Jo Cox Quotes

They are a lifeline for job hunters without their own computer, slimmers, walkers, discussers, knitters and natterers.

The civil war in Syria is the worst humanitarian tragedy of our generation and one that our government, and the world, is failing to deal with adequately.

If you talk to quite a lot of people around the world, whether it’s in an camp or in an emergency disaster they often say the UK is a UN Security Council member, a leading member of the European Union, a leading member of , you can make a massive difference and they want us to act.

Building an integrated, cost-effective, national health service that delivers quality care for all is one of the critical challenges facing anyone with a stake in global health. A mum doesn’t divide the health of her family up into different bits when she goes to a health clinic: ‘vaccines’, ‘malaria’, ‘HIV’. For her a health centre is a health centre and a nurse is a nurse. When she goes to get help, she should receive integrated care for all her family’s needs not just the one thing that centre, or health practitioner, happens to know about. We need to assign inefficient, parallel health interventions to the rubbish bin.

Yorkshire folk are not fools.

It bodes well for the future that young people are thinking so intently about political issues.

I believe it is time for the Government urgently to consider deterring the indiscriminate aerial bombardment of civilians in Syria through the willingness to consider the prudent and limited use of force.

On the military side, we need to get two things right if we only talk about limited air strikes against Isil [Isis] – and I back international action against Isil – it will be counterproductive. We have to look at the conflict dynamic in Syria, and that is 75% of civilian deaths and causalities are caused by the Assad regime due to his aerial bombardment of civilians.

Having gone through that experience of being in a Cambridge college, surviving it and building myself up, meant that coming here (Westminster) was a walk in the park, and a lot of the same people are here!

While I do not believe that there is a purely military solution to this conflict, I do believe that there will be a military component to any viable solution.

Every decade or so, the world is tested by a crisis so grave that it breaks the mould: one so horrific and inhumane that the response of politicians to it becomes emblematic of their generation —their moral leadership or cowardice, their resolution or incompetence. It is how history judges us.

The Tories deserved a kicking last night. With chaos and discord in our hospitals and schools, an unprecedented housing crisis and fatcats lining their pockets while life gets tougher for everybody else, it’s an outrage for David Cameron to appear on TV looking like the cat who got the cream, knowing his party is on track to win again in 2020.

Labour is in the doldrums and we have to ask ourselves why. Why, day after day during the campaign, we failed to get a hearing. Why the voters aren’t getting the alternative vision of a fairer, stronger, more just Britain that we should be offering.

President Assad dropped chemical weapons on school children and the world stood by. He rained down barrel bombs and cluster munitions on hospitals and homes and we did not respond. For too long, the UK government let the crisis fester on the ‘too difficult to deal with’ pile. There was no credible strategy, nor courage or leadership – instead we had chaos and incoherence, interspersed with the occasional gesture. It’s been a masterclass in how not to do foreign policy and a shameful lesson on what happens when you ignore a crisis of this magnitude.

I don’t pretend to have all the answers. But despite all of the dangers and difficult judgements that lie ahead, burying our head in the sand is not an option. We must face up to this crisis and do all that we can to resolve it.