Parliamentary Duties Quotes

How can you compare my life to any other MEP? I mean, come on, it's crackers, isn't it? Look, other MEPs do five days a week in Brussels and pop home for weekends. I'm working seven bloody days a week, all the hours God sends. If you include the socialising, it's over 100 hours a week.

In Westminster, I make sure I maximise my ability to represent my constituents. I can do that in a variety of ways: by asking written questions or questions in the House of Commons, through the scrutiny of bills and by sitting on the environmental audit select committee every week, as well as other committees.

Being an MP is quite a strange job, because you do it in two different places. Half the time I'm in Westminster and the other half I'm in my constituency and the job is different in both of them.

The Chief Whip's job is trying to make sure that the Government - and MPs elected as part of the governing party - deliver the promises that they were elected on. That's a healthy part of the democratic process.

Well it's not a matter for me to say what Llew Smith can or cannot do, he's an elected Member of Parliament.

It is a tenet of representative democracy that MPs are not delegates for their constituents. This means that their decisions and actions are ultimately governed by putting the best interests of all their constituency before all else.

Being an MP is not a desperately hard life, like going down the pit or working in the steelworks - with which I am all too familiar, having been brought up in the city of Sheffield; and it certainly isn't badly paid compared with any of my constituents.

I need to maintain a home in Derbyshire and in London to be able both to represent my constituents and to fulfil my responsibilities as an MP and as a minister.

At times I wonder whether or not your role as a member of Parliament... may in fact inhibit a relationship developing.

I did not come into Parliament to be a Muslim MP. And I have never set myself up as a Muslim spokesperson or community leader. Just as ordinary citizens have multiple identities, so do MPs.

As a relatively young woman - I'm 33 - I hope to one day have a family and already have commitments. If and when I'm elected as an MP, I would face a choice: take my family with me to London each week or be apart for four, maybe five, nights a week.

MPs are paid to be representatives of their constituents. They have to do that job.