Alison Weir
Alison Weir

At school, up to the age of sixteen, I found history boring, for we were studying the Industrial Revolution, which was all about Acts, Trade Unions and the factory system, and I wanted to know about people, because it is people who make history.

Arthur Scargill
Arthur Scargill

The trade unions and the Labour Party... failed miserably. Instead of giving concrete support, and calling upon workers to take industrial action, they did nothing.

Arthur Scargill
Arthur Scargill

The trouble with the Labour Party leadership and the trade union leadership, they're quite willing to applaud millions on the streets of the Philippines or in Eastern Europe, without understanding the need to also produce millions of people on the streets of Britain.

Arthur Scargill
Arthur Scargill

You may see the emergence of a new political party from the body of the trade union movement which represents a very clear-cut socialist alternative policy and which gives expression to the views of the trade union movement in parliament.

Barbara Castle
Barbara Castle

It is true that they paid much more attention to the trade unions because the trade unions were after all speaking for the rights and conditions of working men and women in their employment.

Betty Boothroyd
Betty Boothroyd

If Labour ends up on the scrapheap of history, it will do so because of its own foolishness and self-inflicted wounds. What party in its right mind would allow a combination of far-left enemies, militant trade unions and first-time supporters to decide its fate?

Bob Gunton
Bob Gunton

I was the adoring son of a Welsh-Irish father, a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, a Catholic Knight of Columbus who was a blue-collar, trade union organizer and, not surprisingly, a fervid Nixon-hater.

Bob Hawke
Bob Hawke

There is no doubt that this government and this country are benefiting from the reforms that we brought in the 1980s, and that couldn't have been done without the co-operation of the trade union movement.

Chuka Umunna
Chuka Umunna

When a Conservative government is presiding over unfair cuts to tax credits, chaos in the NHS and an unnecessary and ideological attack on trade union rights, it is natural that many in the Labour party should be sceptical of Tory talk on devolution - sceptical, even of government deals with Labour-led local authorities.

Clara Zetkin
Clara Zetkin

Social Democratic and trade union organs have approved of the illegal invasion of Belgium, of the massacre of suspected guerrillas, as well as their wives and children, as well as the destruction of their homes in various towns and districts.