Author Archives: Nick Baird

Nick Baird

What is the “right” level of immigration to the UK?

By Nick Baird | Mon 15th December 2025 - 9:12 am

There are few current issues more emotive than that of immigration, so I wanted to take a dispassionate view of the future demographic and economic implications of where we are now, and what might happen in the future, particularly if Nigel Farage achieved his aim of ‘net zero’ one-in, one-out migration as he stated in June this year.

I took as a starting point the population projections published by the Office of National Statistics.

The central assumption is that the UK’s population will grow from around 69 million today to 77 million in 2047. One key point to note in this projection is the forecast that deaths will exceed births every year from the end of this decade, and so growth is primarily driven by net inward migration at an average of 340,000 per year, with the people coming to the UK at a rate approximately double that of those leaving.

Using this data we can consider alternative scenarios. In the unlikely event that we went for absolute zero immigration while still allowing British citizens to leave and taking into account below-replacement birth rates, the population would fall dramatically to around 61 million in 2047 with a collapse in the number of those of working age.

However if we look at the ‘net zero’ position advocated by Farage, then the population would fall slightly from its current 69 million to 67.5 million by 2047. At first glance this might appear an insignificant change, but in reality the effects are dramatic.

The reason for the significance is demographics. Other data from the ONS shows that 94% of immigrants coming to the UK are of working age, as are 93% of those emigrating from the UK. However, the UK’s existing population is ageing, and we currently have a ratio of working age people to non-working age (children and pensioners) of about 1.8.

In Farage’s ‘net zero’ scenario, we end up with a falling ratio of working to non-working age to around 1.5, and a working age population in 2047 roughly 2.5 million lower than it is today, most of whom will have become pensioners. This has huge implications for both taxation and spending, because getting old is expensive.

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Nick Baird

ID Cards? We must be barking …

By Nick Baird | Thu 25th September 2025 - 12:17 pm

Unlike many Lib Dems I came to politics relatively late in life, but opposition to ID cards, along with the Iraq war, were absolutely key to my “Tony Blair made me a Liberal Democrat” political origin story. So you can imagine my surprise to wake up on Sunday to a BBC website headline telling me “Lib Dems consider ditching opposition to ID cards” and quoting Ed Davey as stating “times have changed”. He’s right, but not in ways that make ID cards more appealing, and none of the fundamental liberal arguments against are changed by inserting the word ‘Digital’ in front of the letters ‘ID’.

Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised – after all we saw an article from Lisa Smart here on LDV only a few weeks ago telling us we need to “update our thinking” and then there was a consultation at 8.00 on Sunday morning at Conference that was so well attended it overflowed out into the corridor. A clear majority of the comments in response to Lisa’s article were against ID cards, and while the consultation session had a small number of members speaking in favour, the rest were split between those opposing them outright on principle and those with reservations as to whether they could be implemented in a way that respects our privacy or whether a UK Government could actually successfully deliver such a large IT project. Some would only support them if they weren’t compulsory. As LDV’s Caron reported on Sunday, opposition was expressed most robustly by Alistair Carmichael MP who declared “If I have to bark at the tide on this, I will bark at the f**king tide”. One thing was very clear – there is currently no mandate from the Party’s membership to change our long standing policy of opposing ID cards.

So what problem are Digital ID cards intended to solve? While the Government is likely to pivot to say that they will make it easier to access public services, we should be very clear why they are really doing it – to help crack down on immigration and immigrants working illegally, and to perform that function it will need to be compulsory. Essentially they want to make it easier to identify and round-up ‘undesirable’ people in our country. That should ring alarm bells for every liberal-minded person, because a system that can identify one minority can be used to identify others.

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Nick Baird

Labour is playing into Farage’s hands in the immigration debate

By Nick Baird | Thu 28th August 2025 - 2:57 pm

Tuesday brought the announcement of Reform UK’s plans for immigration and asylum, plans which were then relentlessly platformed by the BBC and other media outlets in an exercise that felt like a day-long party political broadcast for the UK’s seventh largest party.

Even cursory examination revealed the plans to be as impractical and they were immoral, but it’s all too clear that Nigel Farage is setting the agenda on the immigration debate, and Labour’s initial response by Party Chair Ellie Reeves criticised the plans for their “lack of detail” rather than their lack of humanity. Fortunately the Liberal Democrat response from Ed Davey, Daisy Cooper and others was considerably more robust, if much less reported on.

But there is a fundamental dishonesty at the root of Reform’s policy, and it’s one that Labour is too scared to challenge. That dishonesty is encapsulated in the statement from Farage that “the only way to stop small boats crossing the English Channel is by detaining and deporting absolutely anyone who comes via that route”.

That’s simply not true. The only way to stop the boats is in fact to fulfil the Lib Dem manifesto commitment to create the currently non-existent legal routes to claim asylum, which really would remove the incentive to risk small boat crossings and destroy the people-smuggler’s business model.

Labour could do that, as could the Tories before, so why don’t they?

Currently you can normally only claim asylum once already in the UK, yet you can’t apply for a UK visa for the purpose of claiming asylum, and without a visa you can’t legally board a flight to the UK and pay an airline instead of a smuggling gang for your journey. This creates a Catch-22 that prevents legal asylum claims. Effectively it is unwritten UK policy to choke off the number of asylum claims by making it extremely difficult to make an application, requiring a high-risk journey to the UK courtesy of a criminal gang, something Labour is no more willing to admit than the Tories before them.

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Nick Baird

A future written by Generative AI looks miserable

By Nick Baird | Thu 1st May 2025 - 9:44 am

I’ll start by thanking Hugh Andrew for his excellent LDV post from the 23rd April – ‘A thief in the night’, which I completely agree with. I’m old enough to remember the Napster file-sharing era when ordinary people started downloading music over the internet for free. This mightily offended big business in the form of the music industry who, pretending to care about the artists they profited from, declared this was stealing and so successfully lobbied Governments to change the law and make it easier for them to prosecute file-sharers.

Fast-forward 20 years, and now other big companies are downloading creative works over the internet for free, often created by ordinary people who are aspiring or actual artists, writers or musicians. This is also stealing, but those big companies are once again lobbying Governments to change the law, weaken copyright in their favour and legitimise what they are already doing anyway. And Governments, forever in thrall to the lure of the ‘next big thing’ are listening to them.

Where does this leave creatives such as artists, musicians, writers and academics? An aspiring musician might now put their work on Spotify, who will typically pay the princely sum of $0.004 per stream. A new author self-publishing on Amazon might earn a couple of quid per Kindle download of their book. A talented or lucky few may create a buzz, go viral or build a following that allows them to make a living doing what they love. However the vast majority will earn peanuts, but at least their work is out there to take pride in and get credit for, and those that enjoy it will know the creator’s name.

Or so we thought. Now their creative work could be swallowed by a machine and regurgitated without credit by anyone who can type the right prompt into an AI model.

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Nick Baird

Trump has set out his tariffs – the UK should respond robustly

By Nick Baird | Fri 4th April 2025 - 10:51 am

So Donald Trump did exactly what he said he was going to do, and put tariffs on imports from all of America’s biggest trading partners. At time of writing, Keir Starmer has acknowledged there will be an impact on the UK economy, but has yet to say how he intends to respond beyond promising to “keep a cool head”. On top of the 25% tariffs on British steel and cars, there is now an additional 10% ‘everything else’ tariff, which interestingly is less than the 20% applied to EU exporters. While this may reflect the lower trade imbalance that the UK enjoys with the US compared to the EU, it is just as likely to be intended as some performative favouritism designed to drive a wedge between the UK and EU.

So how should the UK respond? It’s true that ultimately nobody wins a trade war, and mutual economic damage is always inflicted until a truce is negotiated.  Does this mean that maybe we should just suck it up, avoid any retaliation, and hope that we can dodge the worst of the harm until a new US administration arrives? Or should we respond robustly and hit back with significant tariffs of our own on the US, and risk provoking “retaliatory-retaliation”? Despite the inherent risks I suggest the latter, for three reasons.

Firstly, we know Trump doesn’t respect weakness, and a failure to respond will be seen as weakness by his administration. If you hand over your lunch money to the school bully with no resistance, what’s to stop him coming for your pocket money too?

Secondly, Trump is a very transactional negotiator who seeks maximum advantage with zero interest in right and wrong. Subsequent negotiations will start from the ‘facts on the ground’ at that point in time. Without applying retaliatory tariffs of our own, the question then becomes what does the Government offer to give away in exchange for tariff relief?  Scrap the digital services tax? Allow imports of US chlorine-washed chicken and hormone fed beef? At least if we apply tariffs of our own, first thing on the table is mutual reductions in tariffs before we give anything else away.

Finally, if we apply retaliatory tariffs it will affect US companies that export to the UK. Some of those are large corporations with armies of lobbyists in Washington, and many are political donors. We need those lobbyists and donors pressuring the Trump administration to negotiate tariff reductions, as they have far more influence on a cash-hungry campaigner like Trump than we can hope for.

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Nick Baird

The challenge for liberals everywhere – what if Trump’s policies actually work?

By Nick Baird | Sun 26th January 2025 - 1:00 pm

A provocative title? Of course there is much to offend us in President Trump’s pronouncements, along with the character and antics of his various nominations to Government posts. But if we previously assumed that much of what he said was bluster, we now have to face the reality that he means what he says, and consider what the outcomes might be. In particular, what if he succeeds?

This is not a simple question. To start with – what does “success” look like? We often condense that into simple numbers – GDP growth, inflation, stock market indices and unemployment figures. It is certainly possible that by these simplistic measures, and in the short term, Trump might succeed and grow the US economy without runaway inflation. With the world’s reserve currency and largest economy under his control, he has options not available to the UK and most other countries, and if he can bully OPEC into increasing oil & gas production alongside increases in US domestic production, falling energy costs might offset the inflationary effects of import tariffs, along with his programme of deregulation and gutting of Government Agencies tasked with policing and enforcing what regulations remain.

I know what you’re thinking (because you’re reading LDV) – what about the cost? What about climate change and damage to the environment? What about all the lives destroyed when settled yet illegal migrants get rounded up and deported? What about inequality and minorities? What about healthcare and reproductive rights?

And you are absolutely correct, but what will the headlines be? Particularly when the full impact of some of his policies may not be felt until after he leaves office.

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Nick Baird

Lib Dem MPs are wrong to campaign against farming inheritance tax changes

By Nick Baird | Wed 20th November 2024 - 10:55 am

With the ‘Tractor Tax’ protests filling the news for several days, yesterday delivered an email from Lib Dem HQ informing me that our MPs are demanding that the tax be axed. I was both surprised and disappointed to see our MPs siding with some very wealthy vested interests on this issue. It is clear that investment in farmland is being used by some as a deliberate ploy to dodge inheritance tax, and beyond romanticising the “family farm” and way of life, I’ve yet to hear a convincing moral or economic argument as to why farmers uniquely deserve a better deal on inheritance tax than you or me. And even after Labour’s proposed changes, the IHT regime for farms still remains far better than that available to almost anyone else.

Ed Davey and Tim Farron tell us that farming is vital to the country, that rural communities have been taken for granted, and that Brexit and trade deals that undercut British farmers with food produced to lower standards is a disaster for them. All that is true, but it has absolutely nothing to do with inheritance tax, and even if Labour change their minds tomorrow, the very real challenges that British farmers face will remain. I find it curious (or perhaps not) that tax is the issue that has brought out farmers to protest, whipped up by some multi-millionaires and a right wing press that is ideologically opposed to all inheritance tax in principle.

If we accept that genuine farming families are deserving of special treatment to allow farms to be passed down tax-free within the family, there are ways that Labour’s plans could be amended to ease that, but Lib Dem MPs are siding with tax-dodging multi-millionaires to reverse the change entirely. They are wrong to do so.

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Nick Baird

Leading the way – back to hope

By Nick Baird | Mon 26th August 2024 - 1:32 pm

I’ve never liked the term “progressive parties”, lumping us together with Labour and the Greens despite some significant differences in policies and priorities. It often serves as lazy shorthand for “not Tory”, but it’s accurate in one respect – the Conservatives have spent the last few years slowly strangling any expectation of progress. Their legacy is a cost of living crisis, exponential growth in hospital waiting lists, unaffordable housing, falling living standards and the virtual abandonment of attempts to tackle the climate crisis and protect the environment.

You will have seen that the new Labour Government has recently awarded “inflation busting” pay rises to public sector workers, triggering howls of anguish from the right-wing press. In reality, these pay rises simply go some way towards restoring real terms pay and living standards to a segment of the workforce that has been squeezed by austerity and hammered by inflation, yet even the sensible financial press has framed 5.5% as a problem because it is “inflationary”. It seems the burden of tackling inflation must mostly be borne by the lower paid and the middle classes, while the new boss of Thames Water (a company on the verge of bankruptcy) is given a £2.3m pay package and bankers have seen their bonus caps abolished (which Labour has no plans to restore).

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Nick Baird

The Conservatives have just announced a big increase in defence spending – how should the Lib Dems respond?

By Nick Baird | Wed 24th April 2024 - 12:45 pm

Yesterday Rishi Sunak announced a plan to substantially increase UK defence spending, up to 2.5% of GDP by 2030. This announcement moves the Tory position from an aspiration to achieve this “when economic circumstances allow” to a firm plan with actual budget cash numbers from this year through to 2030.

The timing is interesting – it is less than two months since the Government passed its Spring Budget without any attempt to fund this aspiration, but since then two things have happened. One is that Keir Starmer moved Labour’s policy position to match the unfunded “aspiration”, and (perhaps more importantly) the Daily Mail ran a sustained campaign demanding a defence spending increase.

Beyond the spin and hyperbole of the speech and press release, the Government has also issued a supporting document with more detail, available here and the simultaneous release of this slick and glossy document indicates the Government has been working on this for a while.

In many respects, this is a sensible plan which actually aligns quite closely with the Lib Dem policy “Liberal Values in a Dangerous World” adopted at this year’s Spring Conference, including investing in people to tackle the recruitment and retention crisis within the Armed Forces and civilian MOD, providing a long term procurement pipeline to give industry confidence to invest in capacity and R&D, and reiterating the importance of alliances.

There are a couple of important things currently missing from the Government’s plans however. One is that the Government’s announcements so far do not commit to reverse the current cuts to the Armed Forces, for example in the size of the Army or the Typhoon fighter fleet. These are crucial issues, as the only way the UK could have more capacity available to fight a big war in the next 2-3 years is to reverse planned cuts now.

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Nick Baird

The liberal case for increased defence spending

By Nick Baird | Sun 10th December 2023 - 2:30 pm

Autumn Conference made one thing very clear – the Liberal Democrats stand with Ukraine and welcome the support that the UK has provided in their fight against Russian aggression. But the fight for freedom doesn’t come cheap, nor we can assume it will always be fought far away. With an assertive China, and considerable uncertainty as to the future political direction of the USA, we are arguably facing the most dangerous period since the height of the Cold War.

The largest donor of military aid to Ukraine is the USA and the flow of American equipment and ammunition has been essential to enable Ukraine’s resistance to Russian aggression. Yet Republicans are succeeding in switching off the flow of aid to Ukraine, and threatening to cripple the war effort for a mix of ideological and political reasons.

Meanwhile efforts in Europe to coordinate a strategy to build industrial capacity to supply munitions and replenish stocks are well-intentioned but proceeding far too slowly, and Europe is currently in no position to fully replace any withdrawal of US aid.

While the West dithers, Putin has transitioned the Russian economy to a war footing, increasing spending and building capacity at pace. Looking forward, Putin will survey the situation in Ukraine and wavering support from her allies and believe he can win. That victory will be of a war of attrition, and come at great cost to the Russian people and economy as well as the Ukrainians. Yet as he empties his prisons to provide cannon-fodder for the frontline, his grip on power is such that he answers to no-one except his ego and dreams of past Soviet glory.

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Nick Baird

Resisting the UK’s slide into a ‘middleman’ economy

By Nick Baird | Tue 5th April 2022 - 2:30 pm

My sister-in-law is severely autistic, and as such is entitled to receive support in the form of a carer who takes her out for various activities. Over the years she has had a number of care visitors of highly variable quality, provided by a badly-managed agency under contract to the County Council. Fortunately her current care visitor is a dedicated and caring person who has improved her quality of life immeasurably. She is visibly happier, calmer and getting much more enjoyment from life, and of course want this to continue. The carer herself earns minimum wage but the Council pays the agency over twice this for her time. We are now looking at employing this carer directly, which involves her becoming self-employed and being paid directly by the Council. If we do this the Council will pay her £14 an hour, which looks like a pay rise until you remember that she will be self-employed and so will not have any of the benefits or security of full employment such as holiday pay.  In fact she will be little better off financially and the main benefit is to remove the bad agency from the arrangement and ensure continuity of care with this particular valued carer.

What strikes me about this situation is that the council is willing and able to pay more then £14 per hour for her time, but not to benefit the carer herself – only to benefit a company who will take a large slice of the funding. Why?

My niece is a very bright young woman who graduated a couple of years ago with a first-class degree. She currently works for HMRC. Except she doesn’t – she works for a company who take on graduates, provide training and then sell their time to others. In this case they sell my niece’s time to a major international consulting firm who in turn are contracted by HMRC.  I don’t have the numbers but I suspect HMRC (i.e. the taxpayer) are paying 3-4 times what my niece earns for her time. Why?

The UK’s energy regulator, OFGEM, has over 1000 permanent employees and an annual budget of over £100m. It spends nearly £20m a year with consultants, and recently paid £420k to an outside consultancy to advise on the price cap changes. Why does a well-resourced quasi-Government body need to spend such large amounts of money with consultants just to perform one of its core responsibilities? Incidently, the same consultants contracted by OFGEM also work for the Big 6 energy suppliers – couldn’t they at least find one with some independence?

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Nick Baird

What are the UK’s Armed Forces for?

By Nick Baird | Sun 20th February 2022 - 10:30 am

It may seem an obvious question, but I have never heard a frank and honest public discussion that fully defines the purpose of our Armed Forces. The current crisis in Ukraine has highlighted the stark contrast between our elected politicians wanting to talk tough and appear as a big player on the world stage versus the reality of what we have equipped and resourced our Armed Forces to actually do.

It would be easy to find a broad consensus that they should defend the UK, and it’s Overseas Territories and Dependencies. Most would agree that we have treaty obligations under NATO that we are obliged to meet, and few would argue against using their equipment and expertise to support disaster relief and respond to emergencies.

Beyond that however, should the UK maintain an expeditionary capability, able to conduct operations far away and intervene in conflicts that don’t directly affect UK territory or NATO allies?

It’s an important question in many ways, not least because the Armed Forces needed to do that look quite different to what is needed just to conduct defensive operations close to home. As a nation, we need to collectively decide what is our place in the world, then we have a duty and obligation to resource and equip our Forces accordingly. I suggest that we are currently failing.  Numbers of troops, tanks, warships and combat aircraft are at historic lows, having been cut again recently by the Conservative Government (while boasting of increased defence spending).

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Nick Baird

The Progressive Alliance isn’t progressing…

By Nick Baird | Thu 17th February 2022 - 11:05 am

I’ll be honest – Compass and the whole “Progressive Alliance” debate frustrates me. Yes, I fully understand the principle of opposition parties working together in some as yet undefined way, but in my opinion the advocates of a Progressive Alliance are failing. Leaving aside what “Progressive” means (if anything), I’m still not clear what the “Alliance” bit means. Compass say they want to “stimulate the debate” but what are we even debating?

Cooperation could mean anything within a wide spectrum – from one party’s activists campaigning for another, through one party simply standing down, to standing but campaigning selectively, or passively standing and not campaigning at all.

The debate doesn’t seem to be moving forward, and it can’t until there are concrete proposals on fundamentals such as what cooperation looks like and, importantly, how target seats are apportioned.

Why do I care so much?

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Nick Baird

The weekend everything changed…

By Nick Baird | Tue 26th March 2019 - 10:25 am

What a weekend!  It really does feel different now – claims of “the will of the people” have never sounded more hollow, the 2016 referendum result never more stale.  The online petition to Revoke Article 50 has topped 5 million signatures, dwarfing all the pro-Brexit petitions combined by a massive margin.  Over a million travelled from all over the country to march for a People’s Vote while Nigel-No-Mates struggles to muster 50 for his “Brexit Betrayal” march.

And just look who’s marching.  On Saturday there were young people everywhere – twenties, teens and younger.  All demanding a say, all demanding a brighter future.  Now study the photos (if you can bear to) from one of Farage’s sad little gatherings and tell me how many you spot under the age of 40.

A better Prime Minister, one with charisma and genuine leadership qualities, would have built a cross-party consensus for a Norway-style soft Brexit and would be taking us out of the EU with a deal that a majority would accept (if reluctantly).

But that time has passed.  May’s Brexit plans have turned to ashes on a pyre of incompetence, intransigence and infighting.  The people have stared into the abyss of a hard Brexit, and while a few still want to jump, most are stepping back and turning away.

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