Write for us!Op-eds
Opinion and commentary on UK politics and Liberal Democrat ideas.
A Liberal Approach to Our Broken Energy Policies: Fantasy vs. Reality of Net Zero 2050
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Ever since the Climate Change Act 2008 was first passed, we have seen an ideological obsession with Net Zero 2050 to the detriment of both the public purse and the supply of our energy. I contend that the obsession with Net Zero at any cost, has had a severe impact on both our economy and our source of energy and I will spell out the course of action that should have been taken over the last twenty years or so. This is a strategy we can still pivot towards as we move towards to 2050. Net Zero – an unhealthy…
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…
Welfare in the 21st Century: From Hand Down to Hand Up
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The total welfare bill in the UK, has risen from approximately £100 billion in the early noughties, to £333.6 billion in 2025-26, a more than a threefold increase in just over twenty years, It now comprises 10% of our total GDP. It is expected to hit £400 billion by the end of the decade, according to a recent report by the Centre for Policy Studies. This unsustainable growth in welfare spending needs tackling. In this article, I am going to advocate a welfare system which is simpler, fairer and ensures that working pays better than welfare dependency. Simplification Currently there…
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…
A Liberal Approach to Solving the Housing Crisis: A Free‑Market Solution
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The housing crisis in the UK has become characterised by a severe shortage of supply, record homelessness and soaring rents. Consecutive governments (both Labour and Conservative) have failed to solve many of the issues due to a lack of concerted effort to analyse beyond the headline issues and come up with solutions which favour the free market – this is precisely what aim to do in this article. I will be focusing on three of these deeper issues: Planning restrictions Planning restrictions severely constrain housing supply, creating structural deficits that drive up property prices. In the UK, restrictive land designations…
A Track Less Discovered: A Novel Approach to Railways in the 21st Century
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The Labour Government’s latest attempt at reforming railways in Britain by bringing them back into public ownership, without actually spelling out in detail how this will work in relation to the Great British Railways project, suggests a lack of imagination on the part of the government. It’s time we moved beyond the complication of having a rail franchising system operating within a state-owned railway structure. Britain can and should be more ambitious and therefore opt instead for ‘Open Access Rail’ throughout the system. The bankrupt Rail Franchising System Ever since the inception of rail privatisation in 1996 under John Major’s…
Speaking About Democracy in the House of Lords
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I spoke in the House of Lords on Monday about the irony of raising issues of democracy in what is now an entirely appointed chamber. My expectation when I entered the House in 1999, as a nominee of Paddy Ashdown, was that I would only serve for a few years before contesting elections for membership of the House in the promised, but never delivered, phase two of reform, promised after Tony Blair and Labour won the 1997 general election. Reform has been extremely slow I never thought that it would take 29 years to complete phase one, with the removal…
The Death of Local Democracy: How English Planning Reform Is Silencing Communities (and Why Almost Nobody in Power Seems to Mind)
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There is a particular kind of political sleight of hand that works best when performed quietly. Not in the dead of night, not through scandal, but through the patient accumulation of technical changes – each one framed as modernisation, each one a little harder to object to than the last, and each one moving power incrementally away from the people who are most affected by decisions and toward those who have the most to gain from making them. The Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 is one of the most significant examples of this in a generation. It received Royal Assent…
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…
The Electorate Fragments. What Does This Mean for the LibDems?
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There has been some soul searching in the party based on recent results. Before getting into that it is clear the electorate has fragmented, and in such a multi-party model the ceiling any party can reach will be lower than before. And the floor will also be lower as alternatives exist. Therefore, as a party, our expectations need to shift. Are our core values persuasive? But it feels like our party has no distinctive vision for change in the country. Our values include: Equality, Democracy, Community, Human Rights, Internationalism, Environmentalism. Many of those can be seen as the status quo,…
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…
A Liberal Approach to the State: A Twenty‑First Century Concept of the State’s Role
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Historically, liberals viewed the state with caution and perhaps even indifference. Classical Liberals (like me), argued for a state which is restricted by a codified constitution, separation of powers and respect for the rule of law. Ultimately, the state is there to serve the interest of individuals, not to control them. However, this concept of the state is restricted to a somewhat archaic way of thinking that emerged out of the enlightenment period of the 17th and 18th century, most notably from thinkers such as John Locke. However, over three hundred years later and with the incredible advancement of technology…
Netanyahu and Gaza – How Should Britain Respond?
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The Gaza Genocide has become an element in the long-planned continuation of the Greater Israel project, but it was initially an experiment. For Netanyahu, it was a test of the resolve of the western powers to uphold decades-old ideas about human rights and the ‘rules of war’ established after WWII, which were designed to protect civilians and outlaw the annexation of land occupied during hostilities. He must have been surprised when there was so little response when he started pushing the envelope, but as time went on it became apparent that with active American encouragement, and a more passive kind…
A Liberal Approach to Restructuring Local Government in England
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A few years back I was tasked by my party, namely The Liberal Party, in my capacity as chair of the policy sub-committee, to formulate policies for local governance. This was a subject I had not studied before and I soon realised what a fragmented and disjointed system it is. Hence, the need for reform. England has in some places up to four layers of Local Government (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all have one by contrast, namely unitary authorities) but by the same token, England is one of the most centralised states, certainly in Europe if not the OECD.…
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…
When Will the Party Give the Electorate a Reason to Vote for Us?
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Before the party gets too self-congratulatory (i.e. ‘eight years of gains’), a reminder. In the 48 years since the start of the Thatcher era there have been only eight in which the estimated national vote of the LibDems in local council elections has been lower than in 2026 (and that is if we accept the upper estimate of 16% rather than the lower one, 14%, in which case the number of years is four). Two of those years were 1979 (14%) and 1980 (13%). The worst run was between 2012 and 2016 when the estimated proportions of the national polls…
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…
Time for a Liberal Approach to Fiscal Policy
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Fiscal policy in the UK needs a massive overhaul and indeed a fresh pair of eyes – a liberal, specifically Keynesian approach, would I believe, be a successful approach to treating the ills of the decaying UK economy. Taxation in the UK has become synonymous with overcomplexity and opaqueness: it’s time for a rethink. The British tax code is an incredible 24,000 pages long. To put that into perspective, Hong Kong’s is a mere 350 pages. Ironically, the complexity of the UK Tax Code appeals to the very rich, who can afford to employ advisers who help them to exploit…
Guns, Wealth and Welfare – Who Carries the Burden for Defence?
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The argument for democratic reform on defence, taxation and the social contract. Britain is in the middle of a debate about defence spending. On the surface, it looks like a straightforward question of national security; how much should the country spend, and how quickly? But scratch beneath that surface and a far more uncomfortable set of questions emerges: who actually benefits from military power, who is being asked to pay for it, and what does the answer reveal about the kind of society Britain truly is? The answers are not flattering. The welfare-for-weapons trade-off In early 2025, Chancellor Rachel Reeves…
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…
It’s Time to Clean the Augean Stables
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Natalie Bird was vilified for wearing a T-shirt with a slogan bearing the dictionary definition of ‘woman’. She was banned from standing as a candidate and suspended from the party. She took the party to court and won. John Tilley is the former leader of Kingston Council. He was subjected to an internal party discipline hearing for objecting to a proposal that conference attendees should be required to wear badges stating their preferred pronouns. He wrote that there were more important matters that required our attention. He was sentenced to a ten year ban on holding party office or standing…
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 Compassion Trap: Herbie’s Law and the Patients No‑One Cares About
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A proposed law to end animal testing in UK medical research by 2035 is being sold as an act of compassion. But the real human cost of getting this wrong has been almost entirely absent from the debate — and it will fall hardest on those who can least afford it. Herbie is a rabbit. He was bred for a laboratory, tattooed on his ear, and (as the story goes) rescued before his fate could be sealed. He has since become the face of one of the most emotionally compelling campaigns in recent British politics: a push to ban all…
What Starmer Knew, and When
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The Mandelson–Epstein connection was public knowledge long before the 2024 election. The question of how the Prime Minister could claim ignorance deserves scrutiny. Keir Starmer’s claim that he was unaware of the depth of Peter Mandelson’s relationship with convicted child sex offender and trafficker Jeffrey Epstein when he appointed him British Ambassador to the United States in December 2024, at best occupies shaky ground. The evidence that Mandelson posed a serious reputational and security risk was not hidden in classified files. Much of it was sitting in plain sight, reported by national broadcasters and newspapers, and filed in open US…
The Glass House Secretary General – George of the Bungle
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George Robertson’s attack on the Starmer government ignores the seeds sown during his own tenure, or the 28-year trend that all parties have followed. When Lord George Robertson of Port Ellen took to the podium in Salisbury earlier this month to deliver the Edward Heath Annual Lecture, he did so with the moral authority of a man who had served as Secretary of State for Defence, who had led NATO for four years, and who had personally authored the current government’s Strategic Defence Review. His language was unsparing. Britain, he declared, was “underprepared, underinsured, under attack and not safe.” The…
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% +…
