Douglas Alexander

Any politician in a democracy has to be mindful of public opinion.

If Nick Clegg hadn't been sitting around the cabinet table, we wouldn't have had the bedroom tax; we wouldn't have had the rise in tuition fees. We wouldn't have had the mistakes we've seen in economic policy.

What we are going to offer is not a one-way communication, but one-to-one communication.

Being prime minister is not a job to be performed with an eye for the exit.

David Cameron wants people to believe that his isolation in Europe is a result of Britain being outnumbered when it matters most.

It would be wrong for us to offer difference from the Conservative Party at the cost of credibility, but equally it would be wrong to offer credibility at the cost of being clear that there remain very fundamental differences.

I think politicians who suggest they are uninterested in the support of newspapers are not being straight with people.

Too often, the idea seemed to be that the cost of being part of Europe was being less like Britain. So after years of fighting to defend Europe against attacks from the Eurosceptic right, it would be fatal to retreat into the same arguments and begin the battle anew.

If you're part of the Network Generation, you don't have to belong just to one nation. Dual identities come easily to these dual screeners. They fear a separate Scotland would be a narrowing, not a broadening, experience.

When I joined Labour in 1982, I didn't feel I belonged to a party born to power. My repeated experience was of bitter and repeated defeats.

One of the big weaknesses of the Conservative Party is not just their ignorance of and lack of effective response to the cost-of-living crisis but a more fundamental error about what makes for success in the 21st century.

Of course the decision to commit British forces in Iraq was, for many MPs, a wrenching choice. However, our responsibility in the face of a growing ISIS threat is not to be paralysed by history, but to learn the correct lessons from it.