear that it wants to impose more austerity cuts.

Essentially we need a new social consensus for economic reform as New Labour has achieved in Britain.

Labour opposes the principle of companies having their own private and privileged courts in which to settle investor-state disputes.

Labour reforms are not anti-worker.

As you know, the Australian Labour Party is committed to turning the country into a republic. We've not stipulated a timeline for doing that. We are sensitive to the other priorities we've got as a nation and in the world, but in time the country will head in that direction.

In passing the National Minimum Wage Act in 1998, the then-Labour Government did more than just establish the legal right to a minimum wage, significant as that was. More importantly, the Act made non-compliance a criminal offence.

Labour voted to increase welfare spending again and again, without considering the effect that the spending was having, either on the people it was designed to help or those working to support the system.

We must ensure American workers get the long-overdue raise they deserve.