Nominations for standing for the Liberal Reform board are now open with 11 positions available to serve a term of 2 years (until December 2024). With a crucial general election on the horizon, Liberal Reform is ready to work productively to shape the agenda of the party and to help Liberal Democrats win across the country. Sitting on the Liberal Reform board is your chance to play a key role in making this happen! Please Read more…
Our country is in the grip of a cost of living crisis. While our Prime Minister is more occupied with trying to keep his own job than with leading our country, millions of families in our country are struggling to make ends meet. Energy bills are rising, the tax burden on millions of working people is increasing, and the price of the weekly shop is climbing further by the day. In a nation as rich Read more…
Below you will find Liberal Reform’s formal response to the Homes and Planning Consultation, submitted to the Federal Policy Committee for consideration on 17 March 2022. The FPC paper we are responding to be can found here: https://www.libdems.org.uk/s22-homes-planning-paper You can also download a copy our response here:
Hello all, welcome to another co-chair update! Firstly, a brief update on where I’m at and where Liberal Reform is at the moment: 2021 was a great year for us, and I was especially proud of how the Building Communities campaign went. But running it took a lot out of me throughout the year, and all the Autumn Conference drama added a lot of stress in a short shape of time that I didn’t find Read more…
I am a liberal. I didn’t actually realise it when I joined the party in 2017, days after that year’s general election. At the time I simply saw the Liberal Democrats as the only reasonable political choice that existed; but as I have developed within the party, I’ve come to realise that I have found my political home. Whether it’s our progressive stance on drugs reform, proudly standing up for LGBT rights or calling for Read more…
At 19:05 on Saturday 18th of September, Liberal Democrat Autumn Conference will be debating Liberal Reform’s motion “Building Communities”. This motion aims to commit the Liberal Democrats to combating the housing crisis in a fair, inclusive way, making sure that the right amount of houses are built in the right places at the right price. Let us know you’re voting for the motion by taking our vote pledge below.
At 7:00pm on the 10th of June 2021, our Building Communities working group met via Zoom. Our group consists of housing experts from across the Liberal Democrats, local councillors, as well as some enthusiastic Liberal Reform members. The group is a diverse mix of people from many localities and backgrounds that have one thing in common: a desire to tackle the housing crisis. The working group is currently in the process of putting together a Read more…
There is a housing crisis in our country. The total level of new house building needed in the UK to meet demand is 380,000 per year, but we’re currently only building just over half of this! Furthermore, up to 17% of UK households are living in overcrowded conditions, and Black, Asian and minority ethnic families are less likely to live in a decent home than White households. In a rich country like ours, this is Read more…
Welcome to Liberal Reform’s Briefing for the 2021 Liberal Democrat Spring Conference. Below you will find our views on all the motions up for debate this weekend, plus information on our fringe event on Sunday, and how you can get involved with Liberal Reform. You can download the briefing here.
I used to work at a University Law Clinic. One day two of us were deployed to assist with the defence of a group of Extinction Rebellion activists who had been arrested by the Police. During evidence, there was a fascinating video played, where the police warned protesters that they had 2 minutes to move before being arrested, but in many incidences the police waited for fewer than 30 seconds before proceeding with the arrest. Read more…
It is important for Liberal Democrats to remember that Austerity is not just made up of public spending cuts, but also tax rises. That’s why Liberal Reform are disappointed to hear that the Liberal Democrats will be supporting Rishi Sunak’s move to raise corporation tax. It is deeply concerning to see how quickly the Conservatives have moved to raise taxes. Even if it does not appear in the upcoming budget this week, it does seem Read more…
Dear members and supporters, I officially became co-chair of LR in January and since then I’ve been pretty busy, so I thought it was about time to update you on a few of the things I’ve been getting up to! Firstly some housekeeping. The new board structure that was discussed in my first update piece has now been finalised, and this is as follows: 1. Co-chairs – Me and Alan 2. Comms team – Stuart Read more…
This is not a defence of Begum’s actions, joining a terrorist organisation has ramifications. But those ramifications should lie with her country, which must take partial responsibility for state failure in allowing the radicalisation of a 15-year-old child. It is however, an explainer of the state failures, abuse of power and proposal for legislative reform, with a view to stopping legislative state abuse of deprivation of citizenship. Our current legal settlement with nationality law and Read more…
Book: The Future of Social Democracy: Essays to Mark the 40th Anniversary of the Limehouse Declaration. Edited by Colin McDougall, George Kendall and Wendy Chamberlain. Available here. To mark the fortieth anniversary of the Limehouse Declaration a series of essays have been published by the Social Democrat Group in order “to grapple with the serious challenges the country faces in the coming decades” (p. xi) and “promote new social democratic thinking” (p. xvii). Dedicated to Read more…
Welcome to the first of what will soon be regular updates directly from your co-chair team! Once our term properly starts in January I will try and get one of these out quarterly as a minimum, to ensure that our members are kept up to date with everything we’re doing here at Liberal Reform. As most will know by now, I was chosen by my fellow board members to serve as co-chair for 2021/22. I’d Read more…
As we approach the final few days and weeks of 2020, our time in the Brexit transition period is coming to an end. Being a fully signed-up EU member has gone, and we now need to look to what our future is outside the European family. There is now a growing swell of support for CANZUK (a free trade deal encompassing Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK). The question is should the Lib Dems Read more…
There has been much discussion about Matthew Parris’ Spectator article about the state of the Party. A lot of it rings very true. The broad thrust of the argument is that the Lib Dems have abandoned the tough issues of the day, instead preferring to portray an attitude that could facetiously be described as being in favour of the “good” things, and against the bad, with little more depth than that. In truth, it can Read more…
For the supposed home of market economics, the Conservative party has shown very little knowledge of it during its response to the coronavirus pandemic. Almost every aspect of the Government’s efforts to “control the virus” that have ignored competitive market forces (i.e. most of them) have failed. On both track and trace and procuring enough suitable PPE, the left have been quick to seize on these as failures of privitisation, when in reality they were Read more…
Following the close of nominations, we are now in a position to announce the Liberal Reform board for the 2021-22 term. New to the board this time are Daniel Duggan, Emily Tester, Oliver Jones-Lyons and Julia Wright. Julia is a long time supporter of LR and will be known to many of our members, but to introduce you to the rest: Daniel has been a member of the Liberal Democrats since 2010. He studied at Read more…
Last night Liberal Reform hosted a Question and Answer session with Ed Davey and Layla Moran, the two Lib Dem MPs battling it out to become the next leader of the Party. You can watch the Q&A back in its entirety at the bottom of this page. The evening was no doubt a positive one for Liberal Reform’s members, with the two candidates answering a whole host of questions on topics close to our members’ Read more…