Roz Savage was elected as the Liberal Democrat MP for South Cotswolds in 2024 (Credit: Andrew Matthews/PA Images/Alamy)

6 min read18 min

In a new essay shared exclusively with PoliticsHome, South Cotswolds MP Roz Savage argued that liberals must “rediscover” their “insurgent spirit”, rather than being “the polite custodians of a system that leaves people feeling powerless”.

The essay, Liberalism Alive, has been published just days before the Lib Dem conference in Brighton this weekend, where members will debate a new strategy document aimed at expanding the party’s support in a fractured political landscape.

While Savage does not directly name party leader Ed Davey or call for a change of leadership, her warning comes as pressure has grown on Davey to articulate a more distinct political offer to voters. 

A Lib Dem spokesperson insisted the party is a “serious national force” which is “fighting to change politics so that we can change our country”.

In a recent sit-down interview with The House magazine, Davey said local election results showed that the party was “expanding” across the country under his leadership and in “its strongest position in over a century”. He also defended his use of stunts, saying: “I don’t think we’d have as many MPs, frankly, as we do if we hadn’t done the visuals that we did last election.”

In her essay, published by the progressive think tank Compass, Savage said liberalism should not be pitched to voters as “a comfortable midpoint between left and right” and that her party should avoid being seen as “nicer technocrats with slightly better policies”.

Instead, she argued, liberals should seek to answer more fundamental questions about how to create a society in which people can “flourish”.

The MP wrote: “If liberalism’s historic mission is to challenge concentrations of power and expand people’s practical freedom, we also have to ask how well we have lived up to it. Because if liberalism has so much to offer this moment, we have to address the elephant in the room: why are we as a party struggling for relevance at precisely the moment when so many people feel powerless?

“We cannot blame the populists, the media or an electorate that has somehow failed to appreciate our wisdom. We need to take a long hard look at ourselves too.”

According to Savage, the Lib Dems have not successfully woven their policy offering into a compelling narrative for the public.

“Ask people what Britain would look and feel like after ten years of Liberal Democrat government and many would struggle to answer,” she wrote.

“That is not because our individual policies are not good. Many are remarkably popular. The problem is that they do not add up, in the public imagination, to a coherent picture of the country we are trying to create.

“We have sometimes made a virtue of being reasonable, practical and evidence-led. Those are qualities I value, but competence is not a destination.

“Politics also requires imagination: the ability to help people see a different future and believe that it might actually be possible. But that vision also needs coherence. Voters need to know, with crystal clarity, what we stand for and who we stand with.”

The essay sets out Savage’s vision for how liberalism can offer fresh answers to “a country in urgent need of a new direction”.

The MP argued that devolution should form a key component of that new direction, but she said devolution must go “beyond politicians”. 

“Moving power from politicians in Westminster to politicians in a town hall is not, by itself, empowering citizens,” she wrote. “It may simply change the postcode of the people making the decisions. Genuine devolution must go further.

“Councils should themselves devolve: to neighbourhoods, parishes, community organisations, schools, cooperatives, community land trusts, and sometimes directly to randomly selected citizens asked to deliberate on particularly difficult questions.”

Savage also warned that AI and the growing influence of the world’s big tech firms could represent the “next concentration of power” away from citizens.

“Technology could liberate enormous amounts of human capacity,” the MP wrote. “It could transform medicine, education and scientific discovery. It could remove drudgery from working life.

“Or it could hand a handful of already powerful corporations unprecedented influence over how the rest of us live, work and think. Left to drift, that is exactly what will happen. That is simply what concentrated power does when nobody chooses otherwise. It is a choice, and perhaps only for a short while longer will it remain ours to make.”

Liberals have struggled, Savage added, in a world where the benefits and costs of globalisation were “distributed unevenly”.

She wrote: “Populists are very good at telling people that their power has been taken away. Where they go wrong is telling them who took it: the migrant, the minority, the civil servant, the judge, the international court, whichever convenient enemy fits the story.

“Liberals need a better answer. We should say: yes, too much power has been taken away from you. But look upwards, not sideways.

“Look at an economy in which wealth and ownership have become increasingly concentrated. Look at monopolies and corporations more powerful than many governments. Look at decisions sucked upwards from communities into Whitehall. Look at political systems in which millions of votes barely affect the outcome. Look at technology companies acquiring unprecedented power over information, work and public discourse.

“The answer is not to find another group with even less power and blame them. It is to redistribute power again.

“That requires liberalism to rediscover its insurgent spirit. We should not be the polite custodians of a system that leaves people feeling powerless.”

A Lib Dem spokesperson told PoliticsHome: “Roz is right that the two old parties have left people feeling powerless after decades of failure and neglect. Everything feels so much harder than it used to be because our country is being held back by a failed political system.

“With record numbers of MPs and more councils led than the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats are a serious national force. At all levels of government, we are fighting to change politics so that we can change our country. Liberal Democrats are leading from the front on the big issues facing people across our country right now – from the cost of living crisis to the barriers holding our world-class businesses back.“

2 min read35 min

Days before Andy Burnham became Prime Minister, the British Ambassador to the US, Christian Turner, met with State Department officials to discuss Burnham’s plans for power.

According to sources familiar, British officials asked State Department Under Secretary of State Sarah Rogers about how to combat the radical right, highlighting her recent speeches at the Jordan Peterson-founded Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London. 

Under Secretary Rogers urged Turner and the British officials to be more transparent and honest in their work, and said that doing so would help to rebuild trust. 

Another proposal raised by Under Secretary Rogers was the now-abandoned Rwanda scheme, to process asylum seekers overseas. Rogers praised the plans in the context of plans to combat the radical right, though no suggestion to revive the plan was made. 

The Rwanda deal cost the taxpayer £700m yet only removed four people, all of whom volunteered to leave.

Separately, PoliticsHome also understands that Rogers highlighted how the radical right had taken an interest in independent MP Rupert Lowe’s survivor-led rape gang inquiry, which he had funded via crowdsourcing. She was concerned with how he was conducting it, and called on British officials to publish government transcripts and materials related to prominent grooming gang cases, in order to lessen Lowe’s political impact. Lowe was not characterised as a member of the radical right himself during the discussion.

The Trump official also highlighted the cost of paying for transcripts of historic cases, noting that it cost Open Justice (now known as the Centre for Justice Policy) large amounts of money to release transcripts, and suggested the British government agreed to release the transcripts for free. 

The government has launched an independent inquiry into grooming gangs, with legal powers to hold institutions to account.

Lowe told PoliticsHome: “The country has been undermined by a philosophy which empowers the minority (often unsound) at the expense of the majority, which is Orwellian. I would be surprised if Sarah Rogers has a view on our Independent Rape Gang Enquiry crowd-funded by over 20,000 concerned people. It was done in order to expose systemic evil, and not for political gain.”

An FCDO spokesperson said: “As close allies, UK and US officials meet regularly to discuss shared priorities.

“We are committed to ensuring that our trade and security continues to deliver real benefits for hardworking people on both sides of the Atlantic.”

The State Department was contacted for comment. 

Joël Reland reflects on what it would mean in practice for Canada to become an associate member of the EU, as well as the lessons for the UK in thinking about its own future EU relationship.

At first sight, Ursula von der Leyen’s announcement that she is “opening the door for Canada to being the first associate member of the European Union” seems like a geopolitical earthquake.

Faced with the diminishing reliability of the US a trade and security partner, Canada is transplanting its political centre of gravity from North America to Europe, while the notoriously inflexible EU suddenly appears open to ‘concentric circles’ of membership which have for decades been discussed but never acted upon.

And within the UK, it has immediately been picked up on, both as evidence of the kind of closer EU relationship it could have got were it not so fixated on a hard Brexit, and as a new potential path back towards the bloc.

Yet, for now, the reality remains more prosaic. We simply do not know what associate membership means exactly. Von der Leyen’s ambition to ‘to bring the relationship with Canada to the highest level possible’ is deliciously vague: it implies some limit on the extent of possible cooperation, but does not tell us where that limit lies.

Von der Leyen envisions replacing the existing EU-Canada Trade Agreement (CETA) with an ‘Alliance for the Future to create a common prosperity and economic security space’. Areas of focus will include AI, tech, quantum, defence industry, critical minerals, batteries and the Arctic.

But the nature of that cooperation – and the balance of Canada’s rights, obligations and institutional integration – remains undefined. Will Canada de facto join the EU single market in some or all of those areas, signing up to EU rules in exchange for frictionless trade and integrated supply chains, and some chance to influence EU policy formation? Or will it amount to a looser partnership based on coordinating policy approaches (e.g. on AI safety) and conducting joint initiatives (e.g. on critical minerals procurement)?

Not even the EU seems to know the answer, as illustrated by two Financial Times headlines from Wednesday morning. One stated Ursula von der Leyen backs Canada’s ‘associate membership’ bid while the other announced EU rebuffs Mark Carney’s ‘unique alliance’ with Canada.

The latter piece highlighted that many member states are opposed to Canada receiving enhanced access to the single market – and that ten countries are yet to even ratify CETA (agreed in 2017) due to concerns about the proliferation of Canadian agricultural goods within the EU market.

This tells us that, while the EU is waking up, as Fabian Zuleeg puts it, to ‘a very different geopolitical context’ that needs ‘ambitious mechanisms for bringing like-minded democracies together’, some old habits die hard – namely the sanctity of the single market.

Any deep Canadian integration into the EU market would take some very heavy work to negotiate a defined set of treaty-bound rights and obligations, and so it seems more likely that – at least in the short term – cooperation will focus on more vaguely-constructed alliances for ‘prosperity’ and ‘security’.

This offers some salutary lessons for the UK in thinking about its own future EU relationship.

First, Canada’s model of associate membership could set some important precedents for the UK. After all, CETA is the EU trade deal which most closely resembles the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement. In principle, the new models of cooperation open to Canada, with its level of economic and political integration into the EU, are also up for grabs for the UK.

Second, that model of membership is not likely to create a shortcut back into the single market. At least to begin with, the focus seems likely to be on looser cooperation and initiatives rather than a structured set of rights and obligations à la Norway or Switzerland.

Third, this may well appeal to the Burnham government. As I have argued previously, Burnham seems less interested than Starmer in greater legal alignment with the EU single market, and more interested in the kinds of softer-touch economic security cooperation which may well form the bedrock of the new EU-Canada association.

But fourth, and finally, none of this means UK associate membership is now there for the taking. While the UK might resemble Canada legally, it does not do so politically. Canada carries a lot less baggage than the UK. It did not initiate a dramatic divorce a decade ago, before starting to plead for special access to the single market from outside, while Mark Carney is the poster boy of the emerging ‘middle powers’ movement. Burnham would not have been afforded the same ovation that Carney received in Brussels this week.

And then there is the economics. It is easier to open your market up to more distant economies where trade flows are simpler to monitor and with which you do not directly compete so often. The UK exports five times more in goods to the EU than Canada and is a direct competitor for investment in advanced tech and AI. Canada also has more to offer than the UK in terms of critical minerals supplies and access to the Arctic.

We may come to look back on von der Leyen’s address today as a major tectonic shift in the history of the EU and its approach to third countries. But, for the UK to harness that shift to its advantage, it is going to have to do a lot of work to both think about what UK ‘associate membership’ could look like, and to convince the EU that it is is an idea worth bringing to the table.

By Joël Reland, Senior Researcher, UK in a Changing Europe.

We’re getting so much correspondence from Police Scotland at the moment that we’re starting to feel like their guiltily-neglected penpal.

This one, though, is slightly more involved than their usual two-paragraph brushoff.

Don’t get too excited, though – it amounts to the same thing.

This is self-evident gibberish. Nobody was prosecuted, let alone convicted, over the misappropriation of the fundraiser money specifically (as opposed to the SNP’s general funds, which are what Peter Murrell was convicted of embezzling).

The only way that knowing the reasons they weren’t prosecuted could possibly “prejudice the prevention or detection of crime and apprehension or prosecution of offenders” is if those reasons revealed either some sort of loophole in the law, or some inappropriate interference with its natural processes on the part of the Crown Office, Police Scotland or both.

Neither is a legitimate reason to refuse disclosure. Any loophole should be addressed by Parliament, and inappropriate interference is itself a criminal matter. (Albeit one you could only report to… Police Scotland and the Crown Office.)

The response then attempts to add further excuses.

This is equally obvious nonsense. Everyone already knows who the leadership of the SNP was during Operation Branchform, and who we were asking about in the FOI request – Nicola Sturgeon, her chief executive Peter Murrell and her treasurer Colin Beattie. There is no need to conceal their identity when everyone already knows it.

This is extraordinary. It says, entirely correctly, that:

“It is in the public interest that an understanding exists as to the processes involved in police investigations and in their relative success. This is particularly true in investigations, therefore, accountability and transparency relating to the actions of Police Scotland and its officers would favour disclosure of the information.”

But then it point-blank refuses to actually disclose the information because… well, for no actual valid reason that we can detect. As far as we can make out from those last three paragraphs, Police Scotland is refusing to disclose the information because Police Scotland holds the information and it might reflect poorly on the actions of Police Scotland.

Honestly, folks, we’ve read those three sentences over and over again trying to find any other sort of coherent meaning in them and it simply isn’t there. The whole passage can be accurately summarised as:

“We should give you this information, but it’s important that we don’t because it might make us look bad therefore we’ve decided you have no right to know, even though that’s pretty much the entire point of Freedom Of Information law existing in the first place.”

And it keeps getting madder.

The question asked was about the very specific distinction between the original enquiry into misappropriated fundraiser money used for SNP purposes other than a second referendum campaign, and the subsequent enquiry into general SNP funds embezzled by Peter Murrell for his personal benefit.

We know when that change happened, because the police themselves briefed journalists about it back in June after Murrell’s sentencing.

It was some time between October 2022 and “early spring 2023”. So why are we now being fed some rancid cobblers about it being March 2025? And why did the police submit an “advice and guidance” report to the Crown Office in August 2024 asking them what to do about the original complaint, separate to the embezzlement charge, when by their own assertion they’d already concluded 18 months earlier that there wasn’t enough evidence to charge anyone on the former?

What did that report say, exactly? “We haven’t got enough evidence to charge anyone, but should we charge them anyway and waste a bucketload of public money just for laughs?”?

What evidence was missing? There is no conceivable credible dispute that the money was misappropriated, as assessed by Scotland’s most respected lawyer, the Dean of the Faculty Of Advocates.

The Dean’s analysis was crystal clear:

Nor is there any possible doubt as to who could have been responsible, both practically and in law: one or more of the three party officers who signed off on the SNP’s accounts.

The money was visibly misappropriated, and we have a very small list of suspects. The job of the police and the courts is only to establish which of them it was.

There are no defensible grounds for simply not even bothering to try, and then telling people there wasn’t enough evidence. The evidence is abundant and unquestionable, and as we saw yesterday, Police Scotland have flat-out refused to identify a single item in the Dean’s analysis with which they disagree.

“La la la we’re not telling you, please go away now” is not acceptable.

We will of course be raising the matter with the Information Commissioner immediately, and we have grounds to believe he may look on it sympathetically.

The SNP’s response, of course, has been to try to pre-emptively cripple the office of the Information Commissioner and render it completely impotent in terms of any information which could be damaging to the government.

While also starving it of funds.

The Scottish Government REALLY doesn’t like the Information Commissioner.

And that’s because along with the Auditor General, he’s just about the last public official anywhere in Scotland who is (a) bothered about doing his job properly, and (b) competent enough to actually manage it.

Our appeal to OSIC will take place alongside our application for a judicial review of Police Scotland’s decision not to bring charges in respect of the original Operation Branchform complaint, and such is the time it takes to get anything done in Scotland nowadays, it’s anyone’s guess as to which will make progress first.

But readers, we’ve got nothing else to do. This is our job, and just like David Hamilton, we intend to stick at it.

4 min read16 min

To put the scale of the problem into context over 38 million tonnes of waste, enough to fill Wembley Stadium 35 times, is believed to be illegally managed at some point in the waste management chain each year. 

With organised crime groups believed to commit 35% of waste crime, it is no wonder that it has been described as the ‘new narcotics.’ The cycle of organised crime impacting the circular economy simply must stop at source. That is why I am calling on members of both Houses to back my Corporate Waste Responsibility Bill. 

In October 2025, the cross-party House of Lords Environment and Climate Change Committee, which I Chair, sent a letter to Emma Reynolds MP, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, with our findings and recommendations following a short inquiry on the topic.

We called on the Government to get tough on serious and organised waste crime after highlighting multiple failures by the Environment Agency, the ineffectiveness of its Joint Unit for Waste Crime and a lack of interest shown by the police to act on local residents reports of illegal activity.

When the Committee started its inquiry, waste crime was a regional news story after one notable large scale site was uncovered in Hoads Wood, Kent. However, after pressing the Environment Agency for details of other sites it soon became a national and international story with waste dumps in Oxfordshire, Wigan, Northwich, Lancashire and Cornwall gaining media attention. There are now reported to be around 30 super sites (containing more than 20,000 tonnes of rubbish) and between 500 and 700 smaller sites across the country.

On visits to the sites in Oxfordshire, Wigan and Kent with Channel 4 News and the BBC I got to see, and smell, the full scale of the problem and the impact it is having on local residents, some of whom have had to relocate. It was particularly concerning that these sites aren’t full of waste from individual fly tippers but industrial scale operations moving processed household waste and construction materials.

Waste crime has become profitable due to opportunities to avoid the costs incurred by legitimate businesses, often including landfill tax, with a low probability of detection or punishment, and low penalties. The Committee heard that illegally disposing a single articulated lorry’s load of waste can avoid £2,500 of costs. With anyone, and literally their dog, being able to register for a license, no mandatory tracking on vehicles and very low prosecution rates it’s a low risk, high reward business for criminals.

Eight months on from the Committee’s initial letter waste crime continues to be a hot topic, including the by-election in Makerfield. Over that time Committee members have worked tirelessly to keep up the political pressure through oral questions, debates and follow up evidence sessions with Ministers and the Environment Agency.

This has had some impact. Earlier this year, the Government launched its Waste Crime Action Plan which sets out how it intends to tackle waste crime through prevention, enforcement and accelerating the clean-up effort. This was followed during the summer with the Prime Minister tougher measures against those committing waste crime offences.  There has also been secondary legislation introduced to mandate digital waste tracking, overhaul the outdated Carriers, Brokers and Dealers (CBD) registration scheme and increasing fines local authorities can issue for fly-tipping and littering.

Whilst welcome, these measures don’t go far enough to tackle the source of the problem of corporate waste companies allowing their waste to end up in illegal sites across the country.  

That is why I have introduced the Corporate Waste Responsibility Bill in the House of Lords. If passed, it will require large companies to appoint a named director responsible for compliance with statutory waste duty of care obligations. It will also ensure companies are financially responsible for the clean-up and clearance of waste they have generated or controlled, where that waste is mismanaged and the duty of care has not been discharged.

The second reading of my bill will be held in the House of Lords this Autumn and I am hoping to get the support from members of both Houses to progress it. Without ongoing parliamentary scrutiny and changes being made through legislation this egregious crime will continue to blight our communities and have a devastating impact on the environment.

 

She built the ground campaign that took Labour from 202 seats to 411 and she ran the party with care for the people in it.

By Kevin Craig, Founder and CEO of PLMR and former Labour Party Councillor and Parliamentary candidate

During the very difficult years of the Corbyn era, Hollie Ridley still managed to pull off impossibly difficult by-election wins as in Peterborough, for which she was publicly thanked by the Leader on Sky News. That’s how good a campaigner she is.

It all feels like a long time ago. Fast forward to September 2026 and I joined a very large number of Labour Party folk from all wings of the Party, including former Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, to mark the imminent end of Hollie Ridley’s tenure as General Secretary of the Labour Party.  You have to conclude that she is almost certainly the most consequential General Secretary Labour has had in a generation. The case is built on one simple fact. She built and ran the ground campaign that took Labour from 202 seats in 2019 to 411 in 2024.

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