Category Archives: Op-eds

Tom Arms

Observations of an ex pat: UN or League of Nations

By Tom Arms | Sat 14th November 2026 - 10:30 am

The tenure of António Guterres as Secretary-Geeneral of the United Nations ends on the last day of this year. His successor will inherit an organisation struggling to maintain its relevance in a world increasingly divided by war, nationalism and great-power rivalry.

Guterres is a former Portuguese prime minister and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, His decade at the helm has been marked by the UN becoming increasingly irrelevant as an instrument for resolving international conflicts.

His critics argue that Guterres has been too cautious, too willing to accommodate power and ineffective in confronting international aggression. It has, in short, become less like the UN of 1947 and more like the League of Nations of the 1930s.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was a particularly serious test. As a permanent member of the Security Council, Russia has a veto over its decisions. Guterres struggled to influence Moscow or bring the conflict to an end.

The war in Gaza was anotheer challenge. Guterres has repeatedly condemned attacks on civilians, called for humanitarian access and demanded ceasefires. However, he has been unable to secure a lasting political settlement or prevent the humanitarian catastrophe. His critics argue that his statements have not been matched by sufficient diplomatic influence.

Then there is Sudan. The devastating civil war has continued despite international diplomatic efforts, while competing foreign interests have complicated attempts to secure peace.

It would be unfair to attribute all these failures to Guterres. The Secretary-General does not command an independent military force or possess the authority to overrule sovereign governments. The Security Council, particularly its five permanent members, ultimately determines what action the organisation can take. Guterres has also championed climate change, humanitarian assistance and gender equality, and achieved gender parity in the UN’s senior leadership team.

A big part of Guterres’s problems can be laid at the door of Donald Trump. The US president has repeatedly and loudly made clear his dislike of the UN. The UN represents international law. Trump flouts the law in pursuit of the philosophy of might is right.

Trump has withdrawn the UN from several UN institutions. In September he paid UD $827 million towards the UN budget. But America still owes $1.312 billion. The United Nations relies on contributions from its member states to pay for peacekeeping operations and other activities. Because of the dominance of the US economy, America is assessed at 22 percent of the UN’s budget. Trump’s failure to pay America’s fair share has brought the organisations to the brink of financial and political collapse and left Guterres’s successor with a major headache.

There is also the question of institutional reform. The Security Council still reflects the balance of power that existed at the end of the Second World War. Its five permanent members – the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France – enjoy veto powers denied to the other ten members.

Countries such as India, Brazil, Japan and Germany argue that the Council should be expanded to reflect today’s economic and political realities. African countries also want permanent representation. However, agreement on reform remains elusive because the existing permanent members are reluctant to surrender their privileges.

So, who is likely to succeed to what has increasingly become a diplomatic poison chalice. As of this week, eight candidates remain in the running. Five are women, raising the possibility that the UN could appoint its first female Secretary-General since its foundation in 1945.

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Theo Brown

Reflections on the Hungarian Election

By Theo Brown | Fri 13th November 2026 - 10:21 am

We often struggle to comprehend issues beyond saying we can only do X and can’t do Y. This isn’t just struggles about what policy we talk about, but a whole series of issues, being more Left or Right, defending held seats to building more. We forget that we have many, many facets, and that they can get bigger if we think bigger; becoming that big tent, being a movement, being a complicated, growing party.

But in April 2026, the Hungarians successfully proved that you can in fact have your campaign cake and eat it, under much harsher, first-past-the-post-on-steroids conditions, with a hugely well organised, well funded, nay, international, Far-Right coalition against them. TISZA under Magyar Peter managed to mobilise everyone from the centre right to the far left to win a historic 2/3rds majority from nothing, and hold that level of popularity as I write. When we put this into perspective, our hurdles are slightly smaller.

I have listed a series of strategies that the Hungarian TISZA Party, with Magyar Peter, successfully pulled off. I hope these lessons help build the ability to take advantage of all the skills and people our party not only has, but could have, with broader horizons.

The Cost of Living, Health Care, and Europe, three things which we’ve run on in the past were central to the TISZA message. It also poked big holes in their opposition’s government style and strategy, whilst being shamelessly populist and implementable. They also did stunts (a winter heating support campaign) which was not only wildly successful but built a fantastic narrative about a hands-on, proactive, caring leadership willing to break the mould.

Anti-Corruption. Peter ruthlessly drove home a campaign on a clean-up-politics message. He also used himself and his former Fidez (that’s the party of Orban), links, to make himself more, not less, credible, poacher-turned-gamekeeper, as were many of his team, without any reservations about former ties or record.

Tisza Islands. A federalised party model maxing out its volunteer networks and membership with neighbourhood level teams designed to build community politics and redeploy activists into key target areas from across the country. It also allowed everyone from the hyper-political, to celebrities, to the average joe to participate in activist activities, in or out of house. There were also a lot of third-party(non-party political) organisations around that facilitated the direction TISZA was going that TISZA was intuitively aware of.

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Blaise Baquiche

How to stop Labour stealing our lunch on Europe

By Blaise Baquiche | Thu 12th November 2026 - 4:52 pm

By trying to ‘out-Europe’ us, Burnham will fall into a trap on immigration.

 

At the last general election, hustings for the Chelsea & Fulham seat were like no other. Eventual Labour winner Ben Coleman, incumbent Tory minister Greg Hands and I were all trying to ‘out-Europe’ each other on a church stage, by declaring our commitment to the Remain campaign eight years earlier.

This tripartite agreement on the calamity of Brexit made sense in Europhile central London, just off the King’s Road. But in Starmer’s successful McSweeneyist campaign, the Labour red lines of no to Rejoin, let alone free movement or the single market were critical to winning back the Red Wall lost to the Tories.

How shocking two years later under Burnham it’s Labour party policy to ‘re-open the debate’ on EU free movement. Some strategists including Mark Pack, believe this is a ploy for the PM to win over Lib Dem voters still devastated by Brexit and passionately in favour of rejoining.

With Burnham unveiling trade deals with the EU potentially worth billions, voices from senior Labour MPs to Rejoin are growing louder. Rachel Reeves and Emily Thornberry claim ‘Full-on Rejoin’ could boost our anaemic growth by reversing the 6% hit on GDP caused by Brexit.

Now that the Greens are in freefall after the vociferous reaction to the passing of their ‘Zionism is Racism’ motion, Labour see their chance to ‘unite the left’ ahead of a snap election, win over Greens and steal our lunch by going further on Europe than the passionately pro-European Liberal Democrats.

Our current policy is not to rejoin the EU in its entirety, but rather just rejoin the single market and the customs union. Justifications at Conference for not simply rejoining ranged from ‘it’s too politically toxic’, to ‘it’s not democratic’ and ‘we’ve learned our lessons from Jo Swinson in 2019’.

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The Voice

Mississippi: Historic change has come at last

By The Voice | Thu 12th November 2026 - 11:00 am

Embed from Getty Images

The news last week from the US Mid-term elections has been utterly seismic, as noted by Caron here.

But something else really big has happened which deserves separate focus.

While the party poppers were being swept up from the Democrat celebrations, officials in Mississippi were quietly and labouriously sifting through ballot papers. The vote for the state-wide US Senate post was too close to call. A real nail-biter.

NAACP’s* Legal Defense Fund website takes up the story:

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Cody Butler

The only Tory MP to join the SDP

By Cody Butler | Wed 11th November 2026 - 12:44 pm

British politics has never been short of defectors. It has, however, been rather less well supplied with defectors whose principles survived the journey. Christopher Brocklebank-Fowler was one of the exceptions. A Conservative MP who crossed the floor to join the SDP, subsequently embraced the Liberal Democrats and eventually found his way into Tony Blair’s Labour Party, he was a political traveller of unusual range.

As the One Nation Liberals prepare to publish our founding pamphlet, Beyond the Right, his career challenges the increasingly tedious assumption that One Nation politics is the proprietary invention …

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Owen Driscoll

A Proposed Alternative to Coalition: The Reserved Time Confidence Agreement

By Owen Driscoll | Mon 9th November 2026 - 3:41 pm

The prospect of another hung parliament is higher than it has been for years. For Liberal Democrats that raises a familiar question: how do we maximise our influence without repeating the electoral damage of 2010–15?

Full coalition is one answer. It is not the only one. I want to set out a competing model: the Reserved Time Confidence Agreement.

How it works

Under a Reserved Time Confidence Agreement a larger party forms a single-party government. A smaller party (or parties) agrees to support that government on all confidence motions and on supply. In return it receives two things:

1. Thirty reserved legislative days each session.

On these days the supporting party controls the agenda. Both parties in the agreement are explicitly free to seek votes from any other party in the House in order to pass measures that stick as closely as possible to their own manifestos. The supporting party may therefore build majorities with the official opposition or with other parties on issues where the senior partner is unwilling to move. Equally, the senior partner may use its own time, or seek support from others, to advance its priorities. If the two parties are closer to each other than to anyone else, they will often find it easiest to use the reserved days for joint business. The point of the rule is to maximise each party’s ability to deliver what it promised voters, rather than forcing a lowest-common-denominator programme.

2. A mutual veto on early elections.

After each general election the House elects two “election callers” by open ballot. Joint tickets are proposed by the Speaker on the advice of the parties. If no ticket secures a majority after five attempts, the positions default to the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. An early dissolution requires the agreement of both. In a majority government this is effectively the Prime Minister plus a colleague. In a hung parliament it is normally the two party leaders who are keeping the government in office. Neither can force an election on the other.

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Charles Quinn

ALDC by-election report – 5 November

By Charles Quinn | Sun 8th November 2026 - 12:26 pm

ALDC by-election report – 5 November 2026

This week there was just one principal authority by-election. The Liberal Democrats were defending the seat of Penn Hill on Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council. 

An eight-way contest in a seat that was Conservative until 2023, in which all major parties stood, makes a useful test of how our councillors in power are holding up against both a Conservative comeback and the challenge from Reform UK. The answer in BCP was emphatic!

Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole, Penn Hill – 5 November 2026

The by-election was triggered by the resignation of Liberal Democrat councillor Jo Clements, who was first elected in 2023. Penn Hill is an affluent, largely owner-occupied suburb of Lower Parkstone in Poole, and sits in the Poole parliamentary constituency.

In 2023 the Liberal Democrats took both seats, with Jo Clements topping the poll on 1,445 votes as part of the wave that saw the party gain 15 seats and become by far the largest group on the council.

A by-election in a council-held ward, mid-term, at a time of real financial pressure on local government, is exactly the kind of contest where the defending party might find it tough. The field was also crowded – eight candidates stood.

Huge congratulations to Cllr Amanda Jellicoe and the local Lib Dem team on a very convincing hold. Amanda took 43.6% of the vote, up 0.9%, and beat the second -placed Conservatives by 514 votes. The Conservatives barely moved (+1%), so there is no sign of a Tory recovery in a ward they held for decades. Reform UK’s 17.8% came from a former local Conservative councillor and still left them a distant third. Our share also held up even though four new candidates came into the field. Labour and the Greens were both squeezed hard and lost over 6% of their 2023 vote. 

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Tom Arms

Tom Arms’ World Review

By Tom Arms | Sun 8th November 2026 - 10:30 am

Israel

The Arab parties within Israel are  now the kingmakers in the country’s parliament. They have power, but the tale of the Israeli Palestinians has been a long and bitter battle to deny them representation.

For the first 18 years of modern Israel’s existence, the Palestinians remaining in the new state’s borders were subject to military rule. Villages were razed. Palestinians were penned in camps behind barbed wire. There were sporadic massacres.

Gradually, however, the Palestinians clawed back their rights and they learned to use those rights to protect and advance their cause. Rather than fight the system they decided to work within it. Political parties were formed. They learned to speak Hebrew. Their children went to university. Palestinians were elected to the Knesset. Some even became cabinet ministers—albeit short-lived ones.

The Palestinian community became particularly dominant within Israel’s medical community. A quarter of the country’s doctors are of Palestinian origin.

But prejudices and their consequences remain. Israel’s rail network largely bypasses Arab towns. There is a big gap in public spending between Jewish and Arab schools and municipalities. There are recurring attempts by the right-wing Jewish  parties to deny the vote to the Arab population of two million.

A crime wave driven by young people bereft of opportunities has engulfed Arab towns and villages. Far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has responded by reducing police protection and turning a blind eye to the activities of far-right Jewish gangs. During the Gaza War, Israeli Arabs were demonised as fifth columnists.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has broadly hinted that he wants to move Jewish settlements into the Arab communities. A sort of Israeli gerrymandering that would change the political demographics.

In the past, Israeli Arabs have shrugged their shoulders, muttered “whatever” under their breaths and got on with life as best they could. They rarely bothered to vote. Their vote counted for little because 80 percent of the population voted against their interests.

But then came Benjamin Netanyahu’s latest Likud government supported by the far-right ultra-Orthodox parties. Likud’s persistent threats to their very existence brought Arab Israelis out en masse. Nearly 80 percent voted to elect 19 Arab politicians to the Knesset. Neither Netanyahu’s coalition  with 53 elected members nor the opposition coalition led by Gadi Eisenkot (48 members) has the 61 Knesset members needed to form a majority. The balance of power is held by the Arabs.

Netanyahu’s first move was to employ a Trumpian tactic and declare that the Arabs had been bankrolled by Qatar. How else, he argued, could they have turned out nearly 80 percent of the vote. This argument was rejected earlier this week by President Isaac Herzog.

Then on Friday, the two Arab parties—Ra’am or the United Arab List, led by Mansour Abbas and Hadresh or the Joint List led by Yousef Jabareen—announced that they are recommending to President Herzog that Eisenkot be asked to form the next Israeli government.

This does mean, however, that Eisenkot’s opposition group  and the Arabs have agreed to form a coalition government. Eisenkot has demanded that if the Arabs want to join  his government they have to formally denounce Hamas as a terrorist organisation and accept Israel as the Jewish state. Both issues are long-standing  sticking points with both Arab coalitions.

But fear of another Likud government drove Arab voters to the polls and could drive their representatives to compromise. The two Arab coalitions could, for instance, agree to support an Eisenkot  government on an issue by issue basis without committing to joining the government. If that happens it is bye-bye Bibi.

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Tom Arms

Observations of an Expat: Post Election Worries

By Tom Arms | Sat 7th November 2026 - 9:27 am

The confetti has settled, the champagne is flat and the celebratory balloons have floated to the ground. The midterm elections are over. MAGA and Trump have been well and truly trounced.

Now is the time to worry about what Donald J. Trump will do in the next two months while he still has a sycophantic Republican Congress for the next two months—especially in Iran.

The new Democrat-controlled Congress does not start business until January 3rd. One  of its first orders of business will be to start circumscribing the president’s war-making capabilities. The Constitution gives Trump considerable leeway in foreign and defence policy, but Congress still has the power of the purse and the 1973 War Powers Act. Neither option was pursued by the Republican Congress.

On 28 October—a week  before the midterms– there was a classified briefing at the White House on the Iran War. Among those attending was Democratic Senator Chris Murphy from the Foreign Relations Committee. The following day he said: “Trump is… planning to restart the war with Iran after the election. Some of us have been briefed on the war plan. And while I cannot disclose any elements, I can say this plan is insane.”

Just how insane is “insane” has been a matter of intense speculation. Tucker Carlson, Trump’s former Fox News mouthpiece who broke with the president over the Iran War, claimed that he had inside information that Trump was considering dropping a nuclear bomb on Iran. He said that the president would make his final decision the weekend after the midterms and the target would be Pickaxe Mountain where the bulk of Iran’s nuclear enrichment remains safe under 300 feet of granite.

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Rupinder Singh

How Liberal Democrats can ride Britain’s youth wave on the pro-EU shift

By Rupinder Singh | Fri 6th November 2026 - 5:58 pm

In the exit polls, 73% of American 18- to 29-year-olds backed Democrats. Not a freak result but rather confirmation of an emerging global pattern – after nearly two years of well-organised student protests, Serbia’s Student List took 140 of 250 seats in October and almost two-thirds of Hungary’s under-30s backed the winning party, Tisza, in pre-election polling, whilst in Brazil, a self-organised ‘Lula’s army’ of young voters helped the 80-year-old incumbent to a come-from-behind win. India’s Cockroach Janta Party, named after a Chief Justice’s jibe at activist unemployed youth, has drawn millions of young Indian followers online, helped force out the education minister, now backs calls for the Chief Election Commissioner to resign and is fast emerging as the main potential pressure group cum potential political force against PM Modi, echoing similar youth-driven upheavals in Nepal (where an ex-rapper is now PM) and in Bangladesh.

The evidence of the cost of Brexit is now clear: the NBER estimates Brexit cut UK GDP by 6–8% by 2025, as well as productivity and employment (each 3–4%), on top of the loss of youth and student exchanges. Closer trade and economic ties (if not full convergence & alignment in the jargon) would reverse the picture – lift growth, investment and employment, and in turn ease public finances.

PM Burnham recognises this and that public opinion has shifted, and has left open the fight in the next election over rejoining/Customs Union with the EU.

The Lib Dems can catalyse this shift and differentiate ourselves from Labour (and the Greens on fiscal honesty) by tying into strong EU support among young people. More in Common finds 60% of 18- to 28-year-olds would vote to rejoin, against 9% who would stay out. Ipsos has 68% of 18- to 34-year-olds backing rejoining. Interestingly, ECFR finds 66% of voters, including 45% of Leave voters, would accept free movement. The bill now in the Lords would add 16- and 17-year-olds to the electorate (akin to 3–4% of the enlarged electorate) – a block one would expect to further support a pro-EU, pro-growth and pro-employment shift.

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Tony Vickers

Just growth by lowering deadweight losses through tax

By Tony Vickers | Fri 6th November 2026 - 10:04 am

Like other “advanced economies”, we suffer “deadweight loss” from dysfunctional taxes. Why, when we could get up to 30% more economic growth from tax revenue by taxing wealth extractors, such as landowners, rather than wealth creators: workers and entrepreneurs?

Deadweight Burden is real and now under review by the Labour Government—a potential game changer for sustainable growth. HM Treasury’s Marginal Cost of Public Funds (MCPF) officially acknowledges that 30p in every pound allocated to government capital projects is “lost” through tax inefficiencies. Just 15 years ago, I was told Treasury estimated 20%. No wonder it’s under review.

Treasury does not spell out these “inefficiencies”, citing “sensitivities”. Academic studies suggest they include tackling evasion, collection and administration costs—often borne by businesses—and opportunities lost when taxes divert money from wages, investment and output. Economists also call them “welfare costs”, a benign-sounding term. Stamp Duty Land Tax (SDLT) is an egregious example: its admitted 12% deadweight loss reflects discouraged housing efficiency and labour mobility.

One tax is accepted as “welfare neutral”, with no Deadweight Burden: the Land Value Tax (LVT) on the annual rental value of land or other fixed natural capital. Land is used renewably, but access rights belong to landowners, who do not use it simply by owning it. The tax cannot be avoided or reduce productive land use; it encourages sites’ “highest and best use” within a planning system that largely sets land values.

Gradually shifting taxes off earned income and business profits would grow the economy. By one estimate, each pound shifted would generate £16 of economic growth.

Liberal Democrats have long supported this reform. Some is already Party policy, approved by Conference but rarely used in campaigning. ALTER (Action for Land Taxation & Economic Reform) has summarised the policy and proposed next steps.

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Massimo Ricciuti

Local democracy should not be an excuse to stop building homes

By Massimo Ricciuti | Thu 5th November 2026 - 11:51 am

Britain needs more homes. But why should building them require a choice between local democracy and individual freedom?

Bolton offers a revealing example. From 31 October, new national rules in England require planning officers to decide certain applications, including qualifying schemes of up to nine homes on small sites. Larger or more contentious proposals can still go before elected councillors, subject to the rules. Bolton’s council rejected the constitutional changes in October and has scheduled another vote for 10 November. It warns that, until the matter is resolved, it cannot lawfully determine planning applications.

That is a remarkable result: a reform intended to speed up decisions has, at least temporarily, threatened to stop them altogether.

For Liberal Democrats, local democracy matters. It should. Decisions affecting a community ought not to be casually removed from elected representatives. Yet we should resist the temptation to confuse the power to obstruct with the right to govern.

A planning committee is not necessarily a guardian of liberty merely because its members are elected. Nor does handing applications to professional officers magically liberalise the housing market. Centralisation is not the same as liberalisation.

The deeper question is whether people are free to build homes where others want to live. Too often, existing residents can organise against development while future residents — young workers, families and people priced out of an area — have no vote in that neighbourhood. Their absence makes obstruction politically cheap.

I write from Italy, where local planning controls can be extensive and debates about historic centres frequently turn into arguments over who may use private property, and for what. Naples is a vivid reminder that protecting a city’s character and protecting every restriction on its housing market are not the same thing.

None of this means abandoning safeguards for infrastructure, safety or the environment. It means asking whether a rule addresses a real harm or simply prevents someone else from having a home.

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Mark Corner

The need for a nationally relevant message

By Mark Corner | Wed 4th November 2026 - 5:58 pm

Caron Lindsay’s article discussing Ed Davey’s recent interview on Sky News makes an important point. It’s true that as Ed says the Lib Dems have increased their representation in Parliament from less than a dozen to 72 MPs. It’s true that they run more councils now than do the Conservatives. But it’s also true that their success hangs on the Conservatives not coming back from their recent lows. I think Caron Lindsay is right to say: Those circumstances will not replicate themselves and we need to be looking beyond the Blue Wall to our next gains. And to do that we need a message that is nationally relevant.

The problem is not only one for the Lib Dems. Labour too would be in trouble if the Conservatives became strong again. At the same time, it suits Labour to have the Conservatives become a bit stronger. That takes votes off Reform. To have the vote on the Right split evenly between the Tories and Reform is a perfect scenario for Labour.

Partly for this reason there is a lot of talk about an early election. This BBC report suggests the Lib Dems are going onto a ‘snap election’ footing, quoting a 30% chance of an election this year. I think this is highly unlikely. If he did that, I think Burnham would be crushed by the accusation that he’s a tinkerer who has shown himself tactically adroit but strategically hopeless. Go behind the dinky plans about noisy phones on buses and drinking at football matches, plus a few handouts in the budget, and the critics will claim there’s nothing there that wasn’t already evident in Reeves and Starmer (which is what Reeves and Starmer go round saying now). I don’t think he’ll risk an election on those terms, quite apart from the fact that he’d be giving up the guarantee of half a Parliamentary term with a huge landslide majority.

 However, what is equally true is that Burnham will face huge problems in 2027. The extra spending on defence will have to be found and taxes will have to rise – or huge spending cuts made. This is where he really will have to show some courage – and if he doesn’t, the political extremes that are currently weak will show their strength again. It will remain the case that the UK has huge and increasing levels of inequality and this will increasingly rankle with voters. As the cuts really begin to bite, the call on the Left for radical measures to reduce inequality, which was after all what brought the Greens into recent prominence, will only intensify.

And – just to fly a kite for a moment – what about the Far Right? Far right parties know how to appeal to the less well-off in society. Not for nothing did the worst example of a Far-Right party choose to call itself ‘national socialist.’  Farage has dismissed the idea of a wealth tax with the usual argument about wealthy people fleeing to Monaco and so on, but what if he were to change his mind? According to a YouGov poll, three Reform voters in five support a wealth tax. Could the classic candle start burning at both ends, with Reform and the Greens offering a radical alternative to the mainstream parties whose only argument is the need for spending cuts?

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Chris Coghlan MP

Chris Coghlan MP writes…SEND reform must put children with complex needs at the centre; not treat them as an afterthought

By Chris Coghlan MP | Wed 4th November 2026 - 3:29 pm

I hear the same stories week after week in surgeries and inboxes. Exhausted parents fighting for the support their children need and young people with Education, Health and Care Plans stuck at home for months because no suitable place can be found. Our local schools doing their best under impossible pressure. Surrey has long been one of the areas hardest hit by the national SEND crisis, and families here know the human cost better than most.

This is not a partisan issue. I know that cross-party concern is growing, and organisations like the SEND Matters Coalition are right to sound the alarm. The Liberal Democrats have always believed that every child has a right to an education that meets their needs. That principle must guide any reform.

I welcome the Government’s declared ambition to improve early identification and strengthen mainstream support. Extra resources for mainstream schools are necessary and many children with SEND can and should thrive in inclusive settings when the right help is in place from the start. However, it is simply not credible to claim that this alone solves the problem for those with the most complex needs. There is already a shortage of specialist places. Pretending otherwise risks leaving the most vulnerable children behind while the system is redesigned around those who can more easily be included. We cannot spend the next decade building a better system for the future while allowing a generation of children with complex needs to fall through the cracks in the meantime.

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Caron Lindsay

What a night! Democrats smash the midterms

By Caron Lindsay | Wed 4th November 2026 - 10:00 am

I was not particularly optimistic ahead of the US midterms. I thought the Democrats would make gains, and would almost certainly win the House of Representatives, but gaining control of the Senate was going to be much tougher.

Even at the end of last year, Jon Ossoff’s Georgia  Senate seat looked vulnerable but last night he absolutely smashed it. Not only that, Keisha Lance-Bottoms becomes the first woman of colour to be Governor of Georgia.

I am always mindful of “tempting the Wrath of the Whatever from High Atop the Thing” on election day. Feeling confident is not a healthy instinct on polling day when every vote is up for grabs.

The actual results, though,  are way ahead of even the most optimistic predictions. I was thrilled that paediatrician Annie Andrews pulled off a surprise win in South Carolina. I’ve seen a few interviews with her over the past few months and been very impressed.

Having his rear end admired by Donald Trump did nothing for Jon Husted in J D Vance’s home state of Ohio, who was beaten by Democrat Sherrod Brown by 4 points.

I was particularly delighted to see Amy Acton win in Ohio after the Republican Vivek Ramaswamy blew $4 million on a disgusting attack ad featuring Amy’s mother, failing to mention that her husband, Amy’s stepdad, had been charged with raping her as a child.  This was endorsed by both Donald Trump and J D Vance.

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Steve Aicheler

Choosing a new leader in Wales: why the process matters

By Steve Aicheler | Tue 3rd November 2026 - 9:36 am

At the Welsh Liberal Democrat Autumn Conference in November, members will debate a constitutional amendment I’ve submitted to broaden eligibility for the leadership of our party and make the nomination process more accessible. It raises an important question: when our parliamentary representation is small, should our constitution restrict members’ choice of leader before potential candidates have even decided whether to stand?

Following Jane Dodds’ decision to stand down, David Chadwick has put himself forward as her successor. Under our current rules, he is the only other person eligible to stand.

These proposed changes are not about David’s suitability for the role. From what I have seen, he has the energy and ambition to make a very good leader. He has made a real impact in Westminster, often being a more effective voice for Wales than all the other Welsh MP’s combined.

But I believe his leadership would be strengthened by a more open selection process. There is an important distinction between being unopposed because nobody else chooses to stand and being unopposed because nobody else is permitted to stand. The former may not produce a direct mandate from a membership ballot, but it provides a much stronger foundation of democratic legitimacy.

Andy Burnham offers a valuable illustration of how a mandate can be provided unopposed, and how leadership can change the direction and public perception of a political party. Although he became Labour leader without a membership ballot, other MPs had the opportunity to stand, and his overwhelming support among parliamentary colleagues provided a democratic mandate of its own.

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Daniel Duggan

What can the Liberal Democrats learn from New Zealand’s Opportunity Party?

By Daniel Duggan | Mon 2nd November 2026 - 12:42 pm

New Zealand’s Opportunity Party (TOP) could hold the balance of power after the 7 November election. A late-October poll put it on 7.2%, potentially securing nine MPs and entering Parliament for the first time.

For Liberal Democrats, TOP’s significance lies in its radical centrism: combining support for enterprise and growth with substantial reforms to taxation, income security and economic power. Its policies connect two questions too often discussed separately: how do we produce more wealth, and how should we distribute it?

Security and productive investment

TOP’s flagship proposal combines a Citizen’s Income of approximately NZ$19,400 annually for eligible adults with a 1.75% annual tax on residential and commercial land values.

A guaranteed income provides security and contributes to freedom from domination, while land taxation discourages speculation and encourages development. Buildings and improvements are excluded from the tax, preserving incentives to construct and improve homes. For too long, investors in the UK have been encouraged to pursue rising land and property prices because the expected returns exceed those available from investment in businesses, technology, and innovation. Taxing land values would help shift those incentives towards activities that raise productivity and create new wealth.

Together, these policies would use a share of socially created land wealth to finance individual economic security, while encouraging investment towards productive enterprise. Redistribution would therefore help create the conditions for growth, giving people the resources to develop their abilities and businesses stronger incentives to invest.

Competition and economic power

TOP’s support for business comes with a willingness to challenge powerful incumbents. It proposes stronger competition enforcement, including powers for the Commerce Commission to seek court-supervised break-ups of dominant businesses. It also supports increased research and development spending, technology adoption incentives, and business incubators.

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Judy Abel

Is the NHS still safe enough – and if not, what needs to change?

By Judy Abel | Mon 2nd November 2026 - 10:56 am

In the years after Labour came to power in 1997, NHS healthcare improved rapidly. Waiting lists came down, we were offered a greater choice of providers through a new Choose and Book scheme and walk-in centres were set up, meaning patients could be seen on the day in the community for urgent health problems. But no more.

No one can fail to have noticed the decline in NHS healthcare provision in England in recent years: long waits to see a GP for routine appointments; more GP consultations over the phone instead of face-to-face; even longer waits for outpatient appointments and services such as physiotherapy – up to 12 months where I live (honestly what is the use of that?); the substitution of physician associates for doctors; long hours of corridor care in A&E; and, most worryingly, an increase in medical errors. It is primarily these medical errors that have prompted me to write this piece.

Over the past decade we have seen an increasing number of health scandals come to light, especially, but not exclusively, in maternity care. Despite several high-profile maternity reviews by eminent clinicians over the past decade, these failings continue, with multiple NHS Hospitals Trusts now having been implicated and investigated, including at Nottingham, Shrewsbury and Telford, East Kent, Leeds, Oxford and Gloucestershire NHS Hospital Trusts.

It also takes the NHS far too long to weed out poor practice. A leaked Royal College of Surgeons’ report on a surgeon who performed poor surgery at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) is said to have criticised the hospital’s lower limb reconstruction service as not “safe for patients” with the orthopaedic department being “dysfunctional”. And this hospital is supposed to be a national centre of excellence! Surely, after a certain number of poorly performed operations, alarm bells should be ringing and matters quickly taken in hand? An independent review found in this case, that 94 children and young people had come to harm at GOSH due to the surgeon in question, 13 of whom had life-long injuries according to the initial review by the RCS. There have been similar stories in the media down the years, including that of disgraced surgeon Ian Paterson, who performed unnecessary or botched surgery on more than a thousand women. But is poor practice still going under the radar and is it still too hard for NHS whistleblowers to come forward? Also concerning is the increasing number of ‘never events’ in surgery. For example, cases of wrong-site surgery in England rose from 69 in 2020 to 101 in 2025, with 7% involving serious harm to patients. Still low numbers yes – but devastating for those involved.

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Caron Lindsay

Ed Davey quizzed on EU, slavery reparations and Lib Dem relevance

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 1st November 2026 - 10:11 am

Ed Davey was interviewed on Sky News this morning

The first question was about whether we should apologise for our role in slavery. He said:

If you have done something wrong, I have no problem in apologising for it. That’s what normal people expect to do. I think Tony Blair started this about 20 years ago and I think if the PM wants to consider it in a bit more detail, we should have that debate.

I don’t think reparations is the right approach. We’ve been doing a lot about it in terms of supporting poorer countries. It showed we had a moral obligation to support those well off in the world where there was global economic injustice. When we were in Government we really pushed that hard and I think that there is a case for doing more of that. I’ve been rather disappointed that both under Conservatives and Labour that has been trimmed back, pushed  by pressure from Reform. I think that if we can grow our economy, because aid is linked to our national income, we will be able to support people in less well off countries a bit better.

Isn’t Andy Burnham going a bit further than you?

Not at all. We’ve put forward the idea that we should rejoin the Single Market with freedom of labour earlier this year. We have to negotiate it but we have already advocated and put forward a bill to inttoduce a youth mobility scheme to Parliament.

If you look at what’s happened to immigration since we left the EU, immigration got out of control. If you look at what Europe is doing on immigration, the EU signed a pact earlier this year and it has seen immigration to Europe fall as well. If we work with our European partners we can do a better job than Labour and the Conservatives have done.

But aren’t people protesting about immigration across Europe?

If you look at the protests in France and elsewhere outside Europe, they are related to the cost of living and you can see who has created that problem across the world, Donald Trump with his mad war in Iran. We could benefit from a much closer trade and defence relationship with Europe. By joining the single market and customs union, we could boost our economy. The problem with the Budget is that it had no growth strategy whatsoever. I don’t hear any growth strategy other than what we are putting forward.

But wouldn’t freedom of movement send people to our labour market and stop people getting jobs?

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Caron Lindsay

Scottish Lib Dems defeat SNP on Learning Disabilities, Autism and Neurodivergence Bill

By Caron Lindsay | Sat 31st October 2026 - 10:00 am

This week Scottish Lib Dems inflicted the first parliamentary defeat of this session on the minority SNP Government. SNP candidates had championed the idea of a Learning Disabilities, Autism and Neurodivergence Bill for years and it was in their manifesto for the elections in May. I represented the party at numerous hustings on disability, including specific ones to do with supporting people with learning disabilities, autism and neurodivergence, and there was unanimity amongst all parties.

Earlier this month, the SNP Government said that it would no longer pursue this, claiming that they could make change more quickly as though these things were a binary choice.

All MPs and MSPs in Scotland will have read heartbreaking accounts of the struggles that families of people with LDAN face, not least that the waiting lists for ADHD assessments in some areas are longer than half an entire statutory education period of 13 years. Think of the effect that that has on life chances. All MPs and MSPs in Scotland will be aware of children not going to school because there is simply not the support for them to enable them to access education.

The SNP’s decision to shelve the Bill and enshrine rights in law is unconscionable and we used our opposition day on Wednesday to call on the Government to bring back the Bill.

You can read the whole debate here.

The motion was proposed by Adam Harley, our health spokesperson:

On average, people with learning disabilities in Scotland die 20 years earlier than the wider population, and too many people continue to experience profound inequalities in healthcare, education, employment, social care and the justice system. That is why so many people had placed their hope in the proposed legislation, ever since the Government committed to it in 2021.

Justice spokesperson Yi-Pei Chou Turvey spoke about the impact of the justice system on people with learning disabilities, neurodivergence and autism:

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Rob Blackie

How housebuilding can tackle the cost of living crisis and boost growth

By Rob Blackie | Fri 30th October 2026 - 6:50 pm

This article draws on “Hitting housebuilding targets would reduce rents by £251 a month” published by the Centre for British Progress, written by Rob Blackie, Tim Leunig and David Lawrence.

Andy Burnham’s recent promise to tackle the cost of living pitch ignored the most practical approach: increasing housebuilding to bring down rents. This week the Office for Budget Responsibility predicted that people will get poorer in the next few years. If Britain focuses on cutting rents we can reverse that trend.

The typical British renter spends three times as much on rent as on food, and five times as much as on energy. And in the most expensive areas, such as London and the South East, renters typically spend 40% of their incomes on rent.  And this isn’t because we’re spending money on good housing either. Britain’s housing is smaller, and lower quality, than our European neighbours.

The costs affect not only renters, but all of us. The government spends around £37bn a year on housing subsidies, money we all have to find via our taxes or lower public spending elsewhere. This is the highest rate of any comparable country. There are less obvious costs too: businesses face high rents in London, and skilled individuals can’t afford to move there, constraining the growth of successful businesses in our most successful city. National income – and tax revenues – are lower as a result.

Our high cost of housing can be explained by simple supply and demand, nothing more and nothing less. For instance, London’s population has grown by 1.6 million people this century, and supply hasn’t kept up, constrained by planning rules that prioritise golf courses over house building.

It is reasonable to ask whether new private housing, aimed mainly at people on relatively high incomes, will lower rents more generally. The Prime Minister implies not, hence his currently unfunded pledge to create the “biggest council house building programme” since the 1950s. This would cost tens of billions of pounds a year. This is an admirable ambition, but very unlikely to happen when our government is short of money.

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James Bradford

The Independent View: Nobody falls in love with a manifesto

By James Bradford | Fri 30th October 2026 - 4:37 pm

Last week on this site, Maria Linforth-Hall asked a question that has stayed with me: what are the Liberal Democrats for? One line in particular. “Having individual policies is not necessarily the same as communicating a coherent political vision.” She then asked whether ordinary people can recognise liberal values in the practical answers the party offers to their everyday problems.

I should say where I’m writing from. I’m not a party member. I write for LibDem Dating, an independent dating site for liberal-minded singles in the UK, which has no connection to the party and no endorsement from it. So I’m looking in from outside. But I spend a lot of my working life thinking about how people decide whom to trust, and Maria’s question sounds very familiar from where I sit.

You might expect a dating site for liberals to be full of people listing their positions. Proportional representation, rejoining the EU, scrapping the two-child limit. Some profiles do read like that, and in my experience they’re rarely the ones that get a reply. Nobody falls in love with a manifesto. What draws people in is harder to put in a bullet point: a sense of how the other person treats people.

The profiles I find most persuasive barely mention politics at all. They talk about fairness, about curiosity, about being willing to change their mind. They mention patience with an awkward relative at Christmas, or a friendship that has survived years of arguing about Brexit. They suggest someone who can disagree with you over dinner and still want to see you again. That quality is what most of us are actually looking for, and a party label tells you very little about it. Ten minutes of conversation tells you a great deal.

A first date works a bit like a small election. You can’t check everything about the other person, so you rely on signals. How do they speak to the waiter? How do they talk about an ex, or about people who vote differently? Do they listen, or wait for their turn? None of these is a policy, but together they answer the question that matters: would this person be decent to me when we disagree?

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Francis Chubb

Bridges Matter

By Francis Chubb | Fri 30th October 2026 - 1:03 pm

The road bridge infrastructure in London is creaking and inadequate, and ownership and responsibility is fragmented. The soundness, or not, of these bridges has consequences. However, we, Liberal Democrats, do not yet have a policy for London’s bridges and we need one.

London is a massive centre, drawing people, and with them goods and other resources, from right across the country, but particularly from across the southeast of England. And this creates a need to cross the river that flows through the heart of that centre. Whatever we do with public transport, road traffic will always be part of this need.

The issues themselves are actually well understood. The London Assembly Transport Committee, chaired by our own Baroness Pidgeon (Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM, as she then was), prepared a report in November 2021, which sets out the situation and offers a suite of policy suggestions.

But thinking about London’s bridges has stalled and now, as their condition deteriorates, they present a problem. Their importance is such that they need to be considered as strategic assets, and planned for as such, and this does not appear to have happened.

Other people are noticing this problem too. Recent opinion articles by Juliet Samuel in The Times and Simon Jenkins in The Guardian have both highlighted the issue and proposed solutions. Rightly recognising the importance of the bridges to the efficiency of the city, we can be sure that voters will see this as well and we need to have something to say.

You will notice that, in offering their solutions, both Samuel and Jenkins reach for the funds of the City Bridge Foundation. Renamed in 2023, the City Bridge Foundation is a 13th century charity with, by its own admission, more money than it needs to look after the bridges in its remit. So it looks like an obvious grab. But it would be a mistake to rush to do so, for, as barrister Barbara Rich points out, there are serious questions of trusts law and public policy to overcome first. So when looking for our own solutions we need to be more judicious than that.

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Jean-François Burford

For disabled people, a simple game of football comes with a terrifying price tag: their benefits

By Jean-François Burford | Thu 29th October 2026 - 6:33 pm

Disabled people are encouraged to exercise to protect their health and independence. Yet many fear that participating in sport could jeopardise the financial support they rely on. This is the Activity Trap, and it must end.

For most people, playing football is an opportunity to exercise, enjoy themselves and connect with others. For some disabled people, however, stepping onto a football pitch comes with a frightening question: could this game cost me my benefits?

Health professionals, ministers and sporting bodies regularly promote physical activity for its benefits to physical health, mental wellbeing and social connection. Adapted football and other inclusive sports can help disabled people maintain mobility, manage long-term conditions and combat isolation.

Yet research by Durham University and Disability Rights UK highlights a disturbing contradiction. Their research examines the “Activity Trap”: the fear that physical activity could jeopardise the financial support disabled people depend on.

The findings are stark. 80% of disabled people surveyed worried that physical activity could put their benefits at risk, while more than one in four reported having benefits or other financial support denied or removed in circumstances they associated with being active. Although these findings do not establish the reasons behind every individual decision, they reveal the depth of anxiety surrounding participation.

This is not simply a question of confidence. It is about whether disabled people feel safe enough to participate in community life.

Grassroots football already presents considerable barriers. Accessible pitches and changing facilities remain limited, while adapted equipment, specialist transport and personal support can make participation prohibitively expensive. Finding a suitable club is difficult enough without the additional worry of losing essential financial support.

The Activity Trap reaches into the relationship between disability benefits and assessments of physical ability.

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Callum Robertson

Budget verdict: A missed opportunity to tackle intergenerational unfairness and give working people a tax breakk

By Callum Robertson | Thu 29th October 2026 - 4:15 pm

For the vast majority of people across the United Kingdom, this year’s Budget may as well not have happened.

After working through the Chancellor’s announcements and examining the practical impact on household finances, it is striking how little has changed for ordinary working people. For many families, the only noticeable measures are a £100 payment for households in Council Tax bands A to D and the abolition of gas standing charges.

Neither measure addresses the deeper challenges facing normal people.

The £100 payment is welcome as far as it goes, but it barely touches the sides of the ongoing cost-of-living pressures that households face. Energy bills, housing costs, food prices and transport expenses remain significantly higher than they were only a few years ago. A one-off payment offers temporary relief but does nothing to improve long-term living standards.

Meanwhile, the abolition of gas standing charges has been presented as a significant intervention. Yet this measure deserves closer scrutiny. Standing charges exist to recover fixed costs within the energy system. Removing them does not make those costs disappear. Instead, the cost is likely to be recovered elsewhere, most probably through higher unit charges. For a vast majority of households, this is less a case of eliminating costs and more a case of shifting how those costs are paid.

The real disappointment is that the Budget represents a missed opportunity to address the growing burden on working-age taxpayers and younger generations.

If the government was serious about making Britain fairer, it should have focused on reducing the tax burden on earned income. Three changes in particular would have provided meaningful support to millions of workers.

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Miranda Pinch

Polls Apart: The dehumanisation of Palestinians

By Miranda Pinch | Thu 29th October 2026 - 1:49 pm

I wrote this as Israel went to the polls. It could be weeks before any result because Israeli elections are extremely complicated and depend on coalitions. The one certainty is that little will change for the Palestinians. No candidates are interested in Palestinian self-determination, and all support the illegal settlements.

The West Bank was locked down to ensure free movement and security for Israelis to vote. That prevents the Palestinians from moving from their Israeli designated areas for school, work, medical aid, anything. Israel locks the West Bank down for various reasons at will.

The West Bank including East Jerusalem is occupied territory, illegal under international law. Various statements from Israeli politicians call for the Gazification of Palestinian areas of the West Bank (total destruction) and the Judaization of all the land including Israel itself where twenty percent of the population are Palestinian ‘citizens’ of Israel. Those ‘citizens’ already live under Israel’s Jewish Nation-State Law, which only gives the right of self-determination to Jews. Hardly democratic.

Even the BBC, which has been credibly accused of pro-Israeli bias, documents the illegal Israel settler terrorism, supported by the Israeli army (IDF), who also kill, maim, imprison, and demolish. Ethnic cleansing is an Israeli policy, not just that of rogue settlers.

There is something particularly visceral about the destruction of ancient olive groves and vineyards. The damage caused to land that Israelis claim to love, designed to make it so inhospitable to Palestinians that they leave can also be described as ecocide, destroying native flora and fauna.

I wrote a review of the film NAZA, whose title is Israeli shorthand for “collateral damage” (the number of non-combatants that can legitimately be killed for any suspect). So, one Naza can mean a baby and two hundred Naza can mean the population of a neighbourhood or tower block. It is now showing on general release and will be available for streaming by the Guardian in late November.

The film is about the dehumanization of a population. If people are not human and all propaganda just portrays them as a threat to Israel’s existence, then the idea that they can be exterminated is ‘understandable.’ Some may object to terms like ‘extermination’ and ‘genocide’ as reminiscent of the Nazis, yet my mother equated the treatment of Palestinians to her treatment at their hands well before she died in 2008. Long before October 7th.

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The Voice

Ed Davey on the Budget: British people need real change and fast

By The Voice | Wed 28th October 2026 - 10:45 pm

You can watch Ed Davey’s response to the Budget statement here. The full text is below. He wants to see more radical action to encourage growth and the most important thing is try to repair the damage brought about by Brexit. His main message is that we need some jam today and can’t wait another 5-10 years for it.

Here is his response in full:

It is always a pleasure to follow the Chair of the Treasury Committee, the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Dame Meg Hillier). I am glad she committed to looking at the devil in the detail of this Budget, because when one looks at the fine print there are quite a few things for her Committee to scrutinise. In particular, I hope that she will look at the very disappointing growth forecasts, because I think this Budget will be defined more by Labour’s red lines on Europe and the Conservatives’ Brexit red tape than by faster growth.

At the root of so much of what has gone wrong in our country—the cost of living crisis, higher taxes, broken public services, empty high streets, and the lack of jobs and opportunity—is the lack of economic growth. Our economy is being held back. British business is being held back. It is being held back above all by the terrible damage of the Conservatives’ Brexit deal: a deal, let us never forget, that was backed by the leader of Reform and voted for by Labour—a deal that put up pointless new barriers to trade, tied up British firms in extra costs and red tape, and pushed up prices on our supermarket shelves.

As I was saying, our economy is being held back by Brexit, so the biggest single thing the Government could do to fix our economy is to fix our trading relationship with Europe and take us back into the single market and a customs union, giving us the growth and the money to cut people’s taxes.

Unless and until a Government have the courage to do just what I have outlined, I am afraid that any Budget will only be tinkering around the edges, because it will not provide the growth our country so desperately needs.

The Prime Minister, to be fair, has rightly talked about the economic damage caused by Brexit, but in answer to my questions he still refuses to drop Labour’s red lines set down by Keir Starmer more than five years ago. The world has changed so much since then and it is long past time that Labour policy changed with the world. I welcome the Prime Minister talking more openly this week about the need to move forward on Europe, but can I say to the Chancellor and the Prime Minister that it is just too urgent to wait until the next Parliament? Today’s Budget shows why.

I remember when 2% growth was nothing special. When we were in government that was the average, but since we left the EU, it has been less than half that—less than 1% growth a year. Today’s forecasts show things starting slowly to move in the right direction, but they still show growth well below 2% every year for the next five years. What used to be average growth now feels like a pipe dream, so we need a real growth plan with Europe at its heart: a plan that only our party has set out—an economic plan to make Britain richer, safer and stronger.

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Vince Cable

Vince Cable writes: A budget of small things

By Vince Cable | Wed 28th October 2026 - 9:06 pm

The Chancellor hasn’t crashed the economy by reckless unfunded commitments. Perhaps we should be grateful for small mercies (of which Liz Truss’s new book helpfully reminds us). Nor were there any damaging measures like Rachel Reeves’ big hike in employers’ national insurance contributions. There were lots of small, uncontroversial reliefs for consumers and business which are being paid for by raiding the banks (as I previewed in my last Substack article: The Endless Search for Painless Taxes). But as Kemi Badenoch asked, in her rather effective reply to the Budget, ‘Is that It?’

Much of the budget had been trailed in advance so that there were few surprises. But the reason why the budget was so light on serious content was that the big difficult decisions have been deferred to the Spring Statement. This will explain what is being cut to pay for defence commitments and rising welfare costs, sufficient to keep the government on a financially sustainable path, credible to our international creditors (or, if the expected cuts prove to be too painful, would provide a pretext for the government to go to the country to get a mandate to raise the taxes which were ruled out in the last Labour manifesto).

To be fair to the Chancellor his speech was built around a recognition that the only way of escaping the painful trap of rising fiscal deficits and debt, rising taxation and public spending austerity is to achieve more rapid economic growth. Groth has suffered badly from successive shocks: the global financial crisis; Brexit; Covid; the Ukraine war; now the Middle East war. The government’s own projections are in the 1.5 to 2% range, barely adequate to match the needs of an ageing population, debt service and a growing need to spend more on national security. The forecasts are, frankly, optimistic given the poor external environment of conflict, protectionism and geo-political uncertainty.

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Cody Butler

A Liberal Vision for Britain’s Overseas Territories

By Cody Butler | Wed 28th October 2026 - 8:55 am

The Liberal Democrats’ Defending Democracy policy paper calls for a codified UK constitution. If democratic consent and self-government matter at home, they must also shape our relationship with Britain’s 14 Overseas Territories, ten of which have permanent populations. In 2025, UK and Territory leaders agreed to develop voluntary Partnership Compacts, and in September 2026 the UK published a Charter affirming “devolution and democratic autonomy” and “nothing about you without you”. These are welcome commitments, but they must translate into a more equal constitutional partnership.

Recognising national identities

“Dependent Territories” became “Overseas Territories” in 2002, reflecting a move towards partnership. Yet there is still room to consider how the constitutional relationship can better recognise the distinct identities and democratic aspirations of each Territory. For some islanders, their primary sense of identity may be rooted in their own island and community, rather than in English, Scottish, Welsh or Irish identity. For others, local and British identities may coexist. These identities should be recognised on their own terms, rather than assumed to fit a mainland British model.

A survey conducted in Gibraltar in 2000 and reported in 2001 found that 45% of respondents identified as both Gibraltarian and British. Though dated and specific to Gibraltar, this illustrates how identities can overlap. We should invite discussion with Territory governments and communities about whether the term “British Overseas Territory” remains appropriate, or whether alternatives such as “British Overseas Nation” would better reflect the identities of some communities. 

A partnership in Official Development Aid

Financially self-sufficient Territories should be invited to invest in overseas development alongside British International Investment (BII), combining development benefits with financial returns.

A voluntary co-investment scheme could direct Territory government or institutional capital into independently managed projects, such as small-business finance and climate-resilient infrastructure. In 2025, BII, Zambia’s pension authority and Sweden’s Swedfund launched a platform with an initial close of about £52 million to finance Zambian small businesses.

Some Territories have institutions that could explore similar opportunities. Cayman’s Public Service Pensions Board held around £1.3 billion in assets at the end of 2024, while the Falkland Islands Government reported a £156.7 million Growth Fund in its 2025 accounts. Any investment must have local approval, credible returns and safeguards for pensions, public services and reserves. Participation must remain voluntary, with no expectation that Territories dependent on UK budget support contribute. Britain could invite interested Territories to design a pilot with BII.

Putting elected representatives in charge

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Daniel Duggan

What can republican political thought teach the Liberal Democrats?

By Daniel Duggan | Tue 27th October 2026 - 5:45 pm

A politics of power

Recent Liberal Democrat proposals for faster GP appointments, better support for rural and coastal schools, and investment in walking and cycling show our commitment to improving public services. These are important ambitions.

Yet improving services does not, by itself, challenge the relationships that leave people powerless: an insecure worker dependent on an employer’s goodwill, a tenant afraid to challenge a landlord, or a citizen unable to contest decisions made about their care.

Liberal Democrats must ask not only whether services are improving, but whether people have the rights, resources and voice to shape their own lives. The question of power must be central to our approach. Republican political thought, with its understanding of freedom as non-domination, offers a rich intellectual tradition from which Liberal Democrats can draw in developing a politics of power.

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