Top 35 Vince Cable Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You can’t win with some people. If you’re not in government, you’re criticised for being not serious. If you are in government, you’re criticised for wanting power. That’s the Labour party’s line of attack, and it’s a bit ridiculous.”

— Vince Cable

2. “And humility in politics means accepting that one party doesn’t have all the answers; recognising that working in partnership is progress not treachery.”

— Vince Cable

3. “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.”

— Vince Cable

4. “Where there is flagrant abuse of corporate entities we must and will seek to tackle it.”

— Vince Cable

5. “If the pendulum swings, it may swing to a combination of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats and, thus, to a period of minority government or coalition, in some form.”

— Vince Cable

6. “I am a bit of a lefty on some issues.”

— Vince Cable

7. “I’m now happily remarried to a good cook, which encourages me to be lazy. I like to think that I’m a new man, but perhaps I’m not. I offset it by doing the ironing, though. She has a small farm in the New Forest with a herd of cattle, so she serves up a steak and kidney pie made with her own beef.”

— Vince Cable

8. “According to the papers, I’m miserable, alienated, and on the brink of resignation. But that’s simply not where I am.”

— Vince Cable

9. “The two policies that Ken Clarke is most famous for are his opposition to the Iraq war and being a very defensible and quite courageous pro-European. These are both policies he shares with us.”

— Vince Cable

10. “My job is to support businesses, that means promoting British commerce in the big emerging markets that have been neglected in the past. It means keeping Britain open to inward investors, trade and skilled workers. It means cutting red tape which is suffocating growing companies which create jobs.”

— Vince Cable

11. “I fear that the rising personal bankruptcies and repossessions are the first signs of bigger problems to come and personal debt – Gordon Brown’s legacy to millions of Britain’s families – will hang like a millstone around the neck of the British people for years to come.”

— Vince Cable

12. “Fundamental renegotiation is very, very unlikely to produce any significant change.”

— Vince Cable

13. “Much of the shadow banking sector, a major contributor to the economic crisis, was also only possible because of taxhaven secrecy.”

— Vince Cable

14. “I made friends with a boy who was a communist when I was 13 and that broadened my political views, but it also brought me into conflict with my father who was very Right-wing.”

— Vince Cable

15. “The worship of youth has diminished – perhaps generally – in recent years.”

— Vince Cable

16. “There was, of course, a global financial crisis. But our Labour predecessors left Britain exceptionally vulnerable and damaged: more personal debt than any other major economy; a dangerously inflated property bubble; and a bloated banking sector behaving as masters, not the servants of the people.”

— Vince Cable

17. “The real problem at the moment is that the banks – because of their existing culture, which is frankly anti-business, obsession with short-term trading profits, not focusing on the long term – are throttling the recovery of British industry.”

— Vince Cable

18. “So I went into government with a clear mind about what the problems were, and what needed to be done.”

— Vince Cable

19. “Our workforce is very co-operative, very flexible, easy to work with and one of the big selling points. The idea that Britain is still back in the labour market of the ’70s is utterly bizarre.”

— Vince Cable

20. “We have sectors of the economy, aerospace is a good example, where Britain’s probably the second country in the world, the automobile sector, where we’ve done extraordinarily well, an enormous amount of investment over the last couple of years, life sciences is another.”

— Vince Cable

21. “I don’t feel comfortable with luxury, and I try to stay fairly normal.”

— Vince Cable

22. “Many of our problems are home-grown. Gordon Brown regularly advised the rest of the world to follow his British model of growth. But the model was flawed. It led to the highest level of household debt in relation to income in the world.”

— Vince Cable

23. “Regulators are a backstop: they don’t own banks. The governance at the top of our leading banks has been shown to be lamentably weak. No one at the top of Barclays will take responsibility for systemic abuse.”

— Vince Cable

24. “Quite apart from the problem of the vote, it’s bad for the image of Parliament that people take the trouble to come up and are not allowed to see their MP.”

— Vince Cable

25. “I know it sounds trite but I wanted to make a difference. Political debates with my father had been fraught because he was uncompromising and explosive but if he taught me one thing it was to air my views.”

— Vince Cable

26. “Banks operate like a man who either wears his trousers round his chest, stifling breathing, as now, or round his ankles, exposing his assets. We want their trousers tied round their middle: steady lending growth; particularly to productive British business, especially small scale enterprise.”

— Vince Cable

27. “When I was a child we were sufficiently well off for me to be a picky eater and I still cannot eat vegetables cooked in the traditional British manner.”

— Vince Cable

28. “In my job I meet many outstanding, world class, British based companies. But we need more companies and more jobs in the companies we have.”

— Vince Cable

29. “When Gordon Brown becomes prime minister, the balance sheet that reflects his economic stewardship could look very sickly indeed. He could become Labour’s biggest liability, not its most marketable asset.”

— Vince Cable

30. “The fact that John Prescott is being paid large sums of money to do little or nothing adds to the general malaise surrounding this government and the feeling that ministers are incapable of tackling serious issues.”

— Vince Cable

31. “The Tories are now the party of rural areas and Labour essentially is in the big cities.”

— Vince Cable

32. “Britain is no longer one of the world’s price setters. It is painful. It is a challenge to us in government to explain all that, and it is a pity that the political class is not preparing the public for it to understand how massive the problem is.”

— Vince Cable

33. “Small- and medium-sized businesses need access to a diverse range of finance options, including non-bank lending. These new forms of finance are still small in scale today but they should, over time, bring additional choice and greater competition to the lending market.”

— Vince Cable

34. “Taxes shouldn’t be higher; they should be fairer. We must be a party that’s disciplined. We must make tough choices.”

— Vince Cable

35. “My college, Fitzwilliam, was pretty good but unfashionable and I lived in digs so I was not part of the cloistered ‘old college’ environment, which frankly was a bit intimidating. But I worked hard and settled in by exploring politics and girls.”

— Vince Cable

36. “The economy has become seriously unbalanced. Its growth has not been driven by investment or by overcoming Britain’s long-standing weaknesses in investment and productivity, particularly skills. Instead, there has been a binge of debt-financed consumer spending.”

— Vince Cable

37. “I clearly believe a lot more than some of my coalition colleagues – Tories – in redistribution and using the tax system for that purpose. I also believe in the government having an active role in the economy, which is having an industrial strategy. I’m not a believer in laissez-faire.”

— Vince Cable

38. “The government increasingly resembles somebody who is trying to give the kiss of life to a corpse.”

— Vince Cable

39. “I’ve always been comfortable working with women and I’ve had two happy marriages. Draw what conclusions you like from that.”

— Vince Cable