Lib Dem leader Ed Davey accuses Reform of only caring about its bank balance in conference speech
"They fight because two crypto billionaires gave them seventy-two million quid"
The Lib Dem leader Ed Davey has said Reform doesn’t represent the majority of British people and that the party only cares about its bank balance.
Davey told Lib Dem conference on Saturday that Reform fights because of the mega donations it receives from crypto billionaires.
He praised conference speakers earlier in the day for sharing stories of “why we care and why we fight”.
By contrast, he said Reform “care about their own bank balance”.
He added: “They fight because two crypto billionaires gave them seventy-two million quid”.
Davey also said: “Reform know they don’t speak for the real United Kingdom. That they don’t represent the majority of the British people.
Referring to the two donations of £36 million that Reform received from crypto billionaires Christopher Harborne and Ben Delo on the 11 and 12 September, he said: “They wouldn’t need seventy-two million pounds if they did, would they?”.
Ahead of the next election, Davey said the Lib Dems will fight against Reform’s “nasty populism” and “arsenal of hate and lies”.
Davey recalled his first political campaign as a student, when he successfully campaigned for his university college, Jesus College, Oxford, to boycott Barclays, due to its investments in apartheid-era South Africa.
He said his party will fight again to end injustices and “defeat the nasty populism of Trump, Le Pen, the AfD and the rest”.
In a swipe at Elon Musk, he said his party would “fight to stop the world’s richest man, who learnt racism in apartheid South Africa, from funding racism around the world”.
Davey said the Lib Dems will also “fight against Reform, and their seventy-two-million-pound arsenal of hate and lies”.
He also referred to “the fight to defend the RNLI”, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, after volunteers for the coastal rescue charity were recently targeted online amid a rise in anti-immigration campaigning.
The Lib Dem leader said that “what Farage is counting on to get him into No 10” is that people get “tired, depressed, fed up of seeing Zia Yusuf on BBC Question Time week after week”.
He said he hoped Reform was watching, “Because what they’ll see, what they’ll hear is a party that won’t be ground down. That won’t be deterred. That won’t give up the fight”.
The Lib Dems’ autumn conference started on Saturday 19 September and will run until Tuesday 22 September.
Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward
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