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Best of the Spectator

Coffee House Shots: what's the point of the Lib Dems?

Best of the Spectator

The Spectator

News, Daily News, Society & Culture, News Commentary

4.3826 Ratings

🗓️ 17 January 2026

⏱️ 24 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

As Ed Davey condemned Donald Trump's military manoeuvres abroad, Annabel Denham looked on and asked 'what's the point of the Liberal Democrats?'. Thinking about the Lib Dem's longstanding europhile stance, the senior political correspondent at the Telegraph wrote: 'the party that once stood on a tradition of civil liberties now wants us to rejoin a bloc which regulates everything'.


Calum Miller MP – foreign affairs spokesperson for the Liberal Democrats – joins Annabel and deputy political editor James Heale to address Annabel's challenge that the party is defined more by opposition the other parties than by their own policies. So, from localism and the UK's place in the world to free markets and social care, what do the Lib Dems stand for? And what constitutes 'liberalism' today?


Produced by Patrick Gibbons, Megan McElroy and Natasha Feroze.


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

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0:34.3

Hello, welcome to the special Saturday edition of Coffee House Shots. I'm James Hill. I'm Joyita-Torne Miller, the MP for Bista, and Annabald Danham, who is the senior political commentator at The Daily Telegraph. Now, Annabelle, last week you wrote a piece asking what exactly is the point of the Lib Dems. Do you want to give us your take fully aware here that Callum opposite is the foreign affairs spokesman for the Lib Dems.

0:59.2

To be clear, when I wrote the piece, I didn't know that I would subsequently be taking part in a spectator TV discussion with a Liberal Democrat. But no, I think, you know, I was prompted

1:05.0

to write this by Ed Davies, very strong rhetoric around the US extraction of Nicola's Maduro and how that seemed to be a way,

1:16.6

perhaps, if you were being cynical, for the lived ems to set themselves apart from the other

1:22.0

political parties. And I suppose the two questions I wanted to drill down into in my piece were, first, should the Liberal Democrats be doing better than they are?

1:32.7

And there's a new poll this week, which has shown they are on around 12% and the Greens have caught up with them.

1:40.2

So why is it that when there is such a sense of disillusionment with Labour and the

1:45.5

Tories that Libidems aren't performing better? And second, what is it that the modern

1:51.8

Liberal Democrat Party stands for? Because to paraphrase Voltaire talking about the Holy Roman Empire,

2:00.3

they don't seem to me to be particularly

2:02.5

liberal or particularly democratic when you look at their stance on Brexit. And that really was

2:08.5

the thrust of the piece and what I was looking at. Calam your response to that. Well, I welcome the

2:13.5

chance to have a right of reply. So thank you very much for offering that. Why don't we start where Annabel did with Venezuela? So the way I would think about that is actually that

2:20.9

the other parties in British politics have moved away from what would have been a consensual

2:24.5

position really not very long ago. So I don't see this as some kind of strident attempt by the

2:29.3

Lib Dems differentiate ourselves. Rather, we are holding to principles of international law,

...

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