“In the process of building an inspiring and attractive alternative government, Liberals will not follow in Lord Derby's oft-quoted advice, given in 1841, that 'the duty of an Opposition is to oppose everything, and propose nothing'. The British Tories did not win a parliamentary majority for the next thirty-three years, and if the Liberals adopted such a strategy, we too could be in the political wilderness for a long time. As Menzies once put it:'The duty of an Opposition, if it has no ambition to be permanently on the left-hand side of the Speaker, is not to Oppose for Opposition's sake, but to oppose selectively. No Government is always wrong on everything, whatever the critics may say. The Opposition must choose the grounds on which to attack. To attack indiscriminately is to risk public opinion, which has a reserve of fairness not always understood'.Indeed, simply opposing the government may create headlines, but to win an election you need to present an alternative.”

“At one level, the Opposition's most urgent job, between now and the next election, is to publicise the government's mistakes. Randolph Churchill once declared that oppositions should oppose everything, propose nothing and turf the government out. He was right in this fundamental respect: the opposition's job is to get elected. Intelligent oppositions have no unnecessary enemies. They make the government rather than themselves the issue by ensuring that everyone harmed by government decisions well and truly knows about it.”

“We need an opposition to remind us if we are making mistakes. When you are not opposed you think everything you do is right.”

“Such impulses have displayed themselves very widely across left and liberal opinion in recent months. Why? For some, because what the US government and its allies do, whatever they do, has to be opposed—and opposed however thuggish and benighted the forces which this threatens to put your anti-war critic into close company with. For some, because of an uncontrollable animus towards George Bush and his administration. For some, because of a one-eyed perspective on international legality and its relation to issues of international justice and morality. Whatever the case or the combination, it has produced a calamitous compromise of the core values of socialism, or liberalism or both, on the part of thousands of people who claim attachment to them. You have to go back to the apologias for, and fellow-travelling with, the crimes of Stalinism to find as shameful a moral failure of liberal and left opinion as in the wrong-headed—and too often, in the circumstances, sickeningly smug—opposition to the freeing of the Iraqi people from one of the foulest regimes on the planet.”

“Whenever governments adopt a moral tone - as opposed to an ethical one - you know something is wrong.”

“At first opposites attract. Then opposites attack.”