Write for us!Political debate
It’s Complicated and Superficial Knowledge Doesn’t Help
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Any serious discussion of the Israeli Palestinian conflict risks becoming incomplete when it treats the Palestinian Nakba as the only refugee tragedy born from the collapse of the British Mandate and the wars that followed. The suffering of Palestinian Arabs in 1948 was profound and historically significant. Hundreds of thousands were displaced during a brutal conflict whose consequences remain unresolved today. But modern discussion often overlooks an equally consequential human tragedy: the destruction of ancient Jewish communities across the Arab and wider Middle Eastern world. Tragedies affected both communities Between roughly 800,000 and 1,000,000 Jews fled, were expelled, or were…
Thought‑Terminating Clichés Are the New Normal
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Over the past week I have spent some time on Blue Sky. Partly because this is where a lot of Lib Dem MPs are now posting and I wanted to read their reactions to the EHRC guidance (in summary they have been largely silent except for the Women and Equalities spokesperson who condemned it as a huge step back for human rights – which I disagree with). However, I ended up in several conversations with trans activists on the app who are making the same kind of arguments that failed on Twitter (X) three years ago. One of the key…
Where Are All the Women?
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In most political Parties in the UK, men outnumber women, but in the Liberal Democrats the ratio of men to women is particularly bleak, worse even than Reform. Research published in December 2025 makes sobering reading for the Party: 33% of Lib Dem members are female, 39% of Reform members, and women’s membership of other Parties is much higher. Obviously our deputy leader and several of our MPs are women, and our one successful candidate in the Welsh Senedd election is a woman. But this success masks a growing crisis in female involvement in the Party at all levels. The…
Comment Is Free – if You Know Where to Look
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Censorship is central to the mission of LibDemVoice, the long established “independent” party platform. Its moderators guard their single interpretation of the party’s vision with passion. Opinions that question their beliefs and views from members who suffer from independent thought do not sully their website. This has become such a problem that many members no longer read its articles and those who do rarely attempt to respond, because they know that their contributions will end up in the bin. It was John Stuart Mill who famously wrote: “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of…
The Ballot and the Manipulated: Has Democracy Lost Its Way?
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Other than being friends, Dan and I don’t have much in common on paper. He was born into poverty in Liverpool, left school at sixteen, joined the army, protested nukes at Greenham Common, drove taxis, raised a couple of children alone on next to nothing, and arrived at philosophy and anarchism through sheer intellect led bloody-minded curiosity. He’s precisely the kind of intellect that Stalin would have sent to Siberia. Me on the other hand, I came from a middle-class background that turned out to be as fractured as any – a mother who resented me, an early exit from…
Proportional Representation Is Back on the Agenda but Which Kind?
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When arguing for proportional representation in a country where voters have become used to first past the post, we hit the problem that voters expect their MP to be a good constituency MP, that is a kind of social worker who will sort out their problems if they’re unfairly treated by the state. Proportional representation can’t happen when you have seats returning one representative. Hence, under proportional representation, voters don’t get a single representative dependent exclusively on their votes – except with Additional Member Proportional, the system used in London and Scotland, they can. In London, the Assembly has 25…
Who Gets Heard? Why British Governments Listen to Business — and What It Costs the Rest of Us
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Earlier this month, the government quietly closed one of the more brazen rackets in modern British public life. For years, bots and third-party companies had been bulk-buying driving test slots from the DVSA and reselling them to desperate learner drivers for up to £500 eight times the official price of £62. New rules now mean only the learner themselves can book, change or cancel their test. Simple. Effective. Long overdue. But here’s the question worth sitting with: why did it take so long? This wasn’t a hidden problem. The Driving and Vehicle Standards Agency knew. Ministers knew. The waiting lists…
Another Referendum?
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The problem of asking people what they want in a referendum is that after the event, those happy with the result declare that the matter now settled and those who do not like the result then want another referendum at a later date. The problem for the Liberal Democrats is the party has held both views at the same time, following the Scottish Independence referendum and then the Brexit vote. In Scotland, the Party was happy with the result after the Independence Referendum, as the party campaigned strongly against independence, although it was estimated that 40% of Liberal Democrat voters…
The Scottish Parliament Election
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The recent elections to the Scottish Parliament saw an increase from 4 to 10 Liberal Democrat MSPs at Holyrood, compared to 58 for the SNP, 17 each for Labour and Reform, 15 Greens and 12 Conservatives. Now the sixth largest party in the Scottish Parliament, the Liberal Democrats have fallen from 17 MSPs in the first Parliament in 1999, when they entered a coalition to form the first devolved government with Labour 27 years ago. In the following two elections the Lib Dems only lost one seat. The party has celebrated this recent result as a great success, but what…
The Commissioner Who Lost His Neutrality…
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There is a principle at the heart of British policing so fundamental that it predates the modern democratic state: the constable, whatever their rank, enforces the law impartially and takes no political sides. It is this principle that distinguishes a police service from a political instrument. It is also the principle that Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has, by any honest assessment, repeatedly and seriously compromised. The evidence is not a matter of interpretation. It is a pattern of documented public statements, selective enforcement decisions, and a conspicuous failure to fulfil a clear legal duty, one that sits in…
The Silence They Cannot Buy: Iran, Antisemitism and the Weaponisation of Fear
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Something has gone badly wrong with British political discourse, and the elections on Thursday will be the first formal reckoning with it. Three threads run through the disorder, and they share a single pattern: a political and media establishment using manufactured crises, convenient attributions, and the deliberate conflation of dissent with hatred to avoid accountability for its own failures. The threads are distinct. The logic connecting them is not. The boy who cried wolf (the wolf being Iran) When a seventeen-year-old lad is found with a petrol can after ambulances have been torched, and when a man with evident and…
From Blair’s ‘Tough on Crime/Tough on the Causes of Crime’ to Placing Sticking Plasters Over Gaping Wounds Under Starmer — How Britain’s Shoplifting Crackdown Exposes a Justice System Built to Protect Property Over People, and Power Over Accountability
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On Monday, Prime Minister Keir Starmer stood before the USDAW shop workers’ union and declared an end to the shoplifting “free-for-all.” It was the kind of speech that plays well in a headline cycle: tough, purposeful, protective of honest working people against those who “cheat the system.” The government announced stiffer penalties for shoplifters, 3,000 additional neighbourhood police officers, a £5 million specialist intelligence unit targeting retail crime gangs, and a new standalone offence for assaulting a shop worker. The statistics underpinning the announcement were, at best, modest. According to the Office for National Statistics, shoplifting offences fell from 516,611…
Access Denied: How the Liberal Democrat Leadership is Sidelining Women
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Last week saw another interview with Ed Davey telling a Lib Dem trans activist that he had been listening to trans people in the Party after the Supreme Court ruling on the meaning of woman in the Equality Act. Yet another illustration of the leadership jumping straight to placation mode when something upsets the trans lobby… Part of a pattern The 2022 changes to the unlawful Lib Dem Definition of Transphobia are another case in point. The Party held a special meeting with trans people just prior to amending the Definition. Several were invited to the House of Commons to…
The Road not Taken
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In the autumn of 1986, Margaret Thatcher’s government abolished road service licensing for local bus services outside London (commonly called deregulation). The logic was market orthodoxy: competition would drive down costs, encourage innovation, and serve passengers better than the inefficiencies of public ownership ever had. Almost four decades later, the verdict is in, and it is damning. Bus journeys across England have fallen from 4.6 billion in 2009 to 3.6 billion in 2024. Outside London, bus mileage has collapsed by 29% compared to 2005. In the north of England, the decline is starker still: Transport for the North reports that…
Illiberalism in Defence of Liberalism
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There is a long-standing mutual wariness between the Liberal Democrats and the continuing Liberal Party that anyone who has spent time around either organisation will recognise. What is perhaps surprising is that the sense of grievance seems, on balance, to run more strongly from the Liberal Democrat side than the other way around. This has sometimes led to accusations which, examined in the cold light of day, don’t quite survive reasonable scrutiny. They also seem to focus on one side’s behaviour rather than understanding that it is a two-way street. It would be churlish, in the first instance, not to…
Childhood Is Precious – It’s Time to Tackle Online Harm
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Many people in the Party – especially at the grassroots – are totally unaware of the extreme libertarian approach that has been adopted to a whole range of issues that are most accurately framed as ‘sexual exploitation.’ From pornography to prostitution there has been a laissez-faire attitude and a presumption that somehow these matters are all about individual choice and can even be framed as ‘empowering.’ Of course, the majority of the sexual exploitation in these cases is against women and by men (for example in the UK 88% of people in prostitution are women and buyers are 95% +…
How Not to Make a Magna Carta
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A “New Magna Carta” was one of Ed Davey’s brand-new announcements at his speech to the Spring Conference on Sunday (15 March 2026). Let’s set aside the obvious question of how this has suddenly appeared as a new LibDem policy proposal without any consultation with the membership, and what this means for internal party democracy. After all, few Liberal Democrats would disagree with the principle of a written constitution. And it is certainly consistent with liberal values. But was what Ed was proposing really a good idea? I’m going to say no. It looks to me like he has taken…
The French Revolution and Human Rights – Early Steps Toward Modern Liberalism
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The impression most people have of the French Revolution is a one of sensible moderates who were overcome by the radical extremists of Robespierre who then drowned the Revolution in blood. Jonathan Israel doesn’t dispute that part of the story but places on center stage a group of democratic republicans who briefly gained control of the Revolution and came close to establishing the first true modern democracy – before Robespierre staged the coup that led to them being sent to the guillotine. The Roots of the Revolution in the Radical Enlightenment Johnathan Israel has made the Enlightenment his main specialisation.…
