Sarah Ingham: We shouldn’t take our eyes of the Lib Dems however absurd they often sound

Dr Sarah Ingham is the author of The Military Covenant: its impact on civil-military relations in Britain

Should the LibDems ever chose Blackpool for their Conference, the seaside town would no longer need its Illuminations.

Instead, it could be lit up by members’ high-wattage self-regard.

Before the Leader’s keynote speech on Tuesday, there was a debate on a policy motion: Defending Women’s Rights Across the Globe. Long on platitudes – “global rollback”, “emboldened misogyny” – it was short on tangible detail.

One stellar measure of the LibDem-Conservative Coalition which changed women’s lives for the better was ignored: the 2012  Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative (PVSI). It has since been the subject of summits and UN resolutions.

Whether in Bosnia, Colombia and South Sudan, victims have benefited from the practical medical and legal help offered by the Initiative-inspired International Protocol for documentation and investigation of conflict-related sexual violence. Such violence is now often classified as a war crime.

Driven through by Foreign Secretary William Hague, in unlikely partnership with UN Envoy Angelina Jolie, whose Hollywood star-power ensured global headlines, the Initiative helped to lay the foundations for re-thinking the impact of conflict on civilians.

The LibDems’ silence on Tuesday about such a ground-breaking policy, and the possible role they played in it, reflects a broader inability to confront inconvenient truths, especially if they are odds with the mendacious “14 years of chaos under the Conservatives” narrative.

Like an unwise encounter after a night on the lash, for many LibDem members the five-year Coalition seems an embarrassing episode best forgotten.

The incendiary issue of trans ran through the Defending Women’s Rights debate, undermining not only its basic premise, but assertions about the rule of law.

Biological truth is being swept aside by the Party’s trans ideology. For all delegates’ protests that “trans women are women” and heartfelt feminine pleas about “our trans sisters”, men who wish to identify as women are not women. Or sisters. Pretending that they are jeopardises the safety of women and girls, including in prisons, changing rooms and public loos.

Pushing the rights of fake females is at odds with the defence of women’s rights.  Far from #BeingKind, this is #LibDemMisogyny – as J.K. Rowling stated on X.

The Party follows its Leader.

Last week, in an interview with Piers Morgan, Ed Davey refused to say if a woman can have a penis. He was given 10 goes but could not give a straight answer. Whatever next? Believing in Father Christmas?

The Defending Women’s Rights motion condemned Female Genital Mutilation of which there are an estimated 230 million victims around the world. Overlooked by LibDem trans fans is the wrong sort of genital mutilation: i.e. when transgenderism is taken to its logical conclusion.

The LibDems are still equivocating over April’s Supreme Court ruling that “woman” means a biological woman. The Court is not called Supreme for nothing: challenging it means challenging the rule of law.

In his Leader’s speech to Conference, Ed Davey referred to the “rule of law” four times. It is, he said, a fundamental part of British values. But somehow, in the context of trans, it is an apparent irrelevance.  Supreme Court judgements don’t come a la carte: political parties cannot pick and choose the ones they like. It is unconstitutional nonsense and irresponsible to imply that they can.

Davey’s anti-Americanism jars. His speech repeatedly denounced Elon Musk, but he and his Party both post on X. Yet more do-as-I-say-and-not-as-I-do hypocrisy.

Trans is one small example of the LibDem’s contradictory policy stances which have gone unchallenged. This was once excusable. The Party was inconsequential for years after the 2015 General Election when they lost 49 seats and were reduced to just 8 MPs. The churn of leaders – Clegg, Farron, Cable, Swinson, Davey – and their sub-optimal results in 2017 (12 seats) and 2019 (11 seats), lulled most Conservatives into a false sense of security.

Two by-election results in 2021 should have been warning lights: Chesham & Amersham in June and North Shropshire in December when a 21,000 majority was overturned.

In the 2024 General Election the LibDems won 3,519,214 votes compared with 3,696,419  in 2019, but ended up with 72 MPs, thanks to the collapse of the Conservative vote and the rise of Reform.

The Blue Wall remains decimated, reflected by LibDem gains in the local government elections in May, which gave them control of Oxfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Shropshire County Councils. Last month, the warning lights again began to flash when the Conservatives lost control of Surrey County Council for the first time since 1997, following  LibDem and Reform victories in by-elections.

On Tuesday, Davey correctly highlighted that the attention given to Reform with its 5 MPs is disproportionate. But it’s not just the media that is guilty.

The Conservatives’ focus on Farage is letting the LibDems, with all their contradictions, incoherence and 72 MPs, off the hook.