(Gary Roberts Photography / Alamy)

3 min read17 min

Addressing Lib Dem conference in Brighton on Tuesday, Davey said the party faces “the fight of our lives” against a “far-right movement that is given oxygen, and heat, and fuel by politicians and parties who claim to be serious contenders to lead our country”.

Davey’s speech came amid growing pressure from within his party to give the Lib Dems a more distinct political offering to voters – and to make clear what they stand for. In an essay published days before the conference, one of his MPs, Roz Savage, claimed the party was “struggling for relevance” and failing to paint a “coherent picture of the country we are trying to create”.

In a new policy announcement, Davey pledged that a future Lib Dem government would take hundreds of thousands of people out of the higher rate (40p) tax band by raising the threshold to £56,000.

He also announced that the party would raise the tax-free personal allowance from £12,570 to £15,000, saying this would take more than 2m of the lowest-paid workers out of income tax completely.

Davey said he would fund these tax cuts using the economic growth achieved through his policy of rejoining the European Union’s Single Market and Customs Union.

Amid growing concern about AI models going rogue and posing a potential threat to humanity, Davey called for “a global treaty to press pause on super-intelligent AI now, before it’s too late”.

He compared the risks posed to civilisation by increasingly sophisticated AI models to climate change and nuclear weapons, telling the conference that the human species was “not just the fight of our lives” but engaged in a “fight for life itself”.

Throughout his speech, Davey sought to frame the Lib Dems as an opposing force to Reform UK, and repeatedly contrasted his party’s “community politics” with what he described as the divisive politics of Nigel Farage’s party.

“When that person you disagree with stops being just another little box on your social media feed, and becomes a human being with a face, a home and a life – that’s when we make progress,” he told the conference.

“With liberal community politics, we can answer people’s hopelessness and powerlessness. Not with a slogan, not with a scapegoat, but with hard work.”

One Lib Dem MP seated behind Davey during the speech told PoliticsHome it was “probably his best to date”, as he “articulated what liberalism means” alongside a “bold policy announcement”.

But another MP said that while the proposed tax cuts were welcome: “There’s just so much more we have to say. What people are looking for is not a cautious step-by-step approach to the next election, and the manifesto, but a sense of what it might be like to live in this future Britain, not just what we might have in our pockets.”

5 min read21 min

Matt Downie, chief executive of Crisis, told PoliticsHome that the Prime Minister needs someone who “knocks heads together” across Whitehall and improves coordination inside and outside government when it comes to tackling homelessness.

Burnham pledged to end rough sleeping in the UK when he first entered No 10 after replacing Keir Starmer in July.

Last month, he announced that emergency accommodation will be made available to ensure that all rough sleepers have somewhere safe to live by Christmas.

“We did it in the pandemic. We can do it again. But it needs all of us,” the PM said.

“Government will put the money in. But I’m asking leaders in communities and sectors across society to play their part locally too. Let’s get people out the cold. And let’s bring back hope.”

Rough sleeping hit record highs at the start of 2026, with 4,793 people recorded as sleeping rough on a single night in autumn in 2025, according to government figures. 

Speaking to PoliticsHome ahead of Labour conference getting underway in Liverpool later this week, Downie described the Prime Minister’s pledge to eradicate homelessness as “the biggest moment” for his sector in decades and “properly special”.

“I can tell you that, having tried for many years to get people in the very heart of government, particularly in No 10, to care about this issue, it’s amazing to see large numbers of people now doing everything they can,” he said.

However, he added that the Labour government could take additional steps to boost its chances of success, including appointing a “tsar or commissioner”.

“Someone that knocks heads together across government, that says: ‘By the way, NHS, you’re discharging people onto the streets from A&Es. Stop it’,” said Downie. 

“[Someone] who bangs heads together, gets organisations in our sector, in local government, housing associations to do the right thing. That costs nothing, and they can just do it today.”

The charity head said that the issue of people falling into homelessness when discharged from hospitals and prisons is “outrageous”, but ultimately “solvable”.

But he stressed that it’s “not just possible” to achieve the PM’s pledge without more housing, particularly housing specifically earmarked for people who are already homeless.

It’s not about spending more money, but “organising ourselves better”, Downie said, explaining that homeless people should be guaranteed a “good chunk” of properties built as part of the government’s £38bn Social and Affordable Homes Programme.

Crisis is also calling for Burnham and Chancellor John Healey to unfreeze the Local Housing Allowance (LHA) at the Budget next month, describing it as “the number one thing the government could do right now to send the numbers in the right direction”.

LHA limits how much Universal Credit is paid to private renters. It is meant to cover the cheapest 30 per cent of private sector rents in each area, with claimants whose rent is higher paying the shortfall themselves. However, a two-year freeze to its cash value by the Labour government has led to a real-terms cut because actual rents have risen in that time.

As a result, the support is now worth less than the 10th percentile of local rents in some areas, with many councils warning that the freeze is making rent increasingly unaffordable and pushing people into homelessness.

Some Tory-run councils support ending the freeze, despite party leader Kemi Badenoch’s pledge to further reduce LHA.

Downie also wants to see the PM act on his past support for Housing First: “the single most exciting thing he said on homelessness”.

The scheme works on seven core principles, including the right to a home; giving individuals control over the type and location of their housing; and a focus on harm reduction, with pilots in Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool widely seen as successful.

Labour considered including the nationwide roll-out of Housing First in its 2024 election manifesto, but did not go ahead with it. Burnham previously told PoliticsHome that the scheme had been key to his success in reducing rough sleeping numbers in Manchester.

A Housing, Communities and Local Government spokesperson told PoliticsHome:  “We welcome the vital work that Crisis do to support people experiencing homelessness. The PM has made clear his determination to end rough sleeping at the earliest opportunity and to make sure the whole of government and society works together to fix this problem.

“This is backed by a National Plan to End Homelessness – which sets out how public services must work together to tackle this complex issue, alongside a record investment of over £4bn to help thousands of people leave the streets behind, move into secure homes and get the support they need to rebuild their lives.”

11 min read7 min

Angus MacDonald is described as a “rare politician” by a colleague who compares him, approvingly, to a red squirrel.

Papal knight, self-described Gladstonian liberal, Sandhurst graduate – it might be easy to cast the 63-year-old as an anachronistic holdout against the grey tide of modernity in his Highland fastness. But MacDonald is also a highly successful entrepreneur, a multi-millionaire who has set up and sold a string of businesses and brings to Parliament a sharp eye for the market.

He confesses he was shocked by how many MPs end up at Westminster after a career within the state’s fold, untroubled by the bottom line when he beat the SNP to represent Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire, part of which was once Charles Kennedy’s patch.

While expressing relief that Ed Davey has “stopped the stunts” (although this is contradicted by the leader in his own House interview), MacDonald is not especially critical of his party’s figurehead. He does, however, think the Liberal Democrats need to expand their offer.

“We need to broaden our range. Everybody knows we’re the party of health and social care, but I think we need to be the party of small business, and the party of education. If we had a three-legged stool, we would be a real contender to be a party in power.”

“But my opinion is to be taken lightly because I don’t have a clue what I’m talking about,” he adds, in what The House comes to recognise is typical playful – and disarming – self-effacement.

MacDonald, it is fair to say, is full of surprises, cheerfully admitting for example that he is a former donor to the Conservatives and Labour. The MP says this was in aid of resisting Scottish independence, though his attraction to the Conservatives went deeper than that.

“My father was a Conservative. But Boris Johnson and Liz Truss knocked any affection for the Conservative Party I might have had,” he says. Could that change again one day, if the Tories were to move back to the centre? “I would say I was a compassionate capitalist, and I don’t think the Conservatives have that compassion.”

So, what does MacDonald want to achieve in politics? His answer is immediate and comes with a printed copy of a report he has just written, titled Remote Scotland: Spiralling Towards Unviability?.

“Those living in remote Scotland face an unparalleled, difficult challenge of almost survival,” he explains. “Costs are 30 per cent higher. Incomes are 10 per cent lower. Public services are much less good, and the stopping of EU structural funds has been catastrophic. We are now generating the electricity needed for Great Britain from the Highlands, but it is offering minimal jobs, no legacy housing and almost no community benefit.”

High housing, energy and food costs, health and social care deserts, a lack of childcare, poor transport and digital connectivity are all analysed and assessed as “serious” or “critical” in his paper, complete with constituent testimonies. Current government policy, MacDonald argues, simply does not cater for this area as one of Europe’s most sparsely populated regions. The demographic crisis is particularly acute here and getting worse.

“I would say the West Highlands has the most severe demographic problem of the whole United Kingdom. Many of the schools have half the school roll they had 20 years ago.

Obviously, people are having less children, but we have young, dynamic families leaving the area because of the education offering and the fact you get paid less and the costs are higher.”

Does he have any thoughts on the challenge of explaining our declining birth rates? “As you’ve discovered, I’m not very bright,” he replies, “so I never have the next thought.” He suspects social media is a key culprit.

MacDonald is especially interested in economic policy, for example lobbying to raise the VAT registration threshold for small businesses, though admits he has not got very far with this.

“I would say what’s most shocked me is the complete lack of business knowledge and interest throughout the whole of Parliament, and that the people who are coming into Parliament are very often people who have been in the public sector, or charities, or consultancy, or have been just in politics,” he complains.

“I’m very frustrated because I go around seeing everybody about my policies and nobody’s interested.”

What is perhaps more attention-grabbing about MacDonald’s politics is his approach to cultural issues. On the face of it, one might call him a social conservative, though he prefers to characterise himself as a Gladstonian liberal. He is also, notably, a Catholic – to the extent he has been awarded a papal knighthood, for service to the church – which must have informed his opposition to assisted dying.

“I think 11 of the 72 Lib Dems voted against assisted dying.” (It was 11 at Second Reading and 15 at Third.) “I hope there’ll be more than that next time round. Politically, it’s enormously useful for me – my voters are thrilled with my moral stance,” he says.

While some advocates of Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying bill were critical of those who objected on the basis of faith, others pointed out that we all get our moral compass from somewhere.

“I suppose I get guidance on a belief that politicians should have a moral compass, and I think if you’re active in faith, you’re more likely to have a moral compass. That’s going to rile a few people up,” MacDonald smiles.

He has certainly angered some Lib Dem members online with his dissent on trans issues, having made clear he rejects self-identification on gender and is concerned by the puberty blockers trial.

“I have had absolutely no pushback on my beliefs from anybody,” he says, referring to Lib Dem MPs, “even though I know that three or four of them are 180 degrees opposite of all my views.”

“The great thing about liberalism is it’s quite a broad church. The fact is, I’ll vote against the whip on things I care about. I made it very clear when I joined that I wouldn’t be whipped on moral issues,” he adds.

London-born MacDonald was raised in a famous Highlands climbers’ pub, Clachaig Inn, which his parents ran. “It was a great place to grow up,” he recalls. “It was back in the days when pubs were very vibrant places, so we would sometimes have 300 people in the bar. For a rural pub, it was humming.”

He started serving pints aged 10, he says. And drinking them? “Surreptitiously or legally?” the MP replies. He cannot remember but does confess to “minesweeping” – finishing abandoned drinks.

“I’m very frustrated because I go around seeing everybody about my policies and nobody’s interested”

His parents met in New York, where his father was working in the whisky industry, before his American mother was brought back to the Highlands – a “huge shock” given the wet weather and isolation. “She lasted 30 years, which is 29 and a half years longer than anybody thought it would last,” before going back to the States.

“I went to a Catholic boarding school down south in order to get some discipline knocked into me, and then my parents ran out of money, so they moved us to a day school in Edinburgh, Edinburgh Academy,” says the MP, enthusiastically tucking into his ice cream (it is a hot day in Westminster – though apparently, he eats it every day of the year).

“But a) I didn’t do well academically, and b) I met a girl, and I pursued her to Uruguay. She was Uruguayan, but she was doing a one-year exchange in Scotland. I thought, ‘She’s the one for me.’”

Leaving aged just 16, he spent a year in South America – until her family “made it clear that I should move on”. In the meantime, his entrepreneurial ways had begun: via a bus venture for tourists headed for Machu Picchu in Peru, he made “a fair bit of money”.

“I came back on the QE2, the liner. My father met me in Southampton, and he said, ‘It’s the army for you, laddie.’ I went to Sandhurst, extraordinarily, then did a short service commission, which was the making of me.”

MacDonald repeatedly emphasises just how lacking he was in academic ability – a surprise to him, given his father was an Oxford scholar. “He’s brilliantly intelligent. He was never a money-maker. He couldn’t quite understand why his children were not academic, and I don’t know the answer. But I’ve had many MBAs and PhDs work for me, and I seem to have been able to hold my own.”

So, off the young MacDonald went to the Falklands, post-ceasefire (“similar to the Highlands: very remote, tens of thousands of acres of barren land, very strong winds – I don’t remember being unhappy there at all”), then Northern Ireland. He was 18; the youngest in his platoon of 30.

“You grow up very quickly. You have to gain respect; you have to earn respect. It doesn’t come with the job. I think it was a good lesson in hard work, humility, working well with people, getting results without shouting. It’s a very consensual relationship between the officer, the sergeant and the men.”

MacDonald soon left the army – again, to pursue romance, having met his now-wife in Northern Ireland.

“I had already decided that the girl I was with was the one for me. She actually decided I was not. There’s a bit of a theme coming here! She did end up marrying me, but it took quite a while.

“I always knew that the army – it’s a difficult family life. You’re away from home a great deal, and you live in poor-quality housing, in a part of the world where your family don’t necessarily want to be. Also, I knew I wanted to go and work in the Alps as a ski guide,” he says.

“I did that for a winter and met a chap in a chairlift who offered me a job in finance. Obviously, you just keep going round until they offer you a job and can’t get off.”

The role kindled in him a love of business. Since then, MacDonald has founded multiple companies – including a data product for investment managers, a newspaper and a recycling firm – and sold them for a cumulative £150m.

MacDonald’s sons Archie, Jack and Jamie have followed the same entrepreneurial path (soap, kombucha and the family business of supplying spare parts for wind turbines, respectively). A fourth son, Donald, is the exception; he is “one of the Neets”, struggling to work in finance after gaining a 2.1 in theology at Edinburgh, so has just requalified.

“Hopefully, he’ll get a job now. But the big alarm to me is so many of our kids are studying a subject which will not help them get jobs in Britain, and I think we have to wake up and smell the bacon,” says MacDonald. Did he advise Donald against reading theology? “I’ve always made it clear to him that he’s mad for studying that.”

The MP is most proud of his philanthropic projects. In the 90s, he created the ‘Caledonian Challenge’, a 54-mile sponsored walk from Fort William to Loch Lomond that raised £14m over 20 years, for which he was awarded an OBE.

More recently, he read an article about how to transform a market town and spotted an opportunity to enhance Fort William, which struggles despite being a tourist centre (mostly a draw for hikers; also for Harry Potter fans who want to visit the nearby Glenfinnan Viaduct, which carries the Hogwarts Express in the films).

It recommended a town centre cinema with a restaurant – so, that is precisely what MacDonald created. He bought the old town hall, put a 100-seat restaurant and two-screen cinema in it, and parked a red Lotus sports car inside for good measure. It is now award-winning and owned by the community.

As an MP in the Highlands, MacDonald has a difficult schedule. He leaves home on a Sunday afternoon to catch the sleeper train down for parliamentary business starting a day later, often can only make it home for one night a week, and travels up to four hours to work at the far end of his constituency even when he is there. “I wouldn’t say my wife is a fan.”

Despite this, and his reflection that “in retrospect, I would’ve been very happy to be an MSP”, he is happy with the decision to take a seat in Westminster.

“Quite a lot of my friends are 65 and bored and not contributing and not fulfilled. They haven’t helped other people. They’ve done well, clipped the coupon and not benefited,” he says.

“I believe very strongly that if you’ve been lucky in life, you should give back. It would have been easy for me to continue my life of comfort in the Highlands of Scotland, writing novels and enjoying the social buzz, but I don’t think that is me.

“Although I find the commitment to Westminster a real challenge, I enjoy it a great deal, and do feel that people who can make change should do it rather than take the easy option.”