I hate writing all this. I really like Ed Davey. He is a civilised, decent, humane man. He is genuine and he is sincere. He has good values. But it’s just not good enough. None of this is good enough. And everyone in this conference knows it. Deep down in their bones, they fucking know it. But they’re Lib Dems, so they grumble, and they mutter a bit and they shrug their shoulders, and they toddle off home having done nothing, tottering amiably towards the end of their world.
You can break down the sense of low-level background anxiety around the Liberal Democrat conference several ways - it’s about stubborn polling, disappointing local election results, a leader without much charisma, the lack of ideas, the modesty of the strategy. But get past all that, and it comes down to that one central fact: It’s not damn well good enough.
What we are seeing around the world today and in this country in particular is the attempted murder of liberalism. That’s the story we’ve watched over the last ten years: a sustained attack on the principles of reason and freedom. Now the fascist ghoul is everywhere, unmistakable: on the street, in Westminster, in Silicon Valley, in the White House, in German elections, the European parliament. The ancient terrible darkness is upon us again.
Davey claims to get it. He started his speech today with a stark warning about the gangs in Dover and Portsmouth. “Every generation we have these men who pretend to be patriots… and every generation the real Britain refuses to accept it,” he said. At the end of the speech, he roused himself into what passes for passionate delivery. “This is the fight of our lives,” he said “and we are going to win it.”
The words look better written down than they sounded out loud. Davey doesn’t really have it in him for this type of thing. He’s too nice. He’s too - urgh I don’t feel great about this - but he’s too average. He can communicate decency and warmth. But there’s no fire to him. Even when he came on the stage to applause, he looked like a genial uncle settling down for lunch in a Toby Carvery.
His diagnosis was completely unrelated to the cure. His speech unveiled an income policy which would increase the tax free allowance to £15,000 and raise the 40p rate by £6,000. This is basically the same as Reform’s income tax policy, except that Davey would fund it not through cuts to disability benefits but through increased growth as a result of rejoining the single market and customs union. It would therefore happen around 2034 and even then only if negotiations with the EU were as easy and uncomplicated as possible. In terms of content, the policy is basically the same as the other parties. In terms of effectiveness, its timeline makes it basically redundant.
Elsewhere, there was a very silly policy calling for an immediate 10p cut to fuel duty and a treaty to halt the development of AI - basically the same idea raised by the AI developers themselves last week. There’s just nothing there to distinguish the party or its leader. When it comes down to ideas, Lib Dems are now broadly identical to other parties. Even where their approach is more studious - like on care or sewage - there is little there which makes it specifically liberal. At best, it’s a patchwork of unrelated nice things. At worst it’s cynical electioneering.
It’s all just so very fucking meh. There aren’t many people here. Numbers are well down. The energy levels are negligible. I met a lobbyist the other evening and thought: Why in god’s name are you here? She didn’t seem certain herself. The party feels irrelevant.
Every so often, people at the conference talked about who would replace Davey if there was a challenge. There are plenty of decent options, but none of this is really said seriously. The Lib Dems will never change a leader in this type of scenario. They’re all too nice.
Even if they did, it probably wouldn’t change anything. Davey is not a solution, but he is not the problem either. The Lib Dem issue is fundamental. It is that there is a discrepancy between their values as a party and the structural incentives available to them under the electoral system as the third party.
They have always needed to maintain a certain element of mercuriality to their approach. They can’t ever be too decisively one thing, because they’re never sure where the next opening will be at which point they’ll have to be something else.
During New Labour, the opening was to the left, particularly on Iraq and tuition fees. Now it is on the moderate right - disillusioned Cameronite Tories in picture postcard towns who want a sound hand on the economy but think climate change is real, would accept a fair amount of immigration and think you should treat people with respect.
Davey targeted that vote hard. It was remarkably successful. In terms of the popular vote, the Lib Dems actually slipped from 3,696,419 votes in the 2019 general election to 3,519,143 in 2024 but they won many more seats. The difference was that the former campaign was poorly targeted and the latter campaign was well targeted. First-past-the-post doesn’t give a damn how many votes you get, it rewards you for the most efficient distribution of your vote. And that is what the party secured.
He won 72 seats at the general election and ending the party’s stint in the post-Coalition abyss. They could probably pick up a few dozen more in the next election, if Kemi Badenoch, clown that she is, keeps pushing those voters away. The fear of alienating these voters with batshit ideas or an excess of passion hangs like a shadow over the leader’s shoulders and explains why he is so reluctant to put forward a red-blooded liberal vision.
The Lib Dems will do fine at the next election. The trouble is that this all they have - a decent electoral strategy and no articulable values. They have left liberalism without a defender.
Throughout this conference, Lib Dems have sat and yearned for a sense of vision, of a leader able to say what they believe in, to speak confidently about ideals. Davey’s response is to say that racism is bad and suggest he’ll solve it by cutting income tax. He has created a situation where it is functionally impossible for someone to vote passionately for the Liberal Democrats. It’s impossible to even imagine someone who would. Who would they be? What the fuck would be wrong with them?
This is tarnishing the name of liberalism. It is associating the name of the most liberating idea in the history of mankind with a kind of nervous, flustered, faceless vanilla blather. It is contributing to the sense that liberalism is complacent and unthreatening, ineffectual and self-satisfied.
Davey evidently feels he cannot square the circle between those small-c conservative voters and the ideals of liberalism, but he is wrong. His failure to do so is a failure of his imagination. You simply need to link the resistance to fascism to the iconography which is most reassuring to Middle England.
On the small boats issue, that is currently the RNLI: properly, undeniably, quintessentially British, with a very British sense of duty and universality and practicality. They are currently being targeted by fascists. Davey could put a defence of the RNLI at the very core of what he is doing - proposing laws to protect them, statues to valorise them, events to appear alongside them, measures to bolster them - whatever it takes to highlight their plight and link the Lib Dems to them. This is the cosy, moderate way to fight the balaclava wearing thugs.
Instead, there wasn’t a word in defence of immigration from Davey today. Earlier this week he was repeatedly asked if asylum seekers were more of a threat to women than average members of the public. He would not deny it. He just doesn’t have the courage - as Charlie Kennedy and Paddy Ashdown did before him - to make the case for immigration.
Again, people will say it cannot be done while still retaining Tory seats. Again, that is simply not true. You can make the economic case for immigrants quite easily with Tory voters, especially once you provide reassurances on borders. He could start now by attacking the government for doing so little to attract young high-skilled Americans fleeing Trump’s America. That’s the sort of approach which makes the immigration issue as safe as possible. But he does not have the vision, or the courage, or perhaps simply the motivating emotional outrage at the state of the world.
People have been walking around this conference with tote bags emblazoned by the preamble to the Liberal Democrat constitution: “No-one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity”. I love that line. I have lost track of how many Lib Dem MPs over the years have told me that they first joined the party after reading it.
I suspect the key is the word ‘conformity’. It is a fundamentally liberal word. It is not one you would find in the constitution of the other parties. It is precisely this which the party is missing, something that is unmistakably its own.
You want to shake it sometimes and tell it to wake the hell up. The liberal world is being shaken to its foundations and here they are, speaking its name, claiming it as their own, and refusing to articulate anything even resembling a coherent liberal world view. It’s just not fucking good enough. And deep in their hearts, they fucking know it.
I agree with a lot of your article. However, you ask who would vote for the LibDems? I imagine many people like me. I don't support the LibDems, never have done. I'm a left Labour person, temporarily residing in the Green Party camp after the disaster of Keir Starmer's government. That is actually completely irrelevant. I live in a true blue constituency that returned Tory MP after Tory MP. It didn't matter what I voted, the Tory margin of victory was always huge.
At the last election, knowing that the incumbent Tory was deeply unpopular, the LibDems put some effort into winning the seat, which they did. I, along with doubtless many others desperate to unseat the Tories, voted LibDem. Presumably such tactical voting was responsible for the increased haul of LibDem MPs.
Until we get proportional representation I will never be able to vote for a party whose policies I believe in. I understand that the psephologists think that there will be tactical voting at the next election on a scale never seen before. There's your answer to who will vote LibDem.
I agree with most of that. The party has a problem at the very top in terms of conviction, courage and comms. There’s a disconnect between members and leaders, with the former wanting the latter to go further.
I don’t doubt there is concern about the fragile nature of the seats won in 2024. The thing is, many of those came from constituencies full of the ‘kind Yuppie’ demographic, which the Libs are now alienating in the hope of winning over more typical Tory voters.
In terms of comms, the party’s ongoing disaster is perhaps best summed up in the incoherent way it goes about things. The fuel duty thing has no place in policy. It doesn’t survive a second’s scrutiny. Yet here it is, because the Libs want to bang a populism drum. And on Europe… good grief.
Years back, at their own conference, the party had arguably the best policy on the EU. It outlined a step by step approach to deepening the relationship. Naturally, it appeared to forget Northern Ireland exists, but you can’t have everything. It was, at least, a solid starting point.
Then, to win headlines, the party started getting all coy about the single market and freedom of movement, because it decided a fucking customs union was the way to make Labour look stupid. The basic tactic wasn’t terrible. “If not even this, then what?” But that it came not as a stick to beat Labour with but instead something that effectively replaced its existing policy in public was bonkers. Natch, when people started talking about the single market again, the Libs swung right behind that and looked like flip-flopping lunatics rather than a party that could have said: “Yes. We’ve been saying that, day in, day out, consistently, for years.”
As someone who used to live in a sea of blue, I’m quite glad the Lib Dems exist. My MP is, for the first time, not a Tory – she’s a Lib Dem and she’s pretty good. But the party needs to remember what it stands for, before it makes the same mistake it did during the Clegg years and alienates people willing to give the Libs a go – or who are at least willing to vote for the party in the absence of better local options.