Beating Reform

What makes us different

With the Labour government becoming deeply unpopular so quickly and with Reform on the rise, the need for us to expand into being a credible force across more of the country has never been more pressing.

We are the party that stands up against populist extremists, willing to call out Donald Trump and willing to take on Nigel Farage. 

With the pernicious volume of extremist views - aided by Elon Musk’s love affair with extremism - there’s a crucial role for the Liberal Democrats in being willing and proud to stand against such extremism. 

While both Reform and the Conservatives spend so much time trying to excuse it or benefit from it, and Labour prevaricates, we simply oppose it. 

Rather than putting our energies into telling people how many fellow Brits we dislike and relentlessly seeking to stoke anger and division, our focus is on improving people’s lives through improving our NHS, fixing social care, reigning in the excesses of water companies and tackling the cost of living crisis. 

Central to growing our economy - to fund the better public services we need - is improving our trade relations with the European Union. Those promises made by Brexit campaigners have turned to dust. They broke their promises - and our economy. 

That is why continuing to up our game is so important. We can see in local council by-elections week in, week out, the results where we do. We consistently can take on and beat Reform, even in wards where we were not in contention the previous time, while Labour and the Conservatives nearly always lose out to Reform. 

That should give us optimism - and spur us to do more.

Balanced media coverage shouldn’t just be for election time

The BBC is our national broadcaster, people expect and deserve balanced news coverage.

It's clear to everyone the BBC is giving Nigel Farage and Reform far too much coverage. Reform UK only have 4 of the 250 opposition MPs, but Nigel Farage accounts for 60% of the BBC website's mentions of opposition leaders.

The BBC should have to balance its political news so it doesn’t boost Nigel Farage’s dangerous, divisive politics.

There are special Ofcom rules on balance at election time, these rules should apply all year round so people can trust the BBC.

That is the message for the new Liberal Democrat ‘Balance the BBC’ petition, which you can sign and share here.

(As usual, the data from this petition flows into the usual party systems, so local parties can integrate it into their work too.)

Internal elections

The big three-yearly round of Federal Party elections - such as for my successor as President and also to various party committees - is now underway. All members for who the party has the correct, opted-in email address (important caveats!) are receiving a series of emails from the Returning Officer and from Civica (previously known as Electoral Reform Services), the firm who is running the online nominations and voting system for us. 

Please do also let others in your local party or party body know about that, as the most common reason for people not receiving the emails is that either they’ve changed their email address or they opted out of party emails a while back but now are happy to hear from us again.

The contact address for resolving any queries about not getting these emails is returning.officer@libdems.org.uk. 

Our new London HQ

During September the Liberal Democrat HQ in Vincent Square is moving to First Floor, 66 Buckingham Gate, London, SW1E 2AU. A 2 minute walk from St James’s Park Station, it has extra meeting room space and means we will continue to provide staff with a modern office space to use. It is a long way from when I took up post at the start of 2020 and was kindly warned to be careful about the hole in the floor under the desk I was sat at!

Post will continue to be forwarded from the previous address. So while membership forms, imprints on posters and so on should be updated over time, there is no immediate need to bin items with Vincent Square on them.

Local party officers survey

Thank you to everyone who took part in this survey about how we can make life easier or more effective for voluntary local party officers. It is part of our work to implement the General Election Review.

From the initial analysis, it looks like the main themes running through the responses are:

• concerns over increasing complexity and workload - and hence desire for measures to help with these
• desire to share the workload - and calls for this to be made easier
• openness to a lot more standardisation - though with an important need for flexibility and with standardisation seen as something to opt into when it helps rather than something to be enforced
• concerns over expectations and appreciation - does our way of working expect too much of some volunteers, and do local party officers feel sufficiently valued by the wider party?

The party’s training team is already at work on significantly expanding our training for local party officers, and other action is to come, including looking at how to run a new set of ‘Local Party Officer Awards’, so we can properly recognise the vital contributions made by those who volunteer for these roles.

Improving our Conflicts of Interest policy

The party’s constitution gives the Federal Board the task of setting a Conflicts of Interest policy to be used across Federal Committees. Following a review by the Federal Audit and Scrutiny Committee (FASC), the Board has agreed both some updates to the policy, and also a training plan to help meeting chairs understand when they need to act and how they should.

The updates focus on issues such as greater transparency over when an interest has been declared and why, along with reflecting that increasingly committee discussions happen through channels such as WhatsApp or Slack rather than just at face-to-face meetings.

We are often critical of conflicts of interest in other parties or public life, so it is important we continue to have high standards ourselves.

The new policy will come into force just after the current round of internal elections and the policy will be included in the induction information for committee members.

The budget and other Board work

The Board has also agreed the principles for the Federal Party’s 2026 budget. This includes continuing the financial pattern from the last Parliament,using a post-general election surplus to invest in the early part of the Parliament so that we have a full staff team in place. 

As we saw last time round, that both ensures we can support significant elections during the first half of the Parliament, and also provides the proper long-term run-in for teams to build up ahead of the next Westminster general election. It means running a budget deficit over the next few years as we run down that surplus, before balancing the budget by the end of the Parliament.

Our deficit this time will peak at a lower level than in the last Parliament, so overall this plan also continues our progress towards longer-term financial stability and strength for the party.

An important part of that will be the new legacy fund, designed for people who wish to leave money to the party knowing that it will be committed to our long-term future. Thank you to everyone involved in setting it up - including members who voted for the relevant measure at a previous Federal Conference. Watch out for news on the fund later in the year.

The Board also filled a casual vacancy on the Disciplinary Sub-Group (DSG) by appointing Daniel Mancini.

Do you have questions on any of this report, or other Lib Dem matters? Then please drop me a line on president@libdems.org.uk. Do also get in touch if you would like to invite me to do a Zoom call with your local party or party body.