Davey vows Lib Dems won't surrender to 'nasty populism' as conference opens

Sir Ed Davey stood before the Liberal Democrat conference in Brighton on Saturday and cast the coming political fight as something larger than electoral strategy. The party would not surrender to what he called "nasty populism," he told delegates gathered at the Brighton Centre. Reform UK, he said, had built a "£72m arsenal of hate and lies"—money that came, in his telling, from crypto billionaires who had little interest in Britain's actual problems. Elon Musk figured prominently in his remarks. Davey described him as "the world's richest man who learned racism in apartheid South Africa" and accused him of now funding racism globally. The speech was Davey's opening move at a conference where he needed to show strength after some of his own MPs had publicly questioned his leadership.

Davey's framing was personal and historical. He recalled his days as a student activist, when he had fought successfully to get his university college to divest from Barclays because of the bank's ties to apartheid-era South Africa. That experience, he said, had given him a visceral understanding of what it meant to witness "human beings treating other human beings with total contempt." He drew a direct line from that youthful moral clarity to the present moment. The fight against populism, in his construction, was not merely about winning seats or blocking a rival party. It was about defending human dignity itself—at home and around the world. He named Trump, Le Pen, and the German far-right AfD as examples of the broader movement he believed the Lib Dems had to oppose.

The specific target was Nigel Farage and Reform UK. Davey suggested that Farage's path to Number 10 depended on wearing down the opposition—on making people so tired and demoralized by the constant presence of Reform figures on television that they would eventually stop resisting. Zia Yusuf, Reform's leader, appeared on BBC Question Time repeatedly, Davey noted, and Farage was counting on that repetition to numb the public into acceptance. But Davey promised the assembled party members that the Lib Dems would not be ground down. They would not be deterred. They would keep fighting.

The conference also unveiled concrete policy proposals. Helen Morgan, the party's health spokesperson, announced a £600m plan to overhaul maternity care. The centerpiece was a commitment to provide one-to-one midwifery support for every woman in labour, backed by round-the-clock access to senior consultants. The party argued the investment would pay for itself by reducing the NHS's annual spending on maternity negligence compensation claims, which had reached £1.3bn in the 2024-25 financial year. Munira Wilson, the education spokesperson, introduced a separate guarantee: every student from GCSE age through 18 would be offered 100 hours of work experience. The party framed this as a response to the crisis of young people not in education, employment, or training.

Davey's speech also touched on a smaller but symbolically charged controversy. He defended the Royal National Lifeboat Institution after volunteers for the coastal rescue charity had been targeted online during anti-migrant protests. The attack on the RNLI had become a flashpoint in debates over immigration and national identity. By invoking it, Davey was signaling that the Lib Dems would stand with institutions and individuals caught in the crossfire of populist anger. The conference, in its opening hours, had established the terms on which the party intended to fight: not as a technocratic alternative offering better management, but as a moral force opposed to what it saw as a rising tide of dehumanizing politics.