Conference Round-up Autumn 2025

Now the dust has settled from Lib Dem Conference, we’re all back at our day jobs and local by-elections, and Max Wilkinson is (probably) still trying to find a way to explain to his wife why he mentioned her genitals live on air. 

Which means it’s time for our Conference round-up!

It was an eventful few days so there’s quite a lot to cover. First up, our Constitutional Amendment Non-Debate Debate

The Party leadership was determined to make sure a “trans row” didn’t overshadow  conference this time, as it has on previous occasions. The anxiety was not unreasonable as, in the run-up to the Conference Piers Morgan had taken the opportunity of an interview to ask Ed Davey 10 times whether he could agree that women don’t have penises. Let’s see how well they did. 

Our Constitutional Amendment - F4 - was scheduled as the first substantive item on the agenda for the whole conference. This motion should really just have been a business-as-usual tidying up of the Constitution in response to a clarification in law. In normal times it would have been proposed by someone like the President, whose job it is to lead the way on governance issues, making sure the party Constitution is lawful and functional.

To give a bit of background - the Lib Dem Constitution provides for quotas ensuring a degree of women’s representation on internal committees - a ”positive action” measure, lawful under the Equality Act. Our Amendment would have made these provisions compatible with the Act by removing references to "self-identified women” and “non-binary”, and instead referring to just “women” and “men”, as mandated by the Supreme Court’s clarification of the meaning of “sex” in the Equality Act last April.

However, even though Ed Davey has said the party “accepts entirely” the Supreme Court ruling,  it was apparent that no-one in a leadership position was willing to turn this statement into action. So it was left to our group to address this obvious anomaly in the Constitution for a second time. As it turned out, President Mark Pack not only didn’t support the motion but in fact supported a move to block it from being debated properly.

Lucas North, a man who says he is non-binary, proposed a motion to “move to next business”  and skip our motion, speaking for two minutes about why conference attendees shouldn’t hear a debate on it. Then our Chair Zoe Hollowood was also given two minutes to make the case for why the debate should be allowed to go ahead. Her excellent speech can be viewed here.

Despite Zoe’s valiant efforts, the “move to next business” motion was passed.

The non-debate on the quotas was covered widely by the press, including the BBC, Telegraph,  the Mail and GB News, which featured a superb interview with Zoe here. Efforts to avoid a “trans row” overshadowing conference were failing spectacularly by lunchtime on the first day.

Just a couple of days later the party was seeking legal advice regarding the quotas provisions in the Constitution. As Zoe says in the article linked, “It is good to hear the Party is finally seeking legal advice on the quotas, however given the internal elections have already begun it would’ve been far better to sort this out when we first contacted them in May.” We will be watching how the internal elections proceed with great interest. We will also be fielding a slate of candidates be make sure to subscribe to our mailing list to receive an email with our slate when the time comes.

Our Onsite Fringe - Women and Online Harms 

Saturday evening was our fringe event on Women and Online Harms. Our all-star panel didn’t disappoint. Matilda Gosling shone a spotlight on the findings of her sociological research on the impact of social media and early exposure to violent porn on teenage minds and relationships. Michael Conroy shared his vast experience of working with young men and boys in this field. Kajsa Ekis Ekman brought a razor sharp radical feminist perspective on the rise of online pornography. It felt refreshing and important to be engaging with urgent issues affecting women beyond the often absurd yet critical fight for the recognition of women’s sex in law. 

Our event brought in an excellent, engaged audience who asked a range of thought-provoking questions. We would like to offer special thanks to Sarah Dyke MP, the first Lib Dem MP to chair one of our events. Another threshold crossed!

Defending Women’s Rights Across the Globe

The very last day of Conference - Tuesday morning - featured a motion on Defending Women’s Rights Around the Globe. This contained some worthy policy, but astonishingly failed to make a single mention of pornography or prostitution. A glaring omission given the growth and growing harms of these industries around the globe.

It’s worth noting that this motion was scheduled for the very last session of the conference, when many women members, including most of our group, had already had to leave to attend to caring responsibilities and jobs. This betrays a surprising lack of consideration for women in the conference planning, that we will be highlighting in our feedback to organisers.   

The Patsy Calton Award

The grand finale of Lib Dem Autumn Conference 2025 was Lib Dem Women (the official Lib Dem women’s group)’s decision to award the Patsy Calton award for exceptional women to … [drumroll]... you’ve guessed it. A man. 

Chris Northwood, a councillor from Manchester is known variously for campaigning to open up a women’s community bus service that was provided in the wake of the Yorkshire Ripper cases to men, and endorsing social media posts comparing women who believe women are female with “an infestation of pubic lice”. 

He was nonetheless deemed the most “exceptional woman” in the party, and clearly more exceptional than any actual female woman. Could it be that those old-fashioned women (the penis-free ones) are actually invisible to the eyes of the official Lib Dem women’s group? The Express highlighted the story, while the party itself doubled down on the decision, suggesting all of this was all perfectly normal and sane. Others clearly felt differently.

This gross gesture of trolling and provocation by the party hierarchy was a perfect bookend to the Conference, which had started with a move to demean and belittle women’s status within the party, and ended with a move to demean and belittle women’s status within the party.

Why we stay

We have been asked how we endure the incessant trolling, censorship, and nauseating sanctimony. Well, the answer to that is we have the BEST team in the whole of the party, the most laughs (material provided free of charge by our opponents) and a dogged commitment to our cause, which we happen to know is a just one.

Further to this, why would we give our opponents exactly what they want? It seems like some of them assumed that if they could create a hostile enough environment for us then we would just leave. What they didn’t realise (apart from the point above about female solidarity - did we mention our marvellous team?) is that - because we aren’t narcissists - we aren’t in politics to seek fawning and adulation and to have important-sounding people tell us how much they agree with us. We’re here to advance a political cause - that cause is a type of liberal democracy that doesn’t destroy women’s rights. 

The Liberal Democrats, under their current leadership, would happily see women disappear from political life altogether. We know this because they told us. In 2018 then Party President Baroness Sal Brinton was asked whether she believed a parliament composed of 50% men and 50% transwomen would constitute fair representation. She replied “Absolutely. A transwoman is a woman.” Everything they have done so far indicates a commitment to the ideology that supports that claim.

So we know they are willing to go all the way with this. And we are determined not to let them.

We did a quick post-conference survey of our members on the question of Why We Stay.

Here are a few of the replies:

I stay because it would be easy to walk away and think that change isn’t possible. I am encouraged by the suffragettes and women like Edith Cavell who did what was right despite the cost. We owe it to our daughters, granddaughters to stay and fight. Mainly we won’t wheesht. 

Because if we weren’t here testing the party’s capacity to recognise women as full humans with rights, then the Liberal Democrats - which looks to be on the way to increasing power and parliamentary influence - will get a free ride, trampling on women and ensuring only the compliant, agreeable ones get ahead. We can’t let this happen.

Because we want to ensure that the party of liberalism survives when gender ideology collapses - which is happening right now.

Because some of us remember the party we joined. Open debate and evidence-based policy, willing to tackle difficult topics, and valuing the individual under pressure from the majority. Trying to restore sanity and reflect the values of the majority.

Because as Lib Dem councillors we have experience of making lives better for people at local level and we want to feed that local experience and expertise into national policy and politics. 

We're working to save the party from itself. Liberalism itself is under threat and well worth fighting for.

Because the UK needs a liberal, democratic, party and our party needs to address the rights of women.

Because the more they abuse us the more galvanised we feel, and the more urgent the need to defy their attempts to drive us out, and to protect women’s participation in political life. 

Because someone’s got to hold these hypocrites to account, right?

Because at the next election women shouldn’t have to choose between Nigel Farage and a party that refuses to respect - or even recognise - their sex.

Next stop Spring Conference 2026 in York. Watch this space.