“Let these men sing out their songs,
they've been walking all day long,
all their fortune's spent and gone...
silver dollar in the subway station;
quarters for the papers for the jobs.”
― Roman Payne

“It was his first definite encounter with the wary-eyed, platitudinous, evasive Labour leaders, and he realised at once the formidable barrier of
inert leadership they constituted, between the discontented masses and constructive change. They seemed to be almost entirely preoccupied by
internecine intrigues and the "discipline of the Party". They were steeped in Party professionalism. They were not in any way traitors to their cause, or wilfully reactionary, but they had no minds for a renascent world. They meant nothing, but they did not know they meant nothing. They regarded Rud just as in their time they had regarded Liberalism, Fabianism, Communism, Science, suspecting them all, learning nothing from them, blankly resistant. They did not want ideas in politics. They just wanted to be the official representatives of organised labour and make what they could by it. Their manner betrayed their invincible resolution, as strong as an animal instinct, to play politics according to the rules, to manoeuvre for positions, to dig themselves into positions -- and squat...”
― H.G. Wells, The Holy Terror

“Unless the Labour leadership candidates decide to settle the issue through televised mud-wrestling (Adam Boulton, I think, for referee, and he may even take part) they will find it hard to gain massive attention for their utterances. Nor would the wannabes be wise to sign up to Lord Adonis's optimistic gloom about the coalition not lasting. Watching David Laws this week going about deficit reduction with an avidity bordering on the erotic, I realised that there are very good reasons why the centre should hold.”
― David Aaronovitch

“This is a huge strategic problem for Labour. Mr Laws is a magnificent deployer of Tina; every particular cut he makes, every specific tax increase, is justified on the basis that There Is No Alternative, and that anyone who says different is a Flat Earther. But if Labour complains, it encounters Tina's new boy-friend Alf — All Labour's Fault.”
― David Aaronovitch

“The end of the war was not celebrated in the Socialist Standard...The four year's madness had shown the so-called socialists of the world in their true colours: Kautsky, Jack London, the advocates of international brotherhood everywhere had chosen nationalism and militarism in the hour of trial.The ILP in Britain had rejected the war, but its association with the Labour Party deprived it of all credit in the eyes of the SPGB.The members who had come through the war were confirmed as never before in the belief that they,and no one else, held the truth and menaced the system.”
― Robert Barltrop

“Labourism was to be the bete noire of the Party, hated as much as the capitalist system itself. Its growth was to lead to the hardening of Party attitudes almost to the point where even the wish to improve everyday conditions was considered iniquitous. The resentment was heated by the fact that many of the rising Labour leaders had been fellow members of the Social Democratic Federation and once professed the revolution.No words were strong enough for the Party's contempt. In the the Socialist Standard they were 'fakirs', a strong allusion to self-seeking piety, and on the platforms 'Labour bleeders',...”
― Robert Barltrop

“I never heard communism seriously propounded or argued; perhaps I was too deeply preoccupied with my own dissipations; and, as it turned out in the end it was a way of thought that I was denied or spared by a geographical fluke. From the end of these travels till the War, I lived, with a year's interruption, in Eastern Europe, among friends whom I must call old-fashioned liberals. They hated Nazi Germany; but it was impossible to look eastwards for inspiration and hope, as their western equivalents--peering from afar, and with the nightmare of only one kind of totalitarianism to vex them--felt able to do. For Russia began only a few fields away, the other side of a river; and there, as all her neighbours knew, great wrong was being done and terrible danger lay. All their fears came true. Living among them made me share those fears and they made stony ground for certain kinds of grain.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor

“On the other hand, the militant left, and many socialist intellectuals such as my old friend Ralph Miliband (whose sons were to become important figures in the offices of Prime Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor Gordon Brown), also wrote off the Labour Party until the moment when it had been captured and was ready to become ‘a real socialist party’, whatever that meant. I outraged some of my friends by pointing out that they were not seriously trying to defeat Mrs Thatcher. Whatever they thought, ‘they acted as though another Labour government like the ones we have had before from time to time since 1945 were not just unsatisfactory, but worse than no Labour government … (i.e.) worse than the only alternative government on offer, namely Mrs Thatcher’s”
― Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

“In the 1960's, Labour had gained some power, or at least respectability. Spokesmen for the working class - but of course not necessarily coming from that class or belonging there except through ideology - were upset by the exposed inequalities and abuses disguised as treatment. It did not exactly strengthen the credibility of these measures that most receivers of this type of treatment for crime turned out to belong to just those classes supposed to be in political power.”
― Nils Christie, Limits to Pain: The Role of Punishment in Penal Policy

“He was a Labour MP so I asked him if it was true the House of Commons was a form of poor relief for the otherwise unemployable...”
― Robert Robinson

“The motto of the Labour Party is “bread and roses”, but I always wonder if we are really fighting for daily bread or for the freedom of citizens. Eternal liberty over filling only your stomach.”
― Mwanandeke Kindembo

“If Labour Party is only fighting for the daily bread, then how does it intend to convince the rich to join them?”
― Mwanandeke Kindembo

“I vote Labour. To me, voting Labour is like wiping your bottom: I can't say I like doing it but you've got to - because you're in a worse mess if you don't.”
― Jeremy Hardy, Jeremy Hardy Speaks to the Nation

“I've been convinced for years that the Labour Party were are errand boys for Russians to invade our country and make us submit to sodomy. Surely the BNP were the only people who could save the country from being bummed by some comrade from Moscow.
Most of my mad views were backed up by the Daily Mail (our family bible), and, the rare times I was allowed to peek into it, a copy of The Sun.”
― Matthew Collins, HATE: My Life In The British Far Right