Vince Cable Quotes

I think the interesting thing about Windrush is that perhaps for the first time the public opinion has been ahead of the politicians in seeing that there is a terrible injustice here and it should not be allowed to pass.

Brexit will make us poorer and risks breaking up our United Kingdom. We must stop it and we will.

We need a proper referendum that will come to a resolution on the issue, with remain on the ballot paper.

No-one has come up with a plausible explanation about how leaving [the EU] will make us better off than we are inside. Nobody has come up with a plausible explanation about how this process can be managed in a way that does not cause enormous cost and enormous damage.

There is another word for that - masochism. It isn't illegal. I am told some people pay good money to indulge in it. But unlike masochists, the Brexit ideologues usually envisage someone else bearing the pain. And that pain will mainly be felt by young people who overwhelmingly voted to Remain.

We didn't break a promise. We made a commitment in our manifesto, we didn't win the election. We then entered into a coalition agreement, and it's the coalition agreement that is binding upon us and which I'm trying to honour,

Some of the brightest and most interesting people in British politics recently have been relatively old,

The immediate preoccupation is to work with people in other parties to stop Brexit, but in the longer term there may well be realignment because of the deep splits in the parties and I want my party to be at the centre of it.

We haven't yet heard about 'Brexit jihadis' but there is an undercurrent of violence in the language which is troubling.

Brexit is not inevitable - it can and it must be stopped,

We're being held to ransom by these pinstripe Scargills...

[There is a] fundamental economic issue of whether any company which uses data from individuals to make money should pay the owner of that data for its use... The new oil is data. Data is the raw material which drives these firms and it is control of data which gives them an advantage over competitors

The destruction of the British building society movement – or much of it – in the two decades after the late 1980s … was one of the great acts of economic vandalism in modern times. And the commercial banks largely abandoned locally based relationship banking in the decade before the recent financial crisis. There is now no institutional structure in place to offer countercyclical lending, particularly small and medium sized businesses, in place of the banks.

The big, looming, monetary issue is "quantitative easing": that is, printing money. What happens is that the government borrows from the Bank of England, not from the markets. It expands the money supply to keep the economy going and also to counter deflation without simultaneously increasing government debt. The attractions are obvious, as are the dangers. The Robert Mugabe school of economics provides a salutary warning about uncontrolled monetary expansion in generating hyper-inflation. The road to Harare is not as long as we might hope. Monetary easing may prove to be necessary but will have to be managed with great skill and care: Too little easing and the crisis drags on – as in Japan. If there is too much, the authorities face the messy task of mopping-up liquidity by issuing bonds which add to the burden of borrowing or else we lurch back from deflation to inflation. So interest rates may soon become yesterday's story.

Growing inequality is linked to poor economic performance, greater instability, more social tension, insecurity and unhappiness.