Today the counts get under way for the federal internal elections.

Online voting ended at 2pm yesterday but the voting period was dominated by the changes to the diversity quotas announced the day before polling started on October 28th.

On that day, presidential candidate Prue Bray wrote that she was so angry she could barely type.

It is far from clear what the law is exactly at this point, but even if we are not compliant with it, the party should have to be dragged kicking and screaming to do this! If we give up without a fight, not only will we be letting trans and non-binary people down and violating one of the core values of the party, namely, our opposition to discrimination of any kind – we will also do ourselves immense damage. We will lose the trust of many of our LGBTQ+ members and voters and their allies. Some may choose to quit the party altogether. The stupidity of the way that this has been done, without any explanation to those involved, without any priming, without any expression of regret..! I am not sure whether I feel furious – or heartbroken.

Her fellow candidate Josh Babarinde said shortly thereafter that he stood with trans an non binary Lib Dems.

What has happened in the last 24 hours represents the mere tip of the iceberg of the kind of thing trans and non-binary people face when going about life day-to-day, never mind when putting their heads above the parapet to stand in elections to represent us.

We’ve got to do more to support our trans and non-binary candidates, and ensure they feel safe and valued making contributions to public life. I’ve already had discussions with trans and non binary members about what this practically needs to look like, and I’m fired up to continue these discussions and drive action accordingly, irrespective of the Presidential election.

Since then, there has been an extraordinary and brilliant display of joint working between Josh, Prue and the official diversity organisations within the party, LGBT+ Lib Dems, Lib Dem Women, Lib Dem Campaign for Racial Equality and the Lib Dem Disability Association. They met the KC who had provided the party with the legal advice which had kicked this all off on Friday and issued a detailed statement on Monday which we reported here.

At the same time, Lucas North, a candidate in the elections, challenged the Returning Officer’s decision at a Federal Appeals Panel hearing on Monday. The decision was published yesterday and found in Lucas’s favour. The 2 page decision is published in full below.

The Federal Returning Officer David Crowther announced his resignation this norning:

Following the decision by FAP I don’t believe my position as FRO is any longer tenable and so I have resigned with immediate effect.

I’d like to put on record my thanks to Rachel Minshull and Mike Dixon for their support and endless hard work that made the volunteer role at all possible.

David was in an impossible position. As a volunteer, going against the party’s legal advice would have been extremely risky. We should be grateful to him for his service in this role.

There will have to be a review of what happened because there is much to learn from this. It should be carried out in a spirit of transparency and humility and we should make sure that nothing like this ever happens again.

How we deal with the quotas going forward will need to be addressed too, but the willingness we have seen for all the key players to work together over the past few weeks is an extremely good sign.

As for the count today, we await announcements on how that will proceed. We should, I hope, discover the presidential and vice presidential results fairly quickly. The committee outcomes may be more complicated if the quotas come in to play.

In fact, as I write this, candidates have received an email confirming that the committee counts are delayed pending legal advice. Also we have a new returning officer, Crispin Allard.

You may have seen on our website and some social media channels that the FAP made a ruling on Monday that the alteration to articles 2.5 & 2.6 of the Constitution made by the Returning Officer on the 27th October was invalid.

This has raised questions about how we can conduct the count for the committee positions legally whilst also following the constitution.

In the last 24 hours, the Federal Returning Officer, David Crowther, has resigned stating that the FAP ruling makes his position untenable. The Federal Board is responsible for appointing a new Federal Returning Officer. I am please to tell you that the Federal Board has run an expedited process to appoint a replacement. Crispin Allard has been successfully appointed to this position and will be taking over with immediate effect.

Civica Election Services, our ballot partner, spent many hours testing the ballot last night for us and have informed us that there is more than one committee where quotas would need to be used to fulfill the constitution.

With this in mind, we have taken the decision to delay the count for the committee positions whilst the Party seeks further legal advice.

The counts delayed are: Federal Board; Federal Board Councillor; Federal Policy Committee; Federal Policy Committee Councillor; Federal Conference Committee; Federal International Relations Committee; Federal Council; Federal Council Councillor; and ALDE.

The counts for the President and Vice President positions will still go ahead this morning.

I know many of you registered to attend the counts via Zoom today. Many thanks for this but for obvious reasons will this will not be open.

We currently do not have a timescale for being able to run the counts. We will of course keep you all informed as we move forward.

Thank you for your understanding and patience whilst we find the best way forward.

We will bring you more news when we have it.

One final thought. The right wing press and news channels have been crowing over a recent employment tribunal decision in which a person who made some comments about Islam that many of us would consider extremely offensive. This hearing apparently ruled that “islam critical” comments are protected under the Equality Act. There will be a further hearing in February to determine whether the posts that that person made were within that threshold. If they find that they were, then it will be very clear that the Equality Act is no longer fit for its purpose in protecting marginalised groups of people and will need to be changed.

Whatever happens at that hearing, it’s clear that some people are trying to take us further through Pastor Martin Neismoller’s poem, First they came.

Federal Appeals Panel Decision

We find and declare as follows:

(i) The Returning Officer had no power to issue the statement published on the Party’s
website on 27 October 2025 purporting to ‘reinterpret’ and reword the ‘positive
action’ quotas contained in articles 2.5 and 2.6 of the FPC so as, in his words, to make
a ‘reasonable…set of drafting changes’ which were ‘a reasonable interpretation of the
constitution’s intent’.

(ii) The objective meaning of the language of the relevant constitutional provisions was
not that which the Returning Officer expressed in the statement.

(iii) The Constitution may only be amended under the procedure provided for at article
2.10 thereof, by two-thirds of members voting in Party Conference.

(iv) As a matter of contract law and constitutional governance, the Returning Officer is
bound to apply the Constitution as adopted by Party Conference unless to do so would
infringe the law of the land.

(v) If and to the extent that applying the quotas in those articles would constitute,
promote or provide for actionable discrimination against individual candidates with a
protected characteristic for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010 (‘EqA’), they will as
a matter of law be unenforceable against them or party staff and officers by operation
of s.142(1) of that Act, and the Returning Officer must disapply them in apparent such
cases under article 2.7 of the FPC and to comply with the EqA. The Returning Officer
must act in good faith on his own legal advice (if any), on a case-by-case basis or, if he
is advised that they intrinsically ‘promote or provide for’ unlawful discrimination, as a
matter of principle.

(vi) The wording in article 2.5 referring to self-identification and non-binary people
cannot be severed so as to leave that clause making grammatical sense applying the
‘blue pencil test’ established in case law, and so the entire clause must be applied or
(where unenforceable) disapplied as a whole.

(vii) If severance would both be required by the operation of s.142 the Equality Act
2010 and would operate to save the remainder of article 2.6(c) – which will be a matter
for the Returning Officer to determine for himself in light of any legal advice– then
short of total disapplication, the following words in that clause could be deleted under
the ‘blue pencil test’ whilst still making grammatical sense:
– the words following ‘orientations’ up to the full-stop, or
– the words from ‘be’ to the end of that clause excepting the word ‘trans’
(interpreting that term to mean solely those with the protected characteristic of
gender reassignment for the purpose of s.7(1) of the EqA applying the objective
definition set out therein).

(viii) In applying constitutional quotas, and in determining whether candidates have
‘protected characteristics’ for the purposes of avoiding prohibited discrimination for
the purpose of arts 2.4 and 2.7 of the FPC and EqA, the Returning Officer must in good
faith request and act upon reasonably relevant, accurate and adequate information
precisely addressing the specific constitutional criteria and legislatively protected
characteristics concerned, and give all candidates a fair opportunity to avail of quotas
for which they are eligible. For instance, in considering a characteristic defined as sex
at birth or sexual orientation, he must in good faith request and (if information is
volunteered by the candidate or discrimination is otherwise apparent to him) apply
data about those characteristics as defined in the legislation, and not ‘gender identity’.

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