Ed Davey takes aim at Reform and Elon Musk as Lib Dem conference begins

The Liberal Democrats’ leader, Sir Ed Davey, took aim at Nigel Farage’s Reform UK and Elon Musk on the first day of his party’s annual conference, saying that they “won’t give up the fight” to defeat “nasty populism” and the far-right party’s “£72m arsenal of hate and lies”.

Speaking from the main stage at Brighton Centre, Davey called on the assembled delegates not to be deterred in the face of Reform’s hope “that the anger and the hatred and the lies will grind us down until eventually we just give up”, and praised earlier speakers for showing “why we care and why we fight”.

He contrasted this with Reform, which “care about their own bank balance and they fight because two crypto billionaires gave them 72m quid”.

Davey, who entered conference season having to address frustrations over his leadership expressed by some Lib Dem MPs, also used the speech to recall his early political life as a student campaigning successfully for his university college to boycott Barclays, due to its investments in apartheid-era South Africa.

He spoke of his “visceral shock [and] overwhelming anger at seeing human beings treating other human beings with total contempt” and drew parallels between that experience and the need to not look away “when we see human dignity under attack”.

Davey said: “Today – we are back. Fighting again the fight that fired me up at university. The fight to end injustices. In our country and around the world. The fight to defeat the nasty populism of Trump, Le Pen, the AfD and the rest.

“The fight to stop the world’s richest man who learned racism in apartheid South Africa from funding racism around the world.”

Referring to recent abuse from far-right agitators aimed at the RNLI, Davey also pointed to the “fight to defend the Royal National Lifeboat Institution after volunteers for the coastal rescue charity were recently targeted online amid anti-migrant protests”.

He said that “Reform know they don’t speak for the real United Kingdom” and what Farage was “counting on to get him to No 10” was that people would get “tired, depressed, fed up of seeing Zia Yusuf on BBC Question Time week after week”.

But Davey said he hoped Reform were watching and would see “a party that won’t be ground down. That won’t be deterred. That won’t give up the fight”.

Also during the first day of the conference, Lib Dem health spokesperson Helen Morgan set out a £600m plan to improve maternity care, including proposals to bring in one-to-one midwifery for every woman in labour backed by a round-the-clock senior consultant.

The party said the measures will pay for themselves by reducing how much the NHS has to spend on compensation for maternity negligence claims every year – totalling £1.3bn in 2024-25.

Munira Wilson, the Lib Dem education spokesperson, said the party would introduce a guarantee to provide 100 hours of work experience for students from GCSE age to 18 to tackle the crisis of young people not in education, employment or training.