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Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey on Tuesday put the NHS at the heart of his party’s strategy at the next election, in a closing speech at his party conference in which he vowed to dislodge the Conservatives from power.
He announced an ambitious policy to tackle cancer waiting times in England, including a new legal right for patients to start treatment within 62 days of an urgent referral, in a highly personal speech to delegates in Bournemouth.
About 40 per cent of patients — 72,000 people — waited more than two months to start treatment in the past year, according to Lib Dem calculations. The party previously set out plans to invest £4bn in cancer treatment over the next four years, which it has not yet fully costed.
This was Davey’s first address to a Lib Dem autumn conference since he became party leader in 2019 — Covid and the Queen’s death derailed previous events — and he used the occasion to flesh out his personal story and policies.
In a speech that referred to his own parents’ deaths from cancer and his role caring for his dying mother as a teenager, Davey sought to highlight the Lib Dems’ two key electoral messages: improving the NHS and cleaning up the UK’s waterways.
Party insiders point out that both messages are designed to address the concerns of the voters they are hoping to attract in target seats in Tory heartlands, notably in the so-called “blue wall” of the south and west of England.
But Davey’s refusal during the party conference to outline a position on two other key issues: whether the party wants to rejoin the EU’s single market and ultimately rejoin the union, and what it would do in the event of a hung parliament in the wake of the general election expected next year.
Davey has positioned the Lib Dems as an overtly anti-Conservative party and in all but one of the party’s target seats in England at the next election — Sheffield Hallam — the incumbents are Tories.
His speech on Tuesday made 11 references to UK prime minister Rishi Sunak and none to Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer.
While he attacked the Conservatives on everything from their environmental U-turns to broken promises on health and backlogs in the courts, he only sought to draw one dividing line with Labour — on the UK’s relationship with the EU.
Davey claimed that Labour had “no way near as ambitious” a policy on rebuilding relations with the EU, and claimed the Lib Dems had “always been proud to champion, even when no one else even dared whisper it, fixing our broken relationship with Europe”.
But over successive interviews since Sunday, he failed to confirm whether the Lib Dems wanted to rejoin the EU single market, despite a party policy document clearly spelling out that the final step of a four-stage plan is “seeking to rejoin the single market”.
Several senior party insiders said they felt Davey could be more confident in presenting this position, given concern voiced by pollster Sir John Curtice that the Lib Dems could lose pro-EU votes to Labour, whose public messaging on the EU is not dissimilar.
The Lib Dem leadership has also avoided setting out any position on what the party would do should Labour or the Tories fail to win a majority in the general election, saying only they are focused on winning as many seats as possible and reclaiming their position as the third largest party in Westminster.
Davey has made it clear the Lib Dems would not prop up another Tory government but most party insiders say they would also be unwilling to go into a formal coalition with Labour. The Lib Dems suffered a near-fatal electoral wipeout in 2015 after their coalition with the Conservatives.
However, that leaves the door open for some kind of pact in which the Lib Dems could allow Starmer to form a minority government in exchange for adopting some core Lib Dem policies — electoral reform is often cited as a key demand.
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