I will write more on the detail of Michael Moore’s speech tomorrow, but I just wanted to share one passage exactly one year out from the independence referendum.

His speech was bold, gutsy and passionate. I really felt like he’d stepped up a gear in taking the fight to Alex Salmond and the nationalists.

As you read this, you might want to take a wild guess as to who the activist might be…

Back in the summer of 2011, just after the SNP won its outright majority at Holyrood, I brought a group of Scottish activists together.

I wanted to hear from them how they believed that we, as a party, should respond to the challenge of a referendum that was suddenly looming large. One of those activists is sitting here in the audience this morning. She is a good friend of mine and she is well-known to many of you. That night she said something that brought me up short.

She said that she wants to live in a liberal Scotland and a liberal UK but – above all – she wants to live in a liberal country. Liberalism comes first, national borders come second.

I get that. I do. But I also know that she agrees with me when I say that liberalism is needed as much in Penrith as it is in Perth.

And we have no doubt that liberal solutions are as potent and necessary on both sides of the border. Willie Rennie is the force for liberal change in the Scottish Parliament. Not Alex Salmond.
Where Willie has argued for local services, the SNP has created one national police force, answerable to central government.

Where he has pressed the SNP to adopt David Laws’ policy on childcare, the Scottish Government has spent the money on other things. And where he has stood up for human rights and those whose voices are drowned out, we have a First Minister who likes to meet with the great and the good of China, but will not meet with the Dalai Lama.

Our party must fight for a liberal Scotland; the SNP is no liberal party. We need a stronger economy in a fairer society. But we won’t get these things by downsizing our country or turning to nationalism.

It just goes to show that even if you don’t think a politician has taken on board something you’ve said, it can reappear, in potent form, in a Conference speech two years down the line.

Just to add, by the way, to the SNP’s litany of illiberal measures, we have:

Casually quadrupling pre-charge detention time to 24 hours in an afternoon;

Doing nothing after a damning report at Scotland’s women’s prison;

Getting rid of corroboration, a pillar of the Scottish judicial system;

The illiberal and authoritarian sectarian bill.

I hardly need tell you that all those measures were opposed by the Liberal Democrats and three of them occurred under the SNP’s majority rule.

They have it within their power to create a liberal Scotland now but they pick away at the very fabric of our freedoms.

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings. You can find her on Bluesky at caronmlindsay.bsky.social