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?

The NEET problem has got worse since Brexit. If we grew our economy there would be more jobs for young people, if we grew our economy there would be more help with the cost of living.  If you look at what’s happened from 2021 projected to 2031, it’s a decade of freezing income tax allowances. That’s a massive stealth tax. Conservative and Labour chancellors and PMs have done this and have had to do that primarily because of Brexit. If you look at the independent analysis from forecasters, they show that the Treasury has lost £90 billion a year because of Brexit.

If you look at what Goldman Sachs said last week, if you went back into the single market and customs union, it would boost our economy by between £70 billion and £150 billion.

But aren’t Lib Dems being squeezed out of the debate here? You are at the bottom of the opinion polls.

Opinion polls aren’t real elections. Two and a half years ago we got our best result in 100 years, 72 Lib Dem MPs. If you look at local elections we have had 8 years of conseecutive gains which has never happened before. I’m not interested in polls, I’m interested in elections and we keep winning.

Do you have any KPIs for success. When is it time for you to leave?

When I took over, we had 11 MPs, we now have 72. We were way behind in local Government. Now we run more Councils than the Conservatives. The polls aren’t high under my leadership, but we keep winning in elections. What would you prefer to do?

The problem we have is that nobody is listening to what we say, so the fact that we might have called for the UK to rejoin the single market earlier this year does not make up for all those years where we sat on our hands and didn’t talk about Europe at all. Arguably, if we had, we could have contributed to an even bigger rise in public opinion in favour of much closer relations, even rejoining, the EU.

I also wish he had been a bit stronger on the benefits of immigration rather than feeding the false narrative that it’s too high and A BAD THING. We desperately need more people to come here. We have an aging population, particularly in Scotland.

And the problem with his argument that we’re winning elections so it doesn’t matter what the polls say is that we are winning those elections because the Conservative Party were at rock bottom. We were lucky. 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.

We’re certainly getting a bit better at doing that, but it’s not yet cutting through. We lost an opportunity to influence the national debate after Andy Burnham’s Conference speech.

What was good about this interview is that he did press home the need for economic growth and associated us with things like raising the tax threshold and rejoining the EU that would help boost the economy. A lot of the stuff that Daisy Cooper was putting out ahead of the election was micro, tinkering at the edges. Ed’s comments on and response to the Budget was a bit more macro.

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings. You can find her on Bluesky at caronmlindsay.bsky.social