Last Summer, the mood at party conference was jubilant. Record election success brought us 72 Members of Parliament and offered us a vast opportunity to shape national debate and grow our party further.

Liberalism, once the shining force behind Western democracy and global progress, now finds itself in a state of disrepair.

On July 5th 2024, Labour took office with a mandate to apply Value Added Tax (VAT) at the standard rate of 20% on private school fees, and to revoke the charitable business rates relief currently enjoyed by England’s fee-paying schools.

During every single day of the Trump administration, I will very simply put “America first” declared the 45th and now 47th President, standing in the same Capitol rotunda that his supporters rampaged through four years ago.

Modern Britain prides itself on placing ordinary, working-class people at the forefront of society since its adoption of a meritocratic social agenda in the late 20th century. It would be ignorant to dismiss the rapid social progression that has followed.

We appear to live in an age of media games, of rhetoric, of the sound bite and the one-liner. An age of Brexit, of Boris and of a Britain that everyone seems to agree isn’t going so well. An age of identity politics, the Ben Shapiro’s, the TikTok debates, and of Elon musk buying twitter in the name of “free speech”. Through all this, I wonder, have we lost the point?