Author Archives: Tony Paterson

Tony Paterson

BBC : How to blame the Conservatives for Trump’s $10bn damages claim 

By Tony Paterson | Sat 20th December 2025 - 9:01 pm

We should publicly blame the Conservative Party for its role in ousting Tim Davie as the BBC’s Director-General, and for President Donald Trump’s $10bn lawsuit. The Party has insufficient grounds for `looking the other way’.

Our Party Leader Ed Davey’s `Guardian’ article of 10 November was superb. 

His demand that Sir Robbie Gibb resign from the BBC Board was well focused. Even after Gibb had been exposed to many people who didn’t realise his power within the BBC, shining the spotlight on him was right.

I have been monitoring Gibb for the last couple of years, after my attention had been drawn to the harm he was causing as a `grey eminence’ inside the BBC who had accumulated huge power.

Our Party Leader was able, in his article, to strike a powerful blow for BBC independence (which many voters believe in as passionately as we do).  

Lib Dem Shadow Culture Secretary Anna Sabine MP echoed this perfectly, as reported in the Guardian by Media Editor Michael Savage published on or around the next day.

Now we can teach the Conservative Party a bigger lesson while striking another powerful blow ourselves for the independence of BBC journalists.

The thin fence that they have ducked behind consists of the fact that, technically, the Director-General is appointed by the Executive, consisting of BBC Board Members.

How then can the Conservative Party still be collectively blamed for the debacle which led to Tim Davie’s resignation as Director-General on 9 November whose resignation, alongside Deborah Furness’s, was seen as `cauterising the wound’?

The three figures most clearly involved in the conflagration which led to this were all Conservatives. The Party had so engineered the set-up within the BBC that it was decided that only a Conservative should be Director-General.

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Tony Paterson

Keep calm and carry on urgently re-arming 

By Tony Paterson | Wed 17th September 2025 - 1:30 pm

Is our Party facing up better than others to the high cost of the UK re-arming? l have recently seen senior Lib  Dems whom I rate highly, saying (in their own words but probably echoing the similar thoughts of many senior Lib Dem colleagues) :-

 ‘We support the aim, demanded by Donald Trump, of spending 3.5% of our GDP on defence, with an additional 1.5% on ancillary spending – but that is as long as we can have until 2035 to achieve this – and as long as we won’t be required to reduce spending on the NHS or welfare as a result.”

You can see where they’re coming from with this mindset (shared by many Labour MPs), not only because the latter are our two cherished spending priorities but also because everyone knows that whichever Party sticks its head above the parapet first over the cost of re-arming, is likely, except in the long term, to get its head shot off by voters.

This is because (for the same reason) voters haven’t been prepared yet. Living in a nationwide bubble of self-deception is more comfortable, with leaders and led relying on each other’s lack of realism.

The best way round ‘ostrich’ thinking on this supremely important issue is for:

  1. The Lib Dems to say to Keir Starmer, privately : “lf you tell the voters the truth” , “we will then openly back you up and not cheaply and cynically undermine you over your courageous stand.”
  2. Us to urge Labour, in the same confidential communication, to coordinate with EU Governments about ‘coming out’ with their own voters, saying the same thing to them at the same time as we and Labour proclaim it in the UK.

George Cunningham, ex-Army Officer and one of our Party’s most persuasive spokespeople on the threat posed by Putin to Western Europe, is right to have been  saying, for some time now that we have to plug whatever gaps in our defence we can by around 2027. 

Expecting Putin to give NATO until 2035 is, as recognised by many in Liberal Democrat Friends of Ukraine (LDFoU) and our sister Party `Affiliated Organisation’ (AO) Liberal Democrat Friends of the Armed Forces, a pipedream. 

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Tony Paterson

Confront Farage – or do our own thing?

By Tony Paterson | Tue 13th May 2025 - 12:00 pm

Embed from Getty Images

A lively debate is going on in our local borough party about how the Lib Dems should deal with the Tories and Nigel Farage, following Reform UK’s big advances in the Elections held on 1 May.

One view, held by some senior figures whom I respect, and who know how to win elections, is that it is important not to amplify your opponent’s message. They consider the first rule of politics to be `Never allow yourself to be lured on to your opponent’s territory.’.

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Tony Paterson

Let Lib Dems, not Farage, “Reform UK”

By Tony Paterson | Wed 19th March 2025 - 11:55 am

At this time of crisis, the Lib Dems must seize back the `Reform UK’ initiative from Nigel Farage and his ramshackle party. Freedom is at stake.

Voting intentions (polling data from 10 March) are 15% for the Lib Dems and 23% for Reform UK (from 11% and 25% last December). Here’s how to build on this poll hike.

Farage’s stated belief in electoral reform contains an inherent contradiction: while he ostensibly champions PR, his dream of being PM in 2029 hinges on First Past The Post being maintained.      

To be recognised as the real party of reform, the Lib Dems must recapture the initiative. First, use PR as a protest vehicle for appealing to voters disenchanted with a system which gave 2/3 of seats to a party with only 1/3 of the votes. 

Secondly, keep flagging up Farage’s championing of Putin during the 2024 GE campaign, when, pointing to NATO’s and the EU’s eastward expansion, he claimed that ‘we provoked this war’. Already in 2014, in an interview with GQ magazine, Farage had named Putin as the world leader he most admired. And let’s not forget his many appearances on Russia Today, at least three of them after Putin invaded Crimea in 2014.

But more recently, Farage has been presenting himself as the voice of moderation within his party. We must highlight Farage’s volatility, contrasted with our consistent liberalism.

Ed Davey, who is stalwartly supporting Ukraine, has proposed large increases in our defence spending as a percentage of GDP and, over the past few weeks, has used many of his PMQs to back Ukraine, is best placed to challenge Reform UK over UK military reform. Farage’s well publicised association with Trump makes it hard for him to follow suit. Polling data shows how deeply split Reform voters are over whether their party would do better with or without Farage.

World War III, using modern means of warfare to undermine Western freedom and democracy, has already begun. (See Economist `Want to stop a third world war?’, 30.5.24). Warfare today is hybrid: insidious, dangerous, but not always obvious. It includes ‘grey zone’ warfare: ‘salami-slicing’ (as Putin did to Crimea in 2014, severing it from Ukraine while causing little Western reaction), cyber warfare, sabotaging crucial infrastructure, etc. 

Ideologically, the strategy involves harnessing populism to build up far-right parties across Europe, including in the UK. How can we jolt the country as a whole into recognising that we, on the other hand, stand for freedom and democracy?  

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Tony Paterson

Love is not enough

By Tony Paterson | Mon 23rd December 2024 - 9:28 am

`Love is Enough’ is a wonderful song. Well done to Ed Davey and the Bath Philharmonia Young Carers Choir on having targeted the target Christmas  Number 1 spot. As a sentiment, though, it only reflects one side of the essential components that make us who we are as a political movement and segment of British society.  

At Party Conference in Bournemouth in 2023, I helped found a new Affiliated Organisation called Liberal Democrat Friends of Ukraine, focusing primarily on the bellicose military objective of helping Ukraine to defend itself against Putin’s aggression. Humanitarian support and reconstruction aid are our other priorities. It was the right thing to do – for Ukraine but also for Britain.

That Conference in September 2023 passed a belligerent motion urging the Government, `in defence of liberal values’, to:-

Do all it realistically can, in view of Putin’s brazen actions, to help arm Ukraine, including with longer-range precision weapons,…. to defeat Russia. Continue to strengthen the supply of British arms and ammunition to Ukraine… 

Fantastic. Lib Dem Friends of Uraine works closely with sister AOs like the Armed Forces and Hong Kong. We are about values. Membership of Lib Dem Friends of Ukraine alone has surged to about 350, much of it since Brighton 2024. So many Party members care about this.

Standing back from the `Peace Dividend’ mindset that has catastrophically got us, since 1989, to where, militarily, we are now, we can see how Utopian the daydream was.

Liberal, advanced democracies, including ours, have slid into a vicious circle of 1939 ostrich groupthink.

All parties seem to think that voters would question whoever was honest enough to spell out the substantially higher share of GDP that would be needed to re-arm, and adequately defend Ukraine and ourselves.

Responding to this, they collectively encouraged voters to believe that there was no danger – leaving the UK insufficiently capable, apart from our excellent at sea nuclear deterrent.

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