Liberal Democrat conference 2026: Does Daisy Cooper’s growth plan add up?

The Sunday of the Liberal Democrat party conference found me in the Grand Hotel on the Brighton seafront, interviewing deputy leader of the party and Treasury spokesperson Daisy Cooper about her plans for the economy.  

The event was standing room only, the questions could have carried on all afternoon (did I mention it was a Lib Dem fringe?) and I thought Cooper acquitted herself well. I know from my years of trailing Vince Cable around similarly stuffed rooms that doing friendly battle with an eager fringe audience takes mental dexterity, comprehensive knowledge of the party’s policies, and no small amount of stamina.  

She arrived hot-footed from delivering her conference speech and brandishing those plans – titled "Plan to Get Britain Growing Again". As prefigured on the Inside Briefing podcast the week before, our interest is not just in Lib Dem policy but in Cooper herself. We may be just a couple of years from another government, and while its potential configurations are numberless, many of them may include influence from the UK’s traditional third party.  

The Lib Dem plan for growth is a blueprint which will need more detail

What did we learn? Let me start with the positives. Cooper is clearly well across her brief, speaks passionately on the cause of growth, and moves smoothly between the varied issues thrown at her by the audience or me. A Treasury spokesperson needs to be fluent in the language of bond markets, investment, pension mandates and tax reforms, local government finance, venture capital tax breaks and non-tariff barriers. The Lib Dem plan contains ten chapters and goodness knows how many policy positions, and Cooper knew and could defend them. That sounds like a low bar, until you remember that some politicians have admitted in the past to having no idea what was in their manifesto.  

Her criticism of the Labour government was at its most cutting when she decried its wasted first years in power, and the seeming lack of preparation it brought to the job – this orange-hued plan is meant to counter the same accusation before it can be levelled at the Lib Dems.  

The Lib Dems will need to be franker about inevitable tough trade-offs

Unfortunately, a next-day reading has not entirely convinced me that this is the sort of blueprint for decisive action that Keir Starmer clearly lacked.  

As I set out in my report on how the Centre can drive growth, a proper strategy has to go beyond simply naming its constituent parts (innovation, investment, skills, tax reform, streamlined regulation, and so on) and promises to do better on each. Most serious parties identify these same aspirations. What has been missing, across the spectrum, is a strategy for tackling the serious political costs involved in confronting these problems.  

There are no easy policy levers left, if there ever were: no lever marked “streamline regulation”, no “press here to simplify taxes”, no open door leading back into Europe.  Higher investment is universally agreed to be good for long-term growth; but the consumption foregone and the higher taxes or bills to pay for it is universally skirted over. Tax reform – on which there is some cross-party consensus – invariably requires the reformer to make one set of stakeholders unhappy to help the economy as a whole. This is seldom admitted to.

Any growth plan needs a way to share the pain

The biggest topic of all – how to build a larger buffer against disaster in the fiscal plans – means making nearly every one unhappy at once to forestall far worse misery in the unknowable future. And this was less obvious in the Cooper plan, or in the demeanour of many at the event. Worse, the stand-out announcement of conference, a call for an immediate cut to fuel duty of 10p a litre, is the sort of expensive, people-pleasing bung the accumulation of which explains a large part of our fiscal woes.  

I can understand the reticence of Daisy Cooper on my first really challenging question: how she would address the fiscal situation this autumn. Our crowded room was not the place for such a crucial revelation. After all, why should an opposition party currently a long way from power have to lay out all its plans just to have them knocked down by its less scrupulous antagonists?  

Nevertheless a proper plan for growth must be franker about some of the pain that its delivery needs to take. For example, re-entering some of the structures of the EU will involve not just difficult, possibly humiliating negotiation but a high-multi-billion pound payment for the privilege. Addressing the kinks in the tax system costs money. If you want to address the crazy high marginal rates that hit earners around the £100k mark, you must either foregoing some revenues or tax most people more to save some people a little.  

Another ‘competence first’ approach?

Some of what can be found in this Plan amounts to a commitment to do government better: regulation will be smarter, coordination will be better. A single Shop Front for business will marvellously gather into one place all the advice a company boss might ever need,* new more dynamic employment models will be discovered, and measures to boost investment in UK shares identified.  

In this vague optimism, I heard strong echoes of some of the statements made in private by Labour staffers in the run-up to the 2024 general election – that they will simply be better at the job. As Cooper herself pointed out, that was not enough.  

However, I should not set the bar too high. To be considered a party capable of governing the UK should not require a complete, costed plan sufficient for solving everything – far more richly resourced governments have fallen short of this mark for a whole decade. Parties represent negotiating positions as much as policy blueprints, and I am clearer now than I was before about what Liberal Democrats stand for. I am, moreover, confident that when we need more detail, they have spokespeople who are direct and fluent enough to provide it.  

That, for me, marks our event as a success for all concerned.  

*I have labelled the perennial fondness for this idea One Stop Shop Fallacy – the idea that all the complexity inherent in life can be simplified if it is all bundled behind a single front. In the end all that is achieved is for the mess to migrate, rather than be eliminated. One needs to ask if a business should really go to the same place to ask about taxes, chemical regulations, the prevention of money-laundering, how to claim a tax credit, how to secure raise finance from the markets, and so on. We have multiple departments for a reason.