Ed Davey urged delegates not to be deterred in the face of Reform\u2019s hope \u2018that the anger and the hatred and the lies will grind us down\u2019. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau\/PAView image in fullscreenEd Davey urged delegates not to be deterred in the face of Reform\u2019s hope \u2018that the anger and the hatred and the lies will grind us down\u2019. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau\/PAEd Davey takes aim at Reform and Elon Musk as Lib Dem conference beginsLeader says party \u2018won\u2019t give up the fight\u2019 to defeat \u2018nasty populism\u2019 in first-day speech to delegates in BrightonThe Liberal Democrats\u2019 leader, Sir Ed Davey, took aim at Nigel Farage and Elon Musk on the first day of his party\u2019s annual conference, saying Lib Dems would not give up the fight to defeat \u201cnasty populism\u201d and Reform UK\u2019s \u201c\u00a372m arsenal of hate and lies\u201d.On stage at Brighton Centre, Davey called on the assembled delegates not to be deterred in the face of Reform\u2019s hope \u201cthat the anger and the hatred and the lies will grind us down until eventually we just give up\u201d.He also praised earlier speakers for showing \u201cwhy we care and why we fight\u201d and contrasted this with Reform, which, he said, \u201ccare about their own bank balance and they fight because two crypto billionaires gave them 72 million quid\u201d.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 \u201cvisceral shock [and] overwhelming anger at seeing human beings treating other human beings with total contempt\u201d and drew parallels between that experience and the need to not look away \u201cwhen we see human dignity under attack\u201d.Lib Dems have \u2018moral responsibility\u2019 to block Reform, says Ed Davey as party gears up for snap electionRead moreDavey said: \u201cToday \u2013 we are back. Fighting again the fight that fired me up at university.<\/p>\n
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.\u201cThe fight to stop the world\u2019s richest man who learned racism in apartheid South Africa from funding racism around the world.\u201dHe also referred to the \u201cfight to defend the Royal National Lifeboat Institution after volunteers for the coastal rescue charity were recently targeted online amid anti-migrant protests\u201d.He said \u201cReform know they don\u2019t speak for the real United Kingdom\u201d \u2013 and what Farage was \u201ccounting on to get him to No 10\u201d was that people would get \u201ctired, depressed, fed up with seeing Zia Yusuf on BBC Question Time week after week\u201d.But Davey said he hoped Reform were watching and would see \u201ca party that won\u2019t be ground down. That won\u2019t be deterred.<\/p>\n
That won\u2019t give up the fight.\u201dAlso during the first day of the conference, Lib Dem health spokesperson Helen Morgan set out a \u00a3600m 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 \u2013 totalling \u00a31.3bn 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.Explore more on these topicsLiberal Democrat conferenceLiberal DemocratsEd DaveyReform UKThe far rightnewsShareReuse this content<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ed Davey urged delegates not to be deterred in the face of Reform\u2019s hope \u2018that the anger and the hatred and the lies will grind us down\u2019. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau\/PAView image in fullscreenEd Davey urged\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19736,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19735","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19735","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19735"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19735\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}