Author Archives: Tanya Park

Tanya Park

Liberal Voice for Women poll doesn’t say what they say it says

By Tanya Park | Sun 7th June 2026 - 9:39 am

Yesterday I posted about a YouGov poll commissioned by Liberal Voice for Women. At the time I hadn’t had a chance to see the full dataset, and from comments by LVfW members in other threads I’d got the impression it hadn’t been published. It apparently had. Here’s my assessment now I’ve seen it in full.

The claims being made about this poll include that it shows “the majority of the party agree with us on single-sex spaces” and that “most actual party members are sex realists.” Neither holds up.

On single-sex spaces: every result LVfW are citing comes from questions specifically about trans women who have not had gender reassignment surgery. They present these as findings about trans women in general. They are not. For trans women who have had surgery the results are substantially different: hospital wards splits 43% allowed versus 37% not, toilets 51% allowed versus 32% not, changing rooms essentially even at 40/41. The only result showing a clear majority is the no-surgery changing rooms scenario at 53%. For no-surgery toilets it is 46%, not a majority. For no-surgery refuges it is 49%, also not a majority.

On sex realism: the poll asks whether people who believe biological sex cannot be changed are “bigoted.” 44% say they are not. LVfW infer from that result that 44% of respondents are themselves sex realists. The question does not ask whether respondents hold that belief. It asks whether holding it makes you bigoted. Those are completely different things. And 44% is not most.

The intimate care question asks whether a trans woman should provide care without the patient’s specific consent. 79% say no. That is a result about consent process, not categorical exclusion.

There are also real questions about the sample itself. This is not a poll of Lib Dem members. It is a poll of people who self-identify as current or past members within YouGov’s opt-in panel. Nearly half the sample is over 65, which is not representative of the active membership. Those are not minor caveats when the claim is that most party members believe X.
And here is what does not appear anywhere in LVfW’s materials: 84% of respondents think conversion therapy away from a person’s birth sex should not be allowed. When asked what should happen if women’s and trans people’s rights conflict, 59% say find a compromise, 12% say they don’t conflict at all, and only 22% say women’s rights should take priority.

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Tanya Park

Written Out: Trans people, the British press, and a debate conducted in their absence

By Tanya Park | Mon 25th May 2026 - 10:09 am

Between January 2020 and April 2025, four major British newspapers published 17,000 articles about trans people. That’s an average of nine a day, every day, for five years. A rate, Amnesty International UK notes in its new report, entirely disproportionate to the size of the trans population, which represents around 0.5% of people in England and Wales.

To understand who was shaping the coverage, Amnesty’s researchers tracked which names appeared with enough consistency and regularity to be considered significant presences in the reporting. Not every passing mention, but sustained, repeated prominence across the five years. Of all the individuals who met that threshold, only two were British trans people. One was Brianna Ghey, a sixteen-year-old murdered in a park by two teenagers. The other was Isla Bryson, a trans woman convicted of sexual violence. JK Rowling, by contrast, appears more than four times as often as both of them combined.

That asymmetry tells you almost everything you need to know about how this debate has been constructed, and why it is a democracy problem as much as a trans rights problem.

The findings come from a systematic statistical analysis of how four major outlets, The Guardian, The Sun, The Telegraph, and The Times and Sunday Times, reported on trans people between 2020 and 2025, which identified patterns across thousands of articles.

Coverage was disproportionate to public interest: ahead of the 2024 general election, trans rights didn’t feature in voters’ top 16 concerns, yet gender and sexuality were the most-covered culture war topics in the four weeks before polling day. Coverage was disproportionately negative in sentiment. Successive prime ministers, opposition leaders, and the longest-serving Scottish first minister appear consistently as the named subjects of reporting, confirming that “trans issues” have been elevated to a political priority by the press even where no equivalent public demand exists.

The analysis of which named individuals appear frequently enough in the coverage to be statistically significant is where the picture becomes sharpest. Trans people appear in reporting about their own lives almost exclusively as victim or perpetrator. The frame is set by politicians, campaigners, and a novelist. The people most affected by decisions on legal gender recognition, healthcare access, and single-sex spaces are, as Amnesty puts it, virtually invisible. That absence is not just a media ethics problem, though it is that. It is a structural condition that makes it easier to do things to people than it would be if those people were present in the conversation.

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Tanya Park

The amended EHRC code is an attack on trans rights. Lib Dems should be at the forefront of challenging it.

By Tanya Park | Fri 22nd May 2026 - 12:02 pm

The amended Equality and Human Rights Commission Code of Practice on services, public functions, and associations was laid before Parliament yesterday. It will become law in 40 days unless Parliament acts. That window matters, and Liberal Democrats should be using it.

I have read the code carefully. The headline is this: it does not just reflect the Supreme Court’s ruling in For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers. It goes further, resolving almost every area of discretion against trans people and in favour of those who want to exclude them. It makes inclusion legally risky and exclusion legally safe. That is not what the law required. It is a choice the Commission made.

The Supreme Court ruled that “sex” means biological sex for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010. That ruling set certain parameters. It did not dictate how the Commission should weight trans people’s interests in the proportionality framework, how broadly to define legitimate grounds for exclusion, or how much guidance to give service providers on how to include rather than exclude. Those were judgment calls.

The most significant of them is in paragraph 13.131, which states that a service provided to “women and trans women” could amount to unlawful sex discrimination against women. An organisation that has made a principled, considered decision to include trans women in its women’s spaces now faces potential legal liability for doing so. Inclusion has been turned into a risk. The same logic applies in reverse to trans men: a man’s service that includes trans men is equally exposed. In both directions, the code makes the inclusive choice the dangerous one.

The proportionality framework for single-sex services sounds balanced in principle. Service providers weigh the benefits of a single-sex service against the harm of excluding trans people. But the legitimate aims available for exclusion include preventing “discomfort or distress” in other users, assessed by reference to whether those users “could reasonably object” to someone who “appears to be of the opposite sex.” The threshold is not harm, not complaint, not evidence. It is hypothetical discomfort, assessed by the service provider.

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Tanya Park

Stand aside in Makerfield, but make Burnham earn it

By Tanya Park | Sun 17th May 2026 - 10:55 am

Josh Simons resigned his Makerfield seat this week. Andy Burnham confirmed within hours he would seek the NEC’s permission to stand, and the NEC has now cleared him to do so. A constituency most people couldn’t have placed on a map last week has become the most consequential by-election in a generation.

The question now is whether the Liberal Democrats should stand a candidate.

My answer is no, but not as an act of charity toward Labour. As a conditional offer, grounded in a straightforward calculation about what is most likely to advance the things we actually care about.

What the numbers say

Recent local elections in the Makerfield wards returned Reform on 50%, Labour on 23%, and the Greens on 11%. Britain Predicts models a general election baseline of Reform 41%, Labour 28%. Without Burnham as the Labour candidate, Reform takes this seat. With him, accounting for a substantial personal-vote bonus, the same model produces Labour 39%, Reform 36%. A narrow Labour hold. Remove that bonus, split the non-Reform vote further, and Farage’s people win.

Liberal Democrats have almost no presence in Makerfield. Standing a candidate here costs us very little in votes or resources. What it costs, if Reform wins, is something much more significant.

Why Burnham is different

Previous calls for Liberal Democrats to stand aside for Labour have rightly been treated with scepticism. The usual pitch (don’t split the progressive vote) asks us to subordinate our values to Labour’s convenience, with nothing concrete in return. That is not a case worth making.

This one is different, because the policy overlap is not vague and it is not new.

Burnham has been the most consistent internal Labour advocate for proportional representation, saying at the IPPR in January that it is “an idea whose time has come”. He built the Bee Network, the first integrated, publicly controlled bus and tram system outside London, using exactly the franchising model Liberal Democrats have advocated for years. He co-authored the Hillsborough Law, which Liberal Democrat MPs and peers backed comprehensively. He has championed a National Care Service, free at the point of need and integrated with the NHS, since 2010, a position that mirrors what Liberal Democrats delivered in Scotland over two decades ago and have campaigned for nationally ever since. He has called for Land Compensation Act reform, a fairer property levy, and an elected senate of the nations and regions to replace the Lords.

These are not rhetorical positions adopted for a by-election campaign. They are commitments Burnham has held across different offices and different political climates, often against the grain of his own party. They sit at the heart of what the Liberal Democrats stand for.

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Tanya Park

What last Thursday tells us about beating Reform (and where we still need to do the work)

By Tanya Park | Thu 14th May 2026 - 5:04 pm

The headlines from last Thursday have largely been written around Reform’s gains. Understandably so. 1,453 seats, 14 councils, a projected 284 Westminster seats if those numbers were applied to a general election. The narrative writes itself.

But buried inside those same results is a different story, one that matters rather a lot for Liberal Democrats. It is not a story of comfortable reassurance. It is, if anything, a more useful thing: a reasonably clear picture of what works against Reform, where it works, and where we are still exposed.

The short version is that incumbency beats protest. Almost every time. The places where we held or advanced against the Reform tide were places where we had built something durable: years of casework, local campaigns, a face people recognised on the doorstep. The places where Reform made inroads into what should be our territory were, almost without exception, places where that groundwork was thinner.

It is also worth noting that Reform’s position is softer than the seat count suggests. Their vote share actually slid between 2025 and 2026, and when voters were asked to choose someone to actually govern in Thursday’s mayoral contests, Reform’s support fell to single digits in several races. Their 1,453 gains tell you as much about Labour’s implosion as about Reform’s own growth. That means there is something to work with.

Where the model worked

Portsmouth is the cleanest example. The Liberal Democrats won outright control of the city council, 22 of 42 seats, with Reform coming second on 12. The local party’s response was telling: they said Reform had “thrown everything they had” at Portsmouth and lost. That is what a well-organised, deeply rooted local party looks like under sustained pressure. It holds.

Stockport is arguably more significant, because it punctures the lazy assumption that the Lib Dem model only works in southern, Remain-voting, leafy England. Stockport is Greater Manchester. It voted for Brexit. It is the kind of place people tend to write off when they talk about “the north.” The Liberal Democrats won a majority there on Thursday, 33 of 63 seats, the first majority any party has held on that council since 2011. Reform picked up two seats in wards with paper-thin margins and went no further. The difference was fifteen years of patient rebuilding since the coalition years knocked us back, and a local team that had genuinely reconnected with the community.

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Tanya Park

What’s next? The West Wing and the case for liberal idealism

By Tanya Park | Fri 1st May 2026 - 3:28 pm

I came to The West Wing late. Not when it first aired, in that long forgotten world before 9/11 when liberal democracy felt like the direction of travel rather than a rearguard action. I found it about five years ago, the way you sometimes stumble into exactly what you needed without knowing you were looking for it.

Every year, I have watched it several times. My wife has opinions about this.

I am not going to pretend that watching a twenty-year-old American political drama is a political act. But I want to make a genuine case for why it matters to me. Not as escapism, though it is that too. As an articulation of liberal values that I have not often found dramatised so clearly or so honestly anywhere else.

The West Wing is not subtle about what it believes. It believes that public service is a vocation. That the people drawn to government at its best are not there for the salary or the proximity to power, but because they think the work matters. It believes that competence and compassion belong together: that doing your job well and genuinely caring about the people your job affects are the same impulse, not competing priorities. And it believes that idealism is not a phase you grow out of when you become serious. It is, in fact, the most serious position available.

I think that last part is the one that resonates most with me as a liberal. There is a particular kind of political tiredness that presents itself as wisdom. The knowing shrug. The weary insistence that this is how things are, and anyone who imagines otherwise hasn’t been paying attention. The West Wing refuses that. Not naively, not by pretending the obstacles aren’t real, but by insisting that the obstacles are not the whole story.

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Tanya Park

A year of being gaslit

By Tanya Park | Wed 29th April 2026 - 5:45 pm

The evidence, one year on from For Women Scotland

A year ago this month, a judgment about the meaning of words in a single Act was received, by many people, as a ruling on what I am.

The judgment in For Women Scotland ruled that trans women, including those holding a Gender Recognition Certificate, are not “women” for the purposes of the Equality Act’s sex provisions. What it did not do was make any ruling about identity, personhood, or what trans women are. That gap, between a statutory definition and a statement about human beings, is where a year’s worth of bad faith has taken up residence.

Open any right-leaning paper this month and you will find the same story, told and retold. “Public bodies, charities and businesses are failing to protect women and girls.” “Trans inclusion has run amok.” “The fightback is gathering pace.” “Brave women are speaking up.” “Sensible institutions are at last waking up to the threat.”

My trans siblings and I have been living through this false narrative for the past year.

So let’s look at this supposed threat. TransLucent submitted hundreds of Freedom of Information requests to major public bodies in England between 2022 and 2024. Across 40 large local authorities, 35 reported zero complaints about changing room facilities, five held no records, and the single incident logged involved a cis person in the wrong facility. Across 102 NHS trusts, not one reported a complaint from a cis woman patient about sharing a ward with a trans woman. Four complaints, across 382 public bodies, over three years. That is the empirical record.

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Tanya Park

South Cambridgeshire proved it works. It should be Lib Dem policy

By Tanya Park | Wed 22nd April 2026 - 1:55 pm

In July 2025, South Cambridgeshire District Council did something no other UK council had done. It made the four-day week permanent. Not as a trial, not as a temporary arrangement, but as the way the council works. Its staff complete 100% of their work in 80% of the time, for 100% of the pay. The government told them to stop. They didn’t. The results came in: £371,500 in annual savings, a 120% rise in job applications, a 40% fall in staff turnover. Services maintained. Budget improved. Staff retained.

South Cambridgeshire is a Lib Dem council. This is our proof of concept. And we have not built on it.

That is the question this piece wants to ask, directly and without much diplomatic padding: why not?

Ed Davey said publicly he was proud of what South Cambridgeshire had done. Bridget Smith, the council leader, spoke at the 2024 autumn conference about having “sown the seeds” for a serious party debate. Eighteen months on, it is still not party policy. The seeds appear to still be in the packet.

The political landscape has shifted in the meantime. Labour committed to a 32-hour week in its 2019 manifesto and then buried the policy under Starmer, a senior adviser telling journalists flatly it was “a decision for individual businesses.” The Employment Rights Act does not touch working hours. Twenty-five councils have debated following South Cambridgeshire’s lead. Iceland, Portugal, and a 61-organisation UK trial have all produced evidence pointing in the same direction. The 4 Day Week Foundation is recruiting for two fresh pilots in 2026. The momentum is building, and the main Westminster parties are standing well back from it. That is an open goal. And it has our name on it.

The case for the four-day week is usually made in the language of productivity and well-being, and that case is strong and well-documented. But the more interesting argument, and the more distinctively liberal one, is about freedom. Specifically, about who gets to decide how their hours are spent.

The current working week was not designed for most people’s lives. It was built around a particular kind of worker: male, without primary caring responsibilities, in reasonable health, with someone else managing the domestic infrastructure. That design has never been seriously revised. Around five to six million people in Britain provide unpaid care, the majority of them women, and they are paying a daily time penalty the system imposes without acknowledging it. The carer who has quietly given up on promotion because she cannot afford the extra hours. The disabled worker who has used every hour of flexibility on medical appointments and arrives already depleted. The low-paid warehouse worker who wants to do an Open University course so they can have a chance at the career they want. These are not edge cases. They are the people for whom the current settlement does not work, and for whom a shifted baseline would mean something real.

Liberalism has always been, at its best, about more than leaving people alone. It is about creating the conditions in which people can actually shape their own lives. Time is one of those conditions. An extra day is not a perk. It is, for a great many people, the difference between a life that is merely endured and one that is actually lived. That is a liberal argument. It belongs to us more naturally than it belongs to anyone else.

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Tanya Park

Cheaper fuel isn’t a liberal transport policy

By Tanya Park | Thu 9th April 2026 - 10:06 am

Last week, the party announced an emergency transport package: 10p off fuel duty, £1 bus fares, a 10% rail cut, lower VAT on public EV charging. And the reaction from members has been… pretty muted. I think that tells us something. There’s a shared instinct here that the package doesn’t quite land, and it’s worth working out why.

It’s not that responding to a crisis is wrong. People are paying more to get around because of a war they didn’t start, and a responsible opposition should have something to say about that. The question is whether what we’re saying is distinctively liberal, or whether we’ve produced the package that any of the three parties could have announced on any given Tuesday.

Start with the centrepiece: a 10p cut in fuel duty. This is, bluntly, a regressive measure wearing compassionate clothing. Higher-income households drive more, drive larger vehicles, and capture more of the benefit. The “parent in rural Devon” does real rhetorical work in the press release, but the primary beneficiaries of a universal fuel subsidy are people who drive a lot, and that correlates reliably with income.

More fundamentally, we are in the middle of an energy price shock caused by a war over fossil fuels. The liberal response to that should not be “let’s make fossil fuels cheaper.” You cannot credibly argue for the energy transition while subsidising the thing you’re transitioning away from the moment prices rise. Policy should help people through that shift, not reverse the price signal whenever it bites.

There’s also a basic supply-and-demand problem here. If the Iran war continues or escalates, fuel supplies could be seriously constrained. In that scenario, higher prices do useful if painful work: they reduce consumption, which is exactly what you need when there might not be enough to go around. Cutting duty does the opposite. It stimulates demand at the moment you most need to conserve. That’s not just bad climate policy. It’s bad crisis management.

The bus and rail elements are better. A £1 bus fare is genuinely progressive and I’d love to see it become permanent. A 10% rail cut is at least the right direction. But both are temporary, set for three months, and three months of cheaper tickets doesn’t restore a single cut route or reverse the structural decay that created the problem.

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Tanya Park

My existence is not an ideology

By Tanya Park | Tue 31st March 2026 - 9:11 am

I don’t usually write in the first person like this. But some arguments are better made from inside the experience than at a careful analytical distance. This is one of them.

There’s a phrase that’s been circulating in certain corners of British public life for a few years now. You’ll have heard it. Gender ideology. Sometimes trans ideology. It gets deployed with a specific kind of confidence: the confidence of someone who believes they are simply describing reality, neutrally, accurately, from nowhere in particular.

I am, apparently, an ideology.

I’ve tried to sit with that rather than immediately reaching for the rebuttal. To actually feel what it means to be told that your sense of self (the thing you have lived with, quietly and not always easily, for your entire life) is a belief system. A set of propositions. Something that can be adopted, spread, and ideally resisted. It’s a strange kind of alienation. Not painful in the sharp way that overt hostility is. More like being told that the room you’re standing in doesn’t exist.

But I’m a policy person as well as a trans person, and I can’t leave it at the feeling. Because the feeling is pointing at something real: a genuine category error that matters beyond the personal offence it causes.

An ideology is a systematic set of beliefs about how society should be organised: about who should have power, what values should govern public life, and what kind of world we should be building. It makes prescriptive claims. It tells you what ought to be true, not just what is true about someone’s experience. Ideologies have premises and conclusions. They identify threats. They generate political programmes. Liberalism is an ideology. Conservatism is an ideology. Socialism is an ideology. They are contestable positions in a debate about collective life. Keep that definition in mind, because we are going to apply it to a couple of things.

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Tanya Park

You can’t cite Cass and cancel the trial

By Tanya Park | Wed 25th March 2026 - 10:55 am

Somewhere in England right now, a teenager and their family are waiting. They have been waiting, in many cases, for more than five years just to see a specialist. Not for a diagnosis of cancer or a referral for surgery. For someone to talk to about their gender. While they wait, puberty continues. For some of them, that process is a cause of profound, daily distress.

That is what this debate is actually about. Earlier this week, Westminster Hall debated a petition calling for the cancellation of the PATHWAYS clinical trial into puberty blockers for children with gender dysphoria. The trial had already been paused in February after the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency raised concerns about the trial design. Many MPs, drawn from Labour, the Conservatives, Reform and the DUP, used the debate not to call for those concerns to be resolved, but to demand the trial be scrapped altogether.

Their arguments were passionate, often sincere, and in some cases carefully researched. They also contained a contradiction so fundamental it deserves to be named plainly.

Many of those MPs, when the Cass review was published in 2024, demanded it be implemented in full. Several cited Hilary Cass’s authority in the debate itself to justify their opposition to the trial. What they appear not to have noticed, or to have chosen to overlook, is that the Cass review explicitly recommended a clinical trial. That trial was meant to be the mechanism for building the evidence base they say is lacking.

A point of precision matters here. Cass did not personally endorse the PATHWAYS design in every detail. But she did recommend a trial, and when the MHRA paused recruitment she said publicly that no new research findings justified the change, and that the decision felt like a response to political pressure rather than science. The scientist those MPs invoke to close down the research is concerned it is being closed down for the wrong reasons. That is not a minor irony. It is the entire argument.

Puberty blockers are not new drugs. They have been used for decades to treat precocious puberty, where children as young as six or seven begin puberty far too early. In those cases, the same drugs, in the same doses, are prescribed to comparable or even younger children, frequently for longer periods of time. Nobody in Westminster Hall called for that use to be reviewed. Nobody described those children as being experimented on.

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Tanya Park

From parking spaces to living spaces: the opportunity hiding in NCP’s collapse

By Tanya Park | Thu 19th March 2026 - 12:09 pm

National Car Parks entered administration this week, and the coverage has followed a predictable script: jobs at risk, iconic brand in trouble, another casualty of post-pandemic Britain. All true. But the real story isn’t about what’s being lost. It’s about what could be gained.

NCP operates 340 car parks across the UK – at airports, hospitals, railway stations, and city centres. That’s 200,000 parking spaces sitting on some of the most strategically located urban land in the country. Land with road access, public transport links, and existing planning permissions for intensive use. And right now, it’s available at a fraction of its market value.

The government should be picking up the phone.

What killed NCP – and why it matters

The company’s debts exceeded its assets by £305 million. Demand for city-centre parking never recovered to pre-pandemic levels, and NCP was locked into long-term, inflexible leases on sites it couldn’t afford to operate. The business model broke because people’s behaviour changed: more remote working, fewer commuter journeys, a gradual shift away from the car-dependent patterns that made NCP profitable for nine decades.

This isn’t a temporary blip. It’s a structural correction. And structural corrections create structural opportunities – if someone is willing to act.

The opportunity: triage, don’t rescue

The case isn’t for bailing out a failed business. It’s for acquiring a portfolio of strategically important land and infrastructure out of administration at distressed prices, then putting it to work for the public good.

A sensible approach would triage the sites into three categories. First, the essential infrastructure: car parks at hospitals, airports, and major transport hubs where parking isn’t a convenience but a necessity. These should be acquired and leased to local authorities or NHS trusts to operate, generating revenue while protecting access to critical public services.

Second, and this is where it gets exciting, the city-centre sites where parking demand has permanently declined. These are large, flat plots or multi-storey structures on generous footprints, sitting in exactly the locations where Britain most desperately needs social housing. The land is already serviced, already accessible, and already zoned for intensive use. Mixed-use development with retained ground-floor parking could serve both needs simultaneously.

Third, sites that are neither strategically important nor suitable for housing get sold back into the private market, with the proceeds helping fund the first two categories.

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Tanya Park

Invisible at Wembley: what the Liberal Democrats keep getting wrong on trans rights

By Tanya Park | Tue 17th March 2026 - 6:05 pm

On Wednesday night, ten thousand people filled OVO Arena Wembley for Trans Mission: A Solidarity Concert. It was a four-hour, star-studded declaration that trans people in this country are not alone – and that the hostility directed at them is not going unanswered. Olly Alexander, the Sugababes, Wolf Alice, Adam Lambert, Ian McKellen reading Shakespeare. A mother speaking about her daughter Alice, who is no longer alive, asking the crowd to dance for those who can no longer dance for themselves. A standing ovation that shook the building.

One politician was on that stage. Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party, received what was described as the warmest of welcomes. His speech was filmed, shared, and celebrated. His post-event tweet gathered nearly 144,000 views.

Ed Davey was also there that night.

You would not know it from anything the party put out.

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The missing half of the beyond-GDP conversation

By Tanya Park | Thu 12th March 2026 - 2:19 pm

There is a welcome conversation happening in our party right now about the limits of GDP as a measure of success. As our Thriving Economy working group develops the policies that will take us into the next general election, colleagues are rightly asking whether we should measure what actually matters for people and the planet rather than treating growth as the ultimate aim.

I am firmly in the “measure what matters” camp. But I want to push this conversation somewhere it too often fails to go. Because the history of beyond-GDP thinking is littered with beautifully designed frameworks that changed nothing. The reason they changed nothing is not that policymakers hadn’t heard of them. It is that GDP supremacy serves powerful interests, and moving beyond it requires confronting those interests directly.

Let me put it bluntly. You cannot build a wellbeing economy without redistribution. New metrics are necessary but they are not sufficient. If we stop at dashboards and frameworks, we will have a more sophisticated way of describing the same broken system.

What the plans actually look like

Wales has shown that this is not abstract. The Well-being of Future Generations Act, passed in 2015, places a legal duty on public bodies to pursue wellbeing objectives across four dimensions: economic, social, environmental and cultural. It created a Future Generations Commissioner who can conduct formal reviews of public bodies and make recommendations they must respond to publicly. It is a genuine institutional innovation, but its limits are instructive too: the Commissioner’s powers remain largely advisory, and critics in the Senedd have called for stronger enforcement.

A UK-wide Wellbeing of Future Generations Act should learn from Wales and go further. It should embed wellbeing impact assessments into Treasury rules alongside traditional cost-benefit analysis, require departments to quantify outcomes using recognised measures like life satisfaction, mental health and social connectedness, and create an independent Future Generations Commissioner with the power to issue compatibility notices when legislation conflicts with wellbeing objectives, triggering mandatory parliamentary debate. Quarterly regional wellbeing dashboards, published by an expanded ONS, would give every community a clear picture of whether policy is actually working for them.

This is the institutional architecture that makes “beyond GDP” real rather than rhetorical. But architecture without funding is just a blueprint. The history of wellbeing frameworks, from the Stiglitz Commission to the UN’s own Sustainable Development Goals, confirms this: without the resources and political will to act on what the metrics reveal, measurement becomes an end in itself.

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Tanya Park

Labour’s youth guarantee won’t fix a broken system

By Tanya Park | Sun 8th March 2026 - 2:30 pm

Imagine you’re 20 years old. You left school at 16 with a handful of GCSEs, a mother with a disability, and no money for college. You’ve worked a few zero-hours shifts at a warehouse, but the anxiety that’s been sitting on your chest since you were 14 has made regular employment feel like an impossible ask on most days. You want to do something. You’ve looked at courses. But Universal Credit requires 35 hours a week of job searching, and if you stop, the money stops. So the course stays a thought, and the job search goes nowhere, because there aren’t many jobs and the ones that exist aren’t looking for someone whose CV has a lot of gaps.

You are, in government statistics, “NEET.” Not in employment, education, or training. A data point in a rising trend.

The NEET rate is now 12.7%, up 1.2 percentage points since 2019. Youth unemployment for 16-to-24 year olds sits at 15.3%. These aren’t abstract numbers. They represent a significant share of a generation that the economy has not found a place for, and which the welfare system is actively making it harder to help itself.

Labour’s answer is the Youth Guarantee: £820 million, and a six-month paid work placement for every eligible 18-to-21 year old who has been on Universal Credit and looking for work for 18 months. It’s not nothing. But it rests on a diagnosis that doesn’t survive much scrutiny.

The government’s theory of the problem is wrong

The Youth Guarantee is an activation policy. Its underlying assumption is that NEET young people need a push: a foot in the door, a bit of experience, a coach. Get them job-ready, get them placed, job done.

This is a supply-side answer to what is partly a demand-side problem. There are currently 2.3 unemployed people for every vacancy in the UK. Vacancies have been falling for over three years, down more than half a million from their 2022 peak, and the decline began before recent rises in employer National Insurance contributions, which means it isn’t primarily a story about the cost of hiring. Something structural is happening.

You cannot activate people into jobs that don’t exist. And for young people who are NEET because of mental health difficulties, housing instability, caring responsibilities, or poverty, what they need is not a placement in month 18. It’s support in month one. The 18-month wait is the guarantee’s most revealing design flaw. By the time a young person qualifies, many have already hardened into disengagement.

What could actually change now

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Tanya Park

Power shared, not hoarded: finishing the argument

By Tanya Park | Wed 4th March 2026 - 9:50 am

Roz Savage’s piece earlier this week, and Jack Meredith’s response to it, have done something worth building on. This is an attempt to follow the logic a few steps further, because I think it leads somewhere important.

The strongest thing in Savage’s piece is the power axis. “Power hoarded versus power shared” is not just better messaging than left versus right. It’s a more honest description of what’s actually happening in Britain. Decisions that shape people’s lives are made in places they can’t reach, by institutions they didn’t choose, in processes they can’t scrutinise. That’s a liberal problem, not just a left-wing one.

Meredith picks this up thoughtfully. He’s right that different liberal traditions notice different concentrations of power. Social liberals see material inequality. Market liberals see monopoly and cartel behaviour. Civil libertarians see the state. Bring them into the same room, and they converge, even if they arrive from different directions.

But there’s a step still to take.

If dispersing power is the organising principle, it can’t stop at constitutional reform. Democratic reform is necessary, but formal political power gets hollowed out when economic power remains sufficiently concentrated. In theory, everyone gets one vote. In practice, sufficient accumulation of wealth means your money votes for you in ways the ballot box never could: through political donations, through media ownership, through the ability to fund strategic litigation, through the simple fact that governments worry about the confidence of capital in ways they never worry about the confidence of people on a zero-hours contract. The dispersal of political power and the dispersal of economic power are the same argument. You can’t complete one without the other.

Concentrated wealth isn’t simply an inequality problem, though it is that too. It’s a power problem. When wealth compounds across generations, when returns to capital consistently outpace returns to labour, when a small number of individuals accumulate resources sufficient to shape political culture and purchase influence over public debate, that is a liberal emergency. Not a socialist one. A liberal one.

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Tanya Park

From broadsheet to outrage factory: the decline of the Spectator and the Telegraph

By Tanya Park | Wed 25th February 2026 - 10:30 am

Liberals should care about the collapse of serious conservative journalism. Not because the Spectator and the Daily Telegraph were ever friends to progressive politics (they weren’t), but because a functioning liberal democracy depends on a press that engages honestly with reality across the political spectrum. What has replaced these publications’ particular brand of reactionary journalism is something considerably worse: reactionary journalism stripped of any pretence to intellectual seriousness. And that is bad for everyone.

Let us be clear about what these publications actually were. The Spectator spent much of the twentieth century providing intellectual cover for policies that entrenched inequality and treated the interests of the powerful as synonymous with the national interest. The Telegraph was the unabashed voice of privilege: the paper of the officer class, the Home Counties, the quietly certain that things were arranged more or less as they ought to be. To mourn their decline is not to pretend they were ever on the right side of history. It is simply to note that the seeds of today’s dysfunction were present in the editorial culture all along: a culture that prioritised tribal comfort over truth, and consistently failed to hold power to account when that power wore a blue rosette.

The lurch, and what drove it

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Tanya Park

Labour’s SEND white paper gets the destination right and the journey wrong

By Tanya Park | Mon 23rd February 2026 - 7:00 pm

Today’s Schools White Paper on SEND reform is, in certain respects, a document Liberal Democrats should welcome. The investment is substantial: £1.6 billion for an Inclusive Mainstream Fund, £1.8 billion for specialist services, and a long-overdue write-off of 90 per cent of local authority SEND deficits that were pushing councils toward effective bankruptcy. The aspiration, a well-resourced, inclusive mainstream, with early intervention, genuine specialist support, and families treated as partners rather than adversaries, is the right one.

The problem is not the destination. It is the route the government has chosen to get there.

A right is not the same as a promise

The Education, Health and Care Plan, for all its bureaucratic weight, is one of the few places in the British welfare system where an individual holds a judicially enforceable claim on the state. Not a guidance note. Not a promise from a minister at the despatch box. A right. Local authorities that fail to deliver what an EHCP specifies can be taken to the SEND tribunal, and families win the overwhelming majority of those cases, most conceded before a hearing takes place. That near-universal success rate tells you not that the tribunal is lenient, but that the system routinely under-delivers and only corrects itself when legally compelled.

The White Paper proposes to replace many of those plans with Individual Support Plans. ISPs would carry a statutory duty and be monitored by Ofsted. What they would not carry is tribunal enforceability. That mechanism remains available only for EHCPs, which would be reserved for children with the most complex needs. The government projects that EHCP coverage will fall from 5.8 per cent of pupils today to 4.7 per cent by 2034/35. That is not a side effect. It is the stated aim.

When Schools Minister Georgia Gould was pressed this morning on whether children could lose their plans at reassessment, she declined to give a direct answer. She said her job was to talk about the investment being put in. That is not good enough. And Liberal Democrats should say so clearly.

The sequencing problem

The new plans are not proposed to come into force until 2030. The narrowed threshold is intended to begin operating sooner. Children currently in Year 2 and below will face reassessment of their EHCP at the primary-to-secondary transition under the new, tighter criteria.

This timing could not be worse, and it contradicts what we know about how neurodivergent children experience school. Many autistic children, particularly girls, spend primary school masking their difficulties. They exhaust themselves performing adequately, and the cracks appear precisely when secondary school changes the demands on them: different teachers every period, less structure, more social complexity, higher academic pressure. The ‘secondary crash’ is documented in attendance figures, CAMHS referrals, and late diagnosis rates. Removing or weakening legally enforceable support at that exact transition is not evidence-based policy. It is the opposite.

The Children’s Commissioner has called on ministers to confirm that no child will lose their EHCP as a result of these changes. That confirmation has not been forthcoming. The assurance that “effective support” will not be removed is not the same as guaranteeing that no child loses what their current plan specifies.

Who bears the risk?

Lib Dems understand, better than most, that equality of formal rights is not the same as equality in practice. The Sutton Trust’s October 2025 report found that among parents of children in special schools, 41 per cent from wealthier backgrounds had successfully secured a place, compared with 25 per cent from low-income families. The gap exists because navigating SEND requires resources: private assessments, legal advice, time. When the legal mechanism weakens, it is not wealthy families who absorb the loss.

This is a liberal argument as much as an equalities one. Freedom that can only be exercised by those with the means to assert it is not freedom. It is privilege in freedom’s clothing.

The White Paper asks families to accept a weaker backstop on the promise that something better is coming. For a community that has spent years learning, through hard experience, that the system withholds support until crisis is the only option, that is a very large ask.

What the Lib Dems should push for

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Tanya Park

The new Gilded Age: A liberal case for radical reform

By Tanya Park | Tue 17th February 2026 - 11:55 am

In 1900, the wealthiest one per cent of people in Britain controlled an estimated 70 per cent of all personal wealth. By 1990, that share had fallen to under 20 per cent. It was the most sustained redistribution of wealth in British history, and it was not inevitable. It was the product of deliberate policy choices: progressive taxation, labour rights, universal public services, and democratic reform.

That settlement is now being unmade. The wealthiest one per cent of UK households again hold the same share of wealth as the entire bottom half combined. The 50 wealthiest families hold more combined wealth than 34 million people. UK billionaire wealth has grown roughly four times faster than median household wealth since 2008. We are living in a new Gilded Age, and it should trouble liberals deeply, because concentrated wealth is concentrated power, and concentrated power is the enemy of individual freedom.

This is the point that gets lost when inequality is treated as a concern only for the left. The liberal tradition, at its best, has always understood that freedom without material security is hollow, and that unchecked economic power threatens political liberty just as surely as unchecked state power. Lloyd George understood this when he introduced the People’s Budget of 1909. Beveridge understood it when he identified Want as one of the five giants to be slain. The question is whether today’s liberals are willing to apply that same logic to the new concentrations of wealth and power that define our era.

At A Just Society, we argue that they should, and we have set out a detailed programme for how. Our proposals operate across the same three domains that ended the first Gilded Age: taxation, universal provision, and democratic reform.

Limitarianism would introduce a progressive annual levy on extreme wealth: 1 per cent on fortunes between £5 and £10 million, 2 per cent up to £1 billion, and 3 per cent above that. The revenues would be earmarked for opportunity-enhancing investment: ending child poverty, a £10,000 citizens’ inheritance for young adults, care provision, and the green transition. This is not punitive redistribution. It is the principle that extreme fortunes built on shared foundations should sustain those foundations.

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Tanya Park

Parliament is falling down. Liberals should seize the moment.

By Tanya Park | Wed 11th February 2026 - 12:12 pm

Last week, the Restoration and Renewal Client Board published its costed proposals for saving the Palace of Westminster. The options have been narrowed to two: a full decant costing up to £15.6 billion over 20 to 25 years, or a semi-decant that could take 60 years and cost approaching £40 billion. A £3 billion first phase of works would begin this year.

The debate that follows will focus, as it always does, on where to put MPs while the building is fixed. Richmond House? The QEII Conference Centre? How big should the temporary chamber be?

But there is a more interesting question, and it is one that liberals should be leading on: why do we still assume that 650 MPs need to be in the same building at all?

We already know this works

During the pandemic, the Commons went hybrid. MPs participated remotely in questions, statements, and debates. Select committees took evidence from witnesses across the country and the world. Electronic voting functioned securely. The Hansard Society found that remote committee work was one of the most valuable innovations of the period, and Liberal Democrat MPs were among the highest users of hybrid participation.

Then Jacob Rees-Mogg ended it, forcing a return to physical-only proceedings without even allowing a debate on extending the arrangements. The Hansard Society called the decision “over-hasty, poorly thought-through, unwise and unnecessary.” MPs with disabilities, caring responsibilities, and constituencies hundreds of miles from London were simply shut out.

That decision was wrong then. Revisiting it now, when Parliament faces its biggest logistical crisis in a generation, is not just sensible. It is a democratic opportunity.

This is a liberal argument

The case for hybrid working is not really about technology or convenience. It is about who gets to participate in democracy and on what terms.

Westminster’s culture of presenteeism is a filter. It selects for people who can spend four days a week in London, maintain two homes, endure late-night votes, and have no caring responsibilities that conflict with an unpredictable schedule. It penalises MPs with disabilities, new parents, and anyone whose constituency is not a short train ride from SW1. It concentrates political power in London and weakens the connection between MPs and the communities they represent.

Liberals have always understood that institutions are not neutral. They shape who participates, whose voice is heard, and how power is distributed. A Parliament that requires permanent physical presence in central London is not a level playing field. It is a system designed by and for a particular kind of person, and it excludes others by default.

Hybrid working would not eliminate the demands of the job, but it would make those demands compatible with a wider range of lives. That is not a perk. It is a basic condition for a more representative democracy.

The building becomes something better

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Tanya Park

Evidence beats ideology: What Hampstead Ponds tells us about trans inclusion

By Tanya Park | Sat 31st January 2026 - 3:00 pm

Last Thursday brought two moments that should settle the trans inclusion debate, if we’re willing to listen to evidence. The High Court refused permission for judicial review of Hampstead Heath’s trans-inclusive bathing policy. The same day, the City of London published consultation results showing what 38,445 people actually think about it.

The media focused on the court ruling, spinning it as women being “denied justice.” That’s nonsense. Mrs Justice Lieven simply said Sex Matters used the wrong legal procedure – they need a County Court discrimination claim, not judicial review. Standard civil procedure, not conspiracy.

The real story is what nearly 40,000 people said when asked about their actual experiences.

What the evidence shows

The numbers are overwhelming. 86% agreed the ponds should continue operating as trans-inclusive spaces. Only 13% wanted strictly biological sex-based access.

Among the 84% who had actually swum at the ponds, 81% reported positive experiences, 10% reported negative experiences, and 2% reported mixed experiences. Two-thirds had used the ponds within the previous three months. These are people describing what actually happens, not what they fear might happen.

The consultation tested several “compromise” positions. Every single one was rejected by overwhelming majorities.

Separate changing rooms for trans people: 90% disagreed. Characterised as discrimination and segregation.

Timetabled sessions with designated “trans times”: 90% disagreed. Respondents raised serious concerns about making trans people visible and vulnerable, increasing safety risks.

Mixed-sex facilities open to all: 66% disagreed. Opposition came mainly from people who want to preserve gendered spaces whilst supporting trans inclusion within them. The ladies’ pond as a sanctuary from cisgender men was repeatedly emphasised.

What this means for liberal policy

The findings challenge common assumptions. “Women feel unsafe with trans women present” – not according to 81% of pond users. The real safety concern raised repeatedly was about cisgender men, which is why respondents opposed making the ladies’ pond mixed-sex.

“This is a binary choice between women’s rights and trans rights” – people overwhelmingly reject this framing. They want gendered spaces that include trans people in those spaces.

“Compromise positions balance competing needs” – the consultation tested several. Each failed because they created discrimination, stigma, and practical problems worse than either maintaining or changing the current policy.

Proportionality means assessing whether restrictions achieve legitimate aims with minimum necessary harm. The consultation provides exactly that evidence. When you ask people about actual experiences rather than imagined fears, you get very different answers.

The case for evidence-based rights

A Just Society’s “Human Rights for All” policy demonstrates what evidence-based rights protection looks like: specialist advocacy for those experiencing harassment, accelerated fair legal gender recognition, and independent oversight of systems that affect people’s lives. The full policy is at ajustsociety.uk, but the principle is simple: dignity isn’t divisible, and evidence shows what’s possible when we trust it.

Now Sex Matters faces a choice. They can bring a County Court claim, but they’ll need to demonstrate the City of London’s approach isn’t proportionate when 86% support current arrangements, 81% report positive experiences, and every tested alternative created worse problems.

That’s harder than “the Supreme Court said sex means biological sex, therefore trans women must be excluded.” The law on single-sex services is more nuanced, and the evidence from Hampstead shows why.

What liberalism actually requires

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Tanya Park

Why banning social media for children misses the point

By Tanya Park | Wed 21st January 2026 - 7:59 am

The Government is  considering following Australia’s lead with a blanket ban on social media for under-16s. It’s a move that will appeal to anxious parents and play well in focus groups. It also represents a fundamental misunderstanding of both the problem and the solution.

This isn’t to dismiss legitimate concerns about children’s online experiences. The evidence on mental health impacts is real and concerning, particularly for young people already vulnerable. Algorithmic amplification of harmful content, cyberbullying, and the manipulation of attention through addictive design features cause genuine harm. Parents are right to worry.

But a ban throws the baby out with the bathwater. It looks decisive whilst avoiding the harder work of actually fixing anything, and in the process, eliminates the genuine benefits alongside the harms.

The practical problems are obvious

Age verification technology remains unreliable and privacy-invasive. Australia’s ban, which only came into effect this month, relies on platforms policing themselves – the same platforms that have consistently failed to enforce their existing age limits. VPNs and workarounds are readily available to any teenager with basic digital literacy, which is to say, most of them.

More fundamentally, a ban creates an unregulated underground. When young people inevitably access social media anyway, they’ll do so without adult guidance or support, less likely to report problems or seek help when things go wrong. We’ve seen this pattern before with abstinence-only approaches to sex education and drug policy: restricting access doesn’t eliminate risk, it just pushes it into the shadows.

But the deeper issue is one of rights and autonomy

Children and young people are not simply adults-in-waiting, passive recipients of adult protection. They are rights-holders under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, including the right to freedom of expression and access to information. These rights don’t disappear because we’re uncomfortable with how they’re being exercised.

For many young people, particularly those who are LGBTQ+, disabled, from minority backgrounds, or geographically isolated, online spaces provide crucial community, information, and support that may not exist in their immediate physical environment. Social media is also where civic life increasingly happens. Youth climate activism, political organising, and public discourse occur online. Excluding an entire age group from these spaces is excluding them from democratic participation at precisely the age when political consciousness typically develops. We can’t simultaneously lament young people’s disengagement from politics whilst banning them from the primary forum where political conversation occurs.

What would actually work?

The answer isn’t another badly designed law, it’s properly addressing the actual problem: platform business models that profit from harm. None of these proposals are untested fantasies – elements exist in various jurisdictions – but nowhere has implemented them comprehensively or with adequate enforcement.

Rather than banning access, we should be banning the business model. That means:

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Tanya Park

When discomfort becomes law

By Tanya Park | Sat 17th January 2026 - 11:43 am

How an employment tribunal turned prejudice into principle and left trans workers with nowhere to go.

Friday’s employment tribunal judgment in Hutchison v County Durham NHS Trust should concern anyone who cares about liberty and equality. The tribunal found that allowing a trans woman to use the women’s changing room at work constituted harassment of her cisgender colleagues. The reasoning is sophisticated. The implications are dangerous.

Rose Henderson, a trans woman working as an NHS practitioner, used the women’s changing room in line with her employer’s policy. Eight nurses objected. The tribunal ruled the policy unlawful – not because Rose did anything wrong (they explicitly found no improper behaviour) but because her presence created a “hostile environment”.

If Rose’s conduct wasn’t harassing, how does permission for it become harassing? The tribunal never adequately explains because the honest answer is uncomfortable: trans women’s bodies in women’s spaces are treated as inherently violating.

The flawed legal reasoning

The judgment extends For Women Scotland – a narrow Supreme Court case about gender statistics – to workplace facilities without proper analysis. Different statutes serve different purposes. What works for data collection doesn’t necessarily work for changing rooms.

Worse, the tribunal gave Rose’s rights barely a sentence whilst devoting pages to the nurses’ distress. Rose’s dignity gets acknowledged in passing; the nurses’ discomfort gets elevated to legal harm.

Why liberals should be concerned

It confuses discomfort with harm. The nurses were uncomfortable with Rose’s “masculine appearance”, her “stubble”, her being “sexually active”. These are prejudiced judgments about whose bodies are acceptable. Liberalism doesn’t validate discomfort rooted in prejudice. If it did, every minority right would violate majority dignity.

It applies majoritarian logic to rights. The tribunal emphasises 300 women shared the changing room. But rights don’t work by counting heads. Numbers can measure impact, not legitimacy of objection. This judgment amplifies prejudice rather than assesses harm.

It leaves trans people nowhere to go. Trans women cannot use women’s facilities (violates regulations), cannot use men’s facilities (violates dignity), have no right to alternatives. Even alternatives would visibly out them. The judgment creates impossible situations.

The employer’s dilemma

Though not binding, this judgment shapes how employers understand risk. The message: inclusion is risky, exclusion is safe. Trans workers become problems to manage rather than colleagues with rights.

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Tanya Park

The liberal case for BBC independence

By Tanya Park | Thu 15th January 2026 - 5:57 pm

The BBC faces two existential crises. The first is obvious: the licence fee is dying. Younger audiences don’t watch linear TV. Coverage is declining. Enforcement costs over £100m annually to prosecute people who can’t afford £174.50. Within a decade, the model collapses completely.

The second crisis is worse: nobody trusts the BBC’s independence anymore. And why would they? Ministers appoint the Board. The government sets funding levels. Every charter renewal becomes a hostage negotiation where editorial freedom trades for financial survival. Trust in BBC impartiality has fallen 15 points since 2018. The public sees the strings.

Charter renewal in 2027 offers the chance to fix both problems structurally. Not tinkering with board composition or modest fee reforms, but genuine liberal reform: progressive funding and democratic independence.

Replace the Poll Tax with progressive taxation

The licence fee is a regressive poll tax. A nurse and a banker pay the same £174.50 regardless of income. That’s illiberal and unsustainable. We should replace it with a Digital Services Tax on companies profiting from content infrastructure.

Netflix, YouTube, Meta, Amazon, Disney+, Spotify: these corporations extract billions from UK users whilst routing profits through tax havens. Make them contribute, with 3-5% on UK revenues over £25m, and infrastructure providers and device manufacturers paying lower rates.

This raises £2bn annually. Combined with BBC Studios’ commercial revenue (£1.5-2bn from international sales), that’s £3.5-4bn total, which maintains current funding levels.

The liberal case is straightforward: progressive taxation replacing regressive levies. Those with greatest capacity pay proportionally more. Nobody gets criminalised for being poor. Universal access replaces means-tested exclusion.

Plus, it’s popular. Taxing profitable tech corporations polls well across the spectrum. And it’s sustainable: revenue scales with the growth of the digital economy, with no political negotiations required.

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Tanya Park

The UK must not be Trump’s unwitting accomplice in dangerous escalation

By Tanya Park | Wed 7th January 2026 - 10:25 am

Over the past week, something alarming has been unfolding at British airbases. At least ten US C-17 cargo aircraft, two AC-130 gunships, and specialised intelligence aircraft have arrived at RAF Fairford and RAF Mildenhall, with reports suggesting elite special operations helicopters may also be present. This isn’t routine. The timing, immediately following Trump’s Venezuela operation, raises urgent questions about what Britain is facilitating from our soil.

Ed Davey has rightly described Nicolás Maduro as “a brutal and illegitimate dictator” – but the Liberal Democrat leader also warned that “unlawful attacks jeopardise safety for all.” That second part is crucial. Trump’s pattern of unauthorised military strikes, over 626 in his first year back in office, now includes capturing a foreign head of state and bombing Iranian nuclear facilities. Now, US forces are staging from British soil for what appears to be their next operation: boarding a Russian-flagged oil tanker in the North Atlantic.

The Marinera is part of a shadow fleet transporting sanctioned oil. Intelligence suggests Venezuelan officials discussed placing armed personnel and air defence systems on tankers. This isn’t routine; it’s a potential armed confrontation with a Russian-flagged vessel that could spark US-Russia military conflict, staged from UK bases.

Trump’s dangerous pattern

This buildup follows an established pattern. Similar deployments from Fort Campbell preceded Venezuela. The Trump administration has conducted over 626 airstrikes in one year, with no Congressional notification, no alliance consultation, and no plan for consequences. The Venezuela operation exemplifies this: a regime change operation disguised as an arrest warrant, while his administration told Congress it wasn’t about regime change.

Starmer’s response has been inadequate. The UK offers only “cautious” reactions while providing infrastructure and diplomatic cover, with no real veto or meaningful consultation.

The risks are immediate. If this tanker boarding becomes violent, if Russian crew members are killed, we face a US-Russia confrontation. Russia will claim piracy and may retaliate with cyber attacks or naval harassment. Because operations launch from British bases, we become implicated in an escalation we neither chose nor control.

Trump’s contempt for the democratic process is clear. When he bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities, only Republicans received advance notice. For Venezuela, no lawmakers were notified. Why would Britain expect better treatment than America’s own Congress?

Where Liberal Democrats stand

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Tanya Park

Why Liberal Democrats need a principled position on Farm Inheritance Tax

By Tanya Park | Sat 27th December 2025 - 8:55 am

Labour’s capitulation this week- raising the Agricultural Property Relief threshold from £1 million to £2.5 million after fourteen months of pressure – reveals the weakness of defending arbitrary numbers rather than principles.

This should matter to Liberal Democrats. We’ve opposed Labour’s reforms without offering an alternative. “Scrap the tax” isn’t liberal – it’s opposing for opposition’s sake. We’re ceding ground to Labour’s incoherent incrementalism and Conservative privilege defence.

The opportunity Labour has created

Labour doesn’t know what problem they’re solving. The threshold they inherited was unlimited. They proposed £1 million. Now it’s £2.5 million. They claim to protect “ordinary family farms” while targeting “the wealthy” – but can’t explain why the right number changed by 150%.

This creates space for Liberal Democrats to articulate principled reform. Not “tax more” or “tax less,” but “tax the right things for the right reasons.”

What we should be arguing

The real conflict isn’t “protect farmers versus raise revenue.” It’s tax dodgers versus working farmers.

Current Agricultural Property Relief gives 100% inheritance tax exemption to all agricultural land – whether farmed or held as a tax shelter. Wealthy investors buy farmland to save 40% on inheritance tax, inflating land prices and locking out genuine farmers.

A liberal approach distinguishes between productive farming and passive wealth. Tie relief to behaviour (actual farming), not asset class (land ownership). The mechanism: link inheritance tax relief to the percentage of income from farming. Work the land, pay nothing. Use it as a tax shelter, pay tax.

This protects working farmers better than Labour’s threshold – someone earning their living from agriculture pays nothing regardless of land value. And it removes the tax shelter incentive driving unaffordable land prices.

Why this matters for Liberal Democrats

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Tanya Park

The Peggie case and the problem of shadow funding

By Tanya Park | Wed 10th December 2025 - 11:54 am

An employment tribunal recently dismissed almost all claims in the closely-watched Peggie v Fife Health Board case. Sandie Peggie, a nurse with gender-critical beliefs, sued her employer over its policy allowing a trans woman doctor to use the female changing room. The tribunal found no direct discrimination, no indirect discrimination, and no victimisation. Only one narrow procedural claim succeeded.

For many, this reads as vindication of trans-inclusive policies. But there’s a bigger story liberals need to understand. This case is part of a coordinated litigation campaign operating largely in the shadows, bankrolled by wealthy individuals and organisations whose funding remains deliberately opaque.

Who paid for Sandie Peggie’s legal representation? We don’t know. What other similar cases are they funding? Whether this is an isolated grievance or a test case in a broader strategy? We don’t know. That’s precisely the problem.

Over the past two years, employment tribunals have seen a forty-fold increase in gender-critical belief discrimination cases. Multiple NHS trusts faced legal action within just three months, the Girl Guides received a pre-action letter threatening litigation over their trans-inclusive policies, and the pattern continues to accelerate. The strategy works even without courtroom victories – both the Girl Guides and the Women’s Institute recently withdrew trans-inclusive policies in the face of legal threats, capitulating before cases even reached tribunal.

Beyond the direct policy changes, the litigation serves another purpose: media attention. Each case – win, lose, or settle – generates headlines positioning trans-inclusive policies as legally risky and politically contested. The public controversy itself becomes the victory, shaping discourse and institutional behaviour far beyond any single courtroom.

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