The NHS is the closest thing the English have to a religion.
As the resignation letter which I wrote to the Prime Minister clearly implies, it was not the outcome I sought, but it is one that I accept without rancour, despite what might be described as the hard landing involved.
When differences of view emerge, as they are bound to do from time to time, they should be resolved privately and whenever appropriately, collectively.
It would be wholly wrong constitutionally for the unelected House of Lords to do anything, to kill anything of a financial nature that has been through the House of Commons not once but twice.
Most of the countries in the world are outside the E.U., and they are doing very nicely, thank you.
If our system of cabinet government is to work effectively, the prime minister of the day must appoint ministers he or she trusts and then leave them to carry out that policy.
There is always, of course, a limit in a democracy as to what is politically possible, so you have to respect that limit. But in my experience, governments tend to be too timid.
I'm sure Mark Carney is a very clever young man, but I think that the government would be mad to move from inflation targeting to money GDP targeting.
Raising the personal allowance is massively expensive. For the same amount of money, you could look at reducing the rate of tax.
Prime Minister Cameron says he wants to be the greenest government ever, but the definition of green is immature... I don't deny for a moment that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but there are so many other factors that affect climate. It is more complicated than the computer models that we are using. What the truth is, nobody knows.
She felt Britain should not be so dependent on coal. She was in favour of building up nuclear energy to break the dependence on coal, and the main opposition to nuclear came from the environment movement. Mrs. Thatcher thought she could trap them with the carbon emissions argument.
Those who claim that to leave the E.U. would damage the City are the very same as those who in the past confidently predicted, with a classic failure of understanding, that the City would be gravely damaged if the U.K. failed to adopt the euro as its currency.
God forbid that the United Kingdom should take a lead and introduce a sensible tax system of its own which would probably comprise a very low level of corporation tax - tax on corporate profits - and perhaps a low level of corporate sales tax, because sales are where they are, and sales in this country are sales here, which we can tax here.
We already have a sabbatical system. It's called opposition, and I've had enough of it.
The successful conduct of economic policy is possible only if there is - and is seen to be - full agreement between the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer.