Tag Archives: uk politics

Jack Meredith

What democratic maturity asks of political parties

By Jack Meredith | Tue 3rd February 2026 - 10:25 am

“A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living”.

These were the words of John Dewey, from his 1916 book, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education.

Without prior knowledge of Dewey’s work, I found that he captured my belief in democracy and its purpose in just one sentence. I have never believed that democracy is simply ticking a box or a group of people simply making decisions on behalf of others. It is about individuals making a collective decision about how their country should be run, what their society should look like, which views are acceptable to express and share, and which should be condemned. That decision changes over time. For political parties, this means democratic responsibility does not end when votes are counted. Accepting defeat is only the beginning; what follows is a test of patience, humility, and long-term commitment.

I also believe that political parties can never dictate society’s direction, no matter how much they want to. They must accept that, in a democracy, they are participants, not directors or masters. This means society can move in directions parties resist, and the response cannot be to burn down the house or to abandon principles in a rush to recover lost ground, but instead to embrace the loss and ask, “What can we learn from this?” It’s very easy to say, “Well, the voters were prejudiced?”, and there very well may be a degree of truth to that thought. But it doesn’t mean parties allow themselves to stay in a permanent sulk or adopt those views. Blaming the electorate and abandoning principles are, in different ways, attempts to avoid the more complex work of democratic reflection.

For the Liberal Democrats, that means democratic responsibility does not end when votes are counted; it also includes how we behave, organise, and learn in the space between elections.

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Lord William Wallace

Coalition Government again?

By Lord William Wallace | Fri 2nd January 2026 - 4:22 pm

Just before the Christmas recess I sat down in the Commons cafeteria opposite a Conservative front-bencher whom I knew.  ‘There will have to be a coalition after the next election,’ he told me, ‘bringing you together with Labour and the Greens.’  I realised after absorbing this that he was effectively telling me that the Conservatives could not revive in time to hope for a majority, and that the prospect of either a Reform majority or a Tory-Reform coalition gave him nightmares.

It’s 3½ years at most until the next general election.  Plenty of crises and shifts in political moods may intervene to alter the pattern that opinion polls and local by-elections have indicated over the past year – of five parties between 10% and 30% in England, with six or more competitive in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.  But it’s wise to anticipate the likelihood of an indecisive outcome.  We would probably then have to negotiate – and successfully manage – a multiparty government.  The current Labour Government is floundering in large part because the campaign it fought to win its majority did not provide it with the programme needed for successful government in difficult domestic and international circumstances.  The circumstances that will face the incoming government – of whatever colours – in 2029 are likely to be even more difficult than in 2024.

Many readers of LibDem Voice will groan at the thought of entering another coalition.  But we’re in politics to promote liberal principles, and the most effective way to promote them is to be in power, locally and nationally.  So we need to learn lessons from the 2010-15 coalition and from earlier attempts to cooperate with other parties.

To start with, we need to admit that Liberals are instinctively too inclined to trust others, to be optimistic about outcomes and to believe in rational negotiation. David Steel was naively confident that Callaghan would reward the support we offered his shaky government in 1977-8.   In 1996-8 Paddy Ashdown was far too trusting of Tony Blair, not appreciating the hard and partisan men behind him.  Nick Clegg set out to demonstrate that coalition government would work, without being sufficiently suspicious of those behind Cameron who wanted to push through their Conservative agenda while leaving the Liberal Democrats to take as much of the blame as possible.  Next time we have to be harder, more suspicious and more politically partisan.

In the 2010 coalition government the 53 Liberal Democrat MPs served to close the small gap between the 306 Tory seats and an overall majority: too much of an imbalance to stop most Conservative ministers behaving as if they were still the majority party, let alone to change significantly the working methods of Downing Street, Whitehall and Westminster.  Parliamentary numbers matter enormously in our flawed political system.  If no party in the government has much above 200 MPs, and we have gained well over 100, we will be better placed from the outset.  Winning more seats is a necessary precondition for effective shared government.

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What liberals need to know from Reform UK conference

By Conference Tourist | Thu 18th September 2025 - 11:45 am

Reform UK held their party conference at the Birmingham NEC at the start of the month. Delegates queued for an hour to get in on the first day as an estimated 6,000 activists attended.

The mood amongst delegates could not have been more buoyant – this is a party that believes it is going places. Delegates who had been to a previous Reform conference said it was unrecognisable compared to last year’s event.

News organisations, especially GB News, were everywhere. Wherever you looked, the branding and presentation was highly professional. Whatever outsiders might think, this is a party that believes it can form the next Government. Both the polls and the bookies’ odds suggest they might be right!

Obviously we’re some distance from the next General Election, but this Conference showed that the party is thinking seriously about how it would USE the power of Government.

First up, Nigel Farage appointed Zia Yusuf to be Reform’s Policy Chief and he will develop the policies for a Reform Government across the board – which will not necessarily be tied to positions they held at the last General Election. Reform’s membership or conference will likely have little say on what those policies will be – this is an incredibly top-down party.

But even without the details of the policies, there’s some things that are crystal clear about how a Reform UK administration would start.

Reform UK wants to restore ‘Parliamentary democracy’. What they mean by that is removing anything that might restrict a Government’s power to take action – annoying things such as the law, human rights, experts, scientists, senior civil servants, scrutiny, oversight, checks and balances and so on. They’ve got the Project 2025 Trump playbook and they will bring it to Westminster if they win power.

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Alan Grant

Why Liberals should keep one eye on Corbyn’s new wheeze

By Alan Grant | Thu 17th July 2025 - 11:55 am

Budge up! We need to make room at the British political table for a new guest. Or, an old guest wearing a different hat which, in these days of UKIPs, Brexit parties, and Reform Uks (Reforms UK?), happens a lot.

It seems that former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn will return to leading a political party. We didn’t hear it directly from him of course, but from fellow left-wing MP Zarah Sultana who will be joining him in this new, yet unnamed, venture.

At the time, it seemed Sultana had jumped the gun and announced the move without Corbyn’s approval – perhaps he was present, whether he was involved remains unclear.

But why should liberals, capital letter or lower case, care about what’s going on behind the newest set of curtains in the dysfunctional cul-de-sac of UK politics?

Well, because we like balance and particularly balancing opportunities with obligations; and the new party of the hard-left, which some are already calling “Jezbollah”, presents us with both.

First, the opportunity.

Labour has had a rough year or so in government. The smooth, slick, optimistic Keir Starmer that won the General Election is no more. Even though the Tories were about as popular as the Ebola virus at the time, Labour’s victory was impressive and showed that a sensibly led Labour party can win.

But since then, it’s all gone a bit wrong.

There are some Labour folks who still cling to the idea that it is some grand plan by the leadership to dispose of the difficult stuff (cuts, winter fuel, immigration etc) in the beginning so that when the next election arrives, it’ll be all free puppies and rising GDP.

What they’ve got is plummeting popularity and inflation at 3.6 percent.

Labour is one major scandal away from asking the Ebola virus to share who does its PR and now the ghost of May Day past is haunting their feast. One set of polls even has Starmer’s Labour neck and brass neck with the People’s Front of Kneecap and Bob Vylan.

For Liberals, a chance presents. We can rally behind our shared values of individualism, freedom, and community to show disenfranchised soft-right Labour voters that there is a home for them with us. They do not have to choose between Sir Keir’s downbeat, depressing round table and Jeremy Corbyn’s wonky picnic table where you may well end up sat next to someone from Hamas.

There is an alternative with Liberal Democrats.

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Lord William Wallace

William Wallace writes: How should we play five party politics?

By Lord William Wallace | Wed 28th May 2025 - 12:00 pm

May’s local elections confirmed what opinion polls had been indicating for several months: that England now has five political parties attracting between 10% and 30% of voters.  Nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales make six serious parties: an even more crowded field.  

Of course it’s possible that over the next four years UK politics might return to its traditional two-party model.  But that doesn’t look likely.  Neither Labour nor the Conservatives any longer command the automatic support of a large proportion of voters, nor the mass membership that used to provide local organisations throughout the country. Other divides apart from class and wealth cut across old loyalties: young versus old, graduates versus school leavers, libertarians versus socially-engaged.  The old dream that a ‘realignment of the left’ might enable us to replace Labour, and the more recent hope that we might push the Conservatives out of contention as one of the two main parties both look illusory.  The result of the 2029 election may largely depend on how effectively different parties target specific constituencies, and whether the Conservatives and Reform can construct a formal or informal electoral pact. And it might then require more than two parties to form a majoritarian government.

After our experience between 2010 and 2015, many Liberal Democrats will groan at the prospect of any form of participation in a government in which we were not the largest party.  But we can’t dictate what election outcome we would prefer, and we need to be prepared to make the best of a different pattern of politics as it emerges.  Established party systems have withered in most other democratic states, as similar social and economic changes have transformed their electorates.  Say that we double our number of MPs in 2029, to become a major player in any post-election scenario, perhaps with more MPs than one of the two ‘established’ parties: what would we do then?  We’ve just seen an opinion poll put us ahead of the Tories.  We HAVE to think ahead.

I suggest some themes that ought to feed into our thinking and campaigning if the current pattern of disillusion with Labour and the Tories persists.

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Zagham Farhan

I went to a Reform UK rally. This is what I learned.

By Zagham Farhan | Sun 14th July 2024 - 1:00 pm

Bored in Oxford, three weeks after the end of term and with everyone else having gone home, I decided to take an impulsive day trip to see the Reform UK rally in Birmingham on the last Sunday before election day. I’m not quite sure what I was expecting, as a committed Liberal Democrat and a son of immigrants, I was most certainly apprehensive. I was viewing it essentially as a learning experience, a chance to discover what had driven these people towards Nigel Farage’s newest political entity. 

After an extremely pleasant National Express bus trip and getting slightly lost in the NEC- I found myself in a huge hall, which I later learnt houses around 5000 people. There was an unmistakeable buzz in the room. I got the feeling that the people there felt like they were witnessing something really important. I doubt many of them had been to a political event before, and they’d been uniquely drawn in by Reform. I saw lots of England football shirts, and even a couple of Make America Great Again hats. It was a notably old audience, it seemed like the vast majority were 50+ with an assortment of young men too. I saw very few young women, and very few people from ethnic minorities.

The event was extremely well run, with food and drink stalls, and they even managed to drive their election bus in somehow. The speaker line up consisted of Chief Exec Paul Oakden, Ann Widdecombe, major donor Zia Yusuf (I recommend that you watch this speech in particular), Richard Tice and of course Nigel Farage. When my friends realised where I was off to, I was surprised at the number of messages I got saying ‘stay safe.’ I had never considered that I might be at risk at this event, but apparently a number of my friends (all students) thought that I would be utterly unwelcome. I didn’t find that to be the case at all. Everyone was exceedingly polite, and while I didn’t make any effort to engage in any political conversation, I’m sure they would have been more than willing. 

The speeches centred on a few central political themes- the Tories have failed, the state is too big, we should be patriotic, immigration is too high, there are only two genders. ‘Put British people first’ was uttered repeatedly. Each speaker got a rapturous reception from the audience. 

I think they were translating anger into messaging in a way that other parties failed to do in this election. These are people who haven’t seen palpable economic growth in years, seen the culture of their cities changing, and their public services creaking. Reform have managed to direct that anger, to give them a sense that the ‘British’ people had been ignored, and that they present the answer. 

I share very little politically with Reform UK. The way that they’ve continuously demonised immigrants has been a significant contributor to the horrible nature of our public discourse on the issue. Their attempts to erase trans people are deeply damaging. Some of their candidates demonstrated the very worst of what British politics has to offer. Their rhetoric is dangerous, and we need to ensure that we challenge it at every turn. I’m sure many of our nation’s bigots and racists showed up to vote for them on the 4th July; but I also think that many of their voters are just normal people, completely disillusioned with our politics. 

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Patrick Maxwell

Brexit cannot be the sole issue of the Lib Dems

By Patrick Maxwell | Mon 7th January 2019 - 10:26 am

As the 29th of March comes ominously closer, the eerie reality of the political situation in Westminster is slowly becoming clearer. The Commons is in deadlock, with none of the solutions proposed gaining signification support on the green benches and party infighting rife. This is, however, nothing inherently new.

When faced with such monumental events such as these, the responsible and pragmatic response from our politicians would be a compromise.

A ‘Government of National Unity’ has been proposed, but in such times, the idea of unity it is, as always, an illusion. The country is evidently deeply divided, as is Parliament. No …

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Caron Lindsay

Big ideas abound at SLF Conference

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 29th July 2018 - 3:24 pm

Yesterday was a fantastic day out at SLF Conference. This annual get-together is always thought-provoking food for the social liberal soul. At this point I should say a massive thank you to the organisers for a great day – and particularly to our own Mary Reid who does so much to make the event a success every year.

Layla Moran followed in the footsteps of the likes of Nick Clegg, Tim Farron and Vince Cable in delivering the Beveridge Memorial Lecture. She’s been in the papers a lot this week with talk of un-named people supposedly trying to support the idea of her being leader. There is no suggestion that these moves have anything to do with her and it seems very unlikely that a new MP with a majority of 800 would be preoccupied with such things. In the last session of the day, she emphatically and genuinely endorsed Vince, saying he is doing brilliantly and is “the grown-up in the room” of British politics. Actually, I think our Golden Dozen are probably the most united, together group of Lib Dem MPs I have ever known. They are all working really well together.

One of the many reasons it’s great to have her as education spokesperson is that you can tell how driven she is. She knows from practical experience what the problems are and has some great ideas about how to fix them. Her frustration at being told to concentrate on the average children and leave the bright to teach themselves and the ones who needed help most to flounder so that the school could do well in league tables led her to find another job.

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