Editor’s Note: In November party members will be voting to elect our next Party President and Vice-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.

I grew up in a community with people who do the early starts and the late finishes: the shift workers, the carers, the shop staff who smile even when the till doesn’t balance at home. For far too long, they’ve been told to “tighten belts” whilst the government loosened its grip on the basics that make a decent life possible for every person.

​I’m not interested in Westminster theatre. I’m interested in what lands on individual kitchen tables.​ I want to be Vice President of a party that stands up and represents people from all walks of life in every village, town and city, not just “Middle England.”

​If you rely on public services, you can’t buy your way around an NHS queue. You wait. You grit your teeth. You hope the pain holds off until payday. Today, over 7.4 million treatment cases are on the waiting list in England alone, with around 191,500 people waiting more than a year. That isn’t a statistic; that’s cancelled shifts, lost earnings, childcare you can’t cover, and conditions that get worse while you’re stuck in line, impacting people’s ability to live their lives fully and contribute to their communities.

​And what’s the Tory response? Threaten to ban doctors from striking instead of fixing pay and staffing. You don’t heal a health service by gagging the people holding it together. You pay them fairly, you staff properly, and you stop pretending, like Labour, that headlines are a plan.

​Home used to mean security. Now it’s a bill that stalks you. The government’s own figures put the average UK house price at about £270,000. Meanwhile, rents have been rising fast in many regions; ONS data shows private rent inflation still biting across the country. You can’t talk about “aspiration” while pricing individuals and young families out of both renting and buying. This instability breaks the bedrock of community life.

​Tories love a Stamp Duty soundbite. Individuals and families need affordable homes, not press releases. Labour also needs to deliver. People need no-fault evictions ended in practice, not just in speeches; and they need a serious programme to build social and truly affordable housing because a market this skewed won’t fix itself.

​Here’s the pattern: when the basics fail, the government reaches for a culture-war megaphone. Promise a mass-deportation number big enough to make a news story, then quietly admit the system can’t deliver it. In the most recent nine-month period to March, the total returns (enforced + voluntary) were 24,103. Independent analysis shows enforced returns in 2024 were only around 8,200. So, who’s being helped by the noise? Not the teacher waiting on a scan, not the delivery driver juggling rent, and not the small shop facing energy bills. It’s performance, not policy, and it distracts from the real needs of every citizen.

​The hardest conversation I have on the doorstep is with someone who’s working full-time and still can’t make the household budget balance. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s latest poverty report lays it out: more than 1 in 5 people in the UK are in poverty and crucially, around two-thirds of working-age adults in poverty live in a household where someone works. That’s the quiet scandal of the last decade: we’ve turned individual effort into a promise we don’t keep.

​My view is that we must be true to our Liberal values if we are to lay down the ladders of opportunity in every community across this wonderful land so people can climb to reach their true potential.

Because ​if you break the NHS, individuals wear the pain.

If you let housing run hot, people and communities get burned first.

If you swap policy for performance, citizens and community pay for your applause lines.

​I’m standing for Liberal Democrat Vice-President to move the conversation back to what matters: cut the queues, build the homes, make work pay. No gimmicks, no scapegoats. Just the basics, done properly, for the people who actually keep this country standing.

​We don’t need another speech about “hard-working families.” We need a government that stops making hard work harder for every person.

* Kamran Hussain was a candidate for Vice President in 2025 and is a managing partner/solicitor.