Published by The i Paper (22nd September, 2025)
The Liberal Democrats are feeling smug. While their mainstream rivals to right and left struggle to counter the rise of Reform UK and plummet in the polls, they arrived at their annual party conference in Bournemouth boosted by the capture of three more councils at the local elections. They have been restored to third place in the House of Commons with 72 MPs after achieving the best general election result by a third party for a century. And a dramatic surge in hard-right populism – promoting a creed of intolerance, nativism and economic protectionism – offers a platform for strong voices to defend liberalism as others flee their traditional political terrain in panic.
These should be the best of times for the resurgent Lib Dems. Labour is struggling in government under a beleaguered Prime Minister, beset by scandal and plumbing new depths of unpopularity. Just 14 months after Sir Keir Starmer’s landslide electoral success, there is muttering about a coup already in his ranks. The Tories look increasingly irrelevant, suffering a string of defections to join Nigel Farage’s forces and unable to shake off the toxic dual legacy of Brexit and a disastrous 14 years in Downing Street. Meanwhile the Lib Dems’ own leader is comparatively popular for a politician and has won rightful respect after detailing his role as a family carer.
ibSo why are they desperate to suddenly remind us about their existence? Sir Ed Davey arrived at the conference twirling a baton at the head of a marching band in one of his trademark publicity stunts, fresh from calling for sanctions on Elon Musk over the tech tycoon’s inflammatory comments to a far-right protest march and rejecting the King’s invitation to attend the state banquet for President Donald Trump. Then his party sought to “reclaim patriotism” from the hard right by waving flags and singing “Land of Hope and Glory” – while pandering to their politics by demanding use of emergency wartime powers to clear the asylum backlog and empty hotels.
It is, of course, easy to clown around for cameras, call for vague sanctions against a despised foreign billionaire and decline to eat chicken ballotine at Windsor Castle with an unpopular United States President. Yet it is hard to shake the feeling that for all their electoral success, complacent Liberal Democrats are failing to respond to the reshaping of our political landscape in this age of populism as many voters seek out alternatives to a self-serving elite in Westminster that seems unable to resolve Britain’s pressing problems.
And this failure to cut through, this lacklustre effort to defend liberalism and offer serious policy solutions to key state failures, plays its part in the boosting of the corrosive, divisive and extreme voices on both flanks.
For a party that now has so many MPs – and stands on the correct side of many key debates, from Europe though to the urgent need to salvage social care – the Lib Dems have performed rather poorly since Labour took power. They have been drowned out in public discourse by Farage, a shameless populist hustler with just a handful of MPs, while the arrival of Zack Polanski, the shallow but energetic new left-wing leader of the Greens, only serves to underline their torpor and timidity. The party strategy is to sit tight, play it safe, and seek to pick up more seats from the collapsing Conservative Party and imploding Labour government. But is this really sufficient?
This has been a successful electoral strategy due to the vagaries of our outmoded electoral system in a new era of multi-party politics. In the first election fought as Lib Dems in 1992, they won almost one in five votes but only 20 seats. Davey’s smart targeting of shire constituencies – nicknamed the “Gail’s strategy” after focusing on comfortable areas containing the high-end bakery chain – delivered them 72 MPs last year despite only securing support from one in eight voters.
Now they must defend these seats while focusing their sights on mostly Tory-held seats to continue their growth. So as the Conservatives lurch even further right and shrivel under the ominous shadow of Reform, the Lib Dems plan to leapfrog them into second place despite averaging a paltry 14 per cent in the polls.
This ambition is potentially achievable thanks to the astonishing self-immolation of the Conservatives in the wake of Brexit. An arrogant party that assumed it was our country’s natural government has handed its heartlands in Middle England to a rival that is positioned on the centre-left.
Yet far from confronting their mistakes, let alone apologising for causing immense damage to their nation, the Tories simply continue striding behind Farage and his hero Donald Trump into the fetid swamp of hard-right populism under another dismal leader. So they continue to shed moderate voters, assist the rise of Reform and slide in the polls. It is bizarre that even now they cannot see the damage done to their own cause by echoing a demagogue who is openly intent on their destruction.
Yet this squabble on the right demonstrates that we live in an era of desperate need for powerful proclamation of liberal values. Democracy, free speech, human rights and unfettered trade are coming under attack on all sides. And there are votes to be won from disgruntled voters across the political spectrum as the traditional two-party duopoly dissolves.
There is no room for caution when hard-right populism is surging in tandem with the racist far-right, inflamed by the unregulated wild west of social media and hostile nations seeking to destroy our political system. Otherwise what is the point of this party? As William Gladstone, the former Liberal Party leader, said, nothing that is morally wrong can be politically right. His successors should stop the stunts, live up their party’s name and start mounting a vigorous defence of both liberalism and democracy.