Liberalism is under attack. It’s time to defend its principles; and I hope that Ed Davey will lead the charge at our Spring conference next week. As Rob Davidson wrote on LibDem Voice last week, ‘liberalism and liberal democracy is facing an existential threat’ – both in England and globally.

Most Liberals do not read the Spectator, the Telegraph or Standpoint, which portray an alternative intellectual universe, in which conservatives decry ‘the liberal elite’, against which they stand for community and nation. A network of well-funded think tanks, with close links to neo-conservative think tanks in Washington, reinforces this blend of nationalist nostalgia, assumptions of Anglo-Saxon transatlantic affinity, cultural reaction and anti-Muslim prejudice: the Taxpayers Alliance, Policy Exchange, the Henry Jackson Society and others, with combined budgets larger than our party’s central income.

Repetition of the claim that Britain’s elite is liberal, and that these well-funded researchers, their rich backers in the City and offshore and the government which they support are insurgents against the dominant and corrupting liberalism of our society, feeds populist resentment. It supports attacks on the BBC as inherently left-wing, on universities and academics as having lost “the faith of the nation in some critical areas” (to quote a new Policy Exchange report), on Anglican bishops for failing to defend traditional moral principles as they see them.

Rob Davidson also pointed to the emergence of a global network of self-labelled ‘national conservatives’, strongly supported by right-wing American money, which idolises Viktor Orban’s ‘illiberal democracy’. The recent ‘NatCon’ conference in Rome, which included a number of British Conservatives, welcomed Orban as a keynote speaker. One of the other speakers told the conference that the current Pope has ‘given up his spiritual role to become political leader of the international left.’ This is the politics of unreason, in which one may even cast doubt on whether the Pope is a Catholic.