Author Archives: Victoria Collins MP

Victoria Collins MP

Victoria Collins MP writes.. The ask that changes everything

By Victoria Collins MP | Fri 18th September 2026 - 4:45 pm

There’s a moment every candidate remembers. Not the selection meeting, not the count on election night but the moment before when someone else believed in you, when someone asked you to stand. For most of us, we’d never have got there on our own. Someone else saw it first.

That’s the thread I kept coming back to recently, when the Joint Candidates Sub Committee brought together our Diversity Affiliated Organisations and Campaign Groups to talk about candidates. We heard a lot of honest, thoughtful feedback about our approvals and selection process – what’s working well, and where we must keep improving.

For me, this isn’t an abstract policy discussion on how we get more diverse candidates approved, selected and elected. It’s personal.

The new Candidates team have done a fantastic job of improving candidate onboarding and setting up a referral programme, we well as working on candidate support. Now, we need you.

Standing for Parliament didn’t feel like something for people like me. I only made it through because people in organisations like Chinese East and South East Asian (CESEA), the Campaign for Gender Balance and the Stellar Programme backed me with time, with mentoring, and with the money I didn’t have. Take any one of those away and I’m not writing this as an MP. I went from delivering leaflets to becoming the 656th woman ever elected to this Parliament, and our party’s first MP of East and South East Asian origin. That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because people and programmes chose to invest in me.

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Victoria Collins MP

Fighting for Britain’s soul and bursting the Westminster bubble

By Victoria Collins MP | Tue 28th October 2025 - 2:00 pm

Take a moment and imagine at the next General Election, the closing polls come in.

That ping comes through on your phone, the announcement comes up on the TV, the person next to you turns and says “Reform is winning….the exit polls look like tomorrow we’ll have Nigel Farage as our Prime Minister…”.

Then, over the next few years a Reform government takes away the rights and freedoms of millions up and down our country in a toxic wave of populism.

We know sadly the polls show this is very possible but we know it’s not inevitable.

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Victoria Collins MP

Growing our Movement: A vision for Liberal Democrat renewal

By Victoria Collins MP | Thu 23rd October 2025 - 11:55 am

Editor’s Note: In November party members will be voting to elect our next Party President. At Lib Dem Voice we welcome posts from each of the candidates – one to launch their candidature plus a maximum of one per week during the actual campaign.

The news that our membership has halved in five years, is not simply a statistic to be dismissed or explained away, it’s a call to action. As Liberal Democrats, we must confront this reality with both honesty and determination.

It’s been at the heart of my campaign as Vice President, because if we’re going to improve diverse representation we must fix engagement. We need to start at our grassroots. 

Let me be clear: this is not about diminishing the extraordinary achievements of our parliamentary team or our incredible councillors. Our 72 MPs and thousands of councillors are delivering real change in communities across the UK, holding this government to account and winning on key campaigns from justice to the environment. But electoral success and organisational vitality don’t always go hand in hand. We can celebrate our electoral gains whilst acknowledging that our membership base requires urgent renewal.

The challenge before us is fundamental. As we’ve rebuilt our parliament party and council base, we’ve treated membership growth as an administrative afterthought rather than the lifeblood of our movement. We’ve assumed that electoral victories would automatically translate into organisational strength. The numbers tell us otherwise. Whilst we’ve been focused,  rightly, on winning seats, we’ve inadvertently allowed our grassroots foundations to weaken.

A thriving membership base is our connection to communities, and our source of renewal. The drop speaks to a hunger for authentic political engagement, for movements that feel genuinely participatory rather than transactional. Many people are seeking parties that offer meaningful involvement, not just occasional requests for donations or signatures on petitions.

As Vice President, I would implement a comprehensive renewal strategy built on three interconnected pillars.

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Victoria Collins MP

Fewer committees, more diversity – why I’m backing F10

By Victoria Collins MP | Sun 16th March 2025 - 10:28 am

I want us – as Liberal Democrats – to select great candidates, improve diversity in the party and empower our local parties to elect the best candidates to represent them. That’s why I’m backing motion F10 at conference – the one that seeks to implement the recommendations of the General Election Review around Westminster candidates. 

I am doing so for two reasons:

  • By reducing three committees to one it makes it easier to address the problems in our current candidates system;
  • By creating a place on the committee for the Vice President responsible for increasing engagement with ethnic minority communities, candidate diversity finally becomes a keystone in our Westminster candidate system.

Now, I am sure many in the party can give you verbatim – in probably the most intricate of detail – the constitutional intricacies and implications of the motion. However, I wanted to share with you my personal story of my journey to becoming a candidate and how this has led me to strongly support real reform of our candidates system.

From the top, I wish to say that none of this is criticism of individuals involved in the process. This is criticism of the process itself that volunteers spend hours dedicating their time to administer and deliver. I am truly grateful to them for this, but I want the system -those volunteers have to work with -to be better for them and for candidates.

I am in the incredible position of writing this post as the first Liberal Democrat MP of East and South East Asian origin, and the first MP for the newly formed seat of Harpenden and Berkhamsted. When my mother arrived from Malaysia 50 years ago, I don’t think she could have imagined that such a thing was possible. And yet here I am.  

Becoming a candidate is not easy. I should quickly add that nor should it be. It is right that we are put through our paces. But becoming a candidate shouldn’t be made harder by the inadequacies of our own systems and processes, inadequacies which frankly stand in the way of us improving our candidate diversity. 

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