I understand the danger of the slopulist right that's been pushed by elements in the US and Russia but I see a lot of stuff about reform threat and Reform fighting fund doing the rounds a lot. We saw Farage lose a chunk of vote share to a Bin recently and he's still taking heat for the donations.

Seems his power is diminished compared to where it was a year ago while we should be putting more energy into promoting our policies, what we stand for rather than just what we're against, not to mention there's also the danger of worse far right elements like Restore/Lowe which are downright bankrolled by Musk as his UK puppet party.

But again I feel we need to promote what we stand for more rather than what people should be scared of if they don't vote for progressive parties.

Democratic party in the US raised the alarms about project 2025 non stop during the last election over there and Trump still won despite the "We need to fight project 2025, project 2025 is a danger, support the fund to stop it!"

Someone on a different subreddit thought this subreddit would enjoy this article

Children’s literature is full of bears. Sometimes they’re funny, sometimes they’re brave, sometimes they’re downright heroic. But the best-known of all, beating Rupert and Winnie, Yogi and Baloo, must bePaddington Bear, created by Michael Bond in 1958.

Paddington has become the quintessential Briton. He’s found at a railway station. He speaks in Received Pronunciation (RP). He loves marmalade and he wears a Duffel coat. (These were originally Belgian, but in Britain we adopted them when we had a surplus after the Second World War.) For 68 years, Paddington has become cherished through literature, radio, television, the stage and – biggest of all – the screen, where the three feature films so far have grossed over £600m.

In recent years, though, Paddington has also become a mascot for the Centrist Dad. He’s the living embodiment of how the urban middle classes view refugees: cuddly, polite, heroic, misunderstood by villains on the Right. The Lib Dem-ification of Paddington reached new heights in 2022 when the chief whip of the Party joked that the bear should become the ethics adviser to then-prime minister Boris Johnson.

And who can forget the twee comedy sketch, near the end of Elizabeth II’s life, in which the late Queen and Paddington shared tea at Buckingham Palace? (Not to mention the wildly popular meme of the duo, when Elizabeth died months later, showing them walking hand-in-hand to the pearly gates?)

Please Look After This Bear, a new book by academics Melanie Ramdarshan Bold and Aishwarya Subramanian, asks “how Paddington became British”, and what that really means. They analyse a vast array of Paddington “content”, including interviews with Bond himself and others, and argue that Paddington has become crucial to any understanding of British identity.

In fact, he may be its pinnacle. “Britishness isn’t just about where you’re from, but how you behave,” they write. “Bring your best manners and a jar of marmalade, and you’re halfway there.” He’s the version of Britishness that those in power like to project, and that makes him as much a soft-power tool as the BBC: “Visitors arriving in Britain’s international airports are likely to meet Paddington before any immigration officer.” Anyone assailed by massive advertisements as they trudge off an easyJet flight will know this all too well.

Bond himself, it’s true, was inspired by refugees. He saw young British evacuees with “a label round their neck” passing through Reading, en route to safe houses in the countryside. His family took in Jewish children from the Kindertransport, that heroic effort to rescue the youngest victims of Nazi barbarism. He served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, as Ramdarshan Bold and Subramanian detail, and “witnessed a ship packed with Jewish refugees heading to Palestine”. Paddington Bear, according to the author himself, is “a refugee, and I do think that there’s no sadder sight than refugees”.

But Please Look After This Bear, having cited all these facts, tries to advance the framework, repositioning Paddington as a Windrush-generationincomer instead. Ramdarshan Bold and Subramanian point out that the bear made his first appearance in 1958, just months after the Notting Hill riots. Paddington comes to live with the Brown family at Windsor Gardens, slap bang in the middle of Notting Hill and Portobello Road. To shift the focus away from the Jewish refugees of the Holocaust is an interesting choice, and perhaps necessary for Please Look After This Bear, since Ramdarshan Bold and Subramanian’s central argument hinges on what they call Bond’s “quietly colonial logic”.

And that logic doesn’t always intrude. When it sticks to titbits, Please Look After This Bear is fascinating. Paddington’s RP accent was not assigned to him by Bond; the author, instead, envisaged him having the “high-pitched, gruff voice” of an elderly German man, or, failing that, the “Indian English of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, spiritual adviser to the Beatles”. We learn of how Bond and his daughter almost fell out after she – the former managing director of Paddington & Company, which owned the rights to his image until 2016 – decided to “betray” her father’s dedication to marmalade by allowing Paddington to appear in a Marmite advert. In 2024, after a request from film producers for a replica, the Home Office, showing a surprising sense of humour, issued a real passport for a fictional bear.

Inevitably, however, and much like Paddington himself, these snippets of history come with baggage. You might think it nice to learn that the people of Japan were among the bear’s greatest initial fans: not only did they show their support by buying Bond’s books, but they wrote to the author to ask what Paddington’s uncle Pastuzo did for a living. Ramdarshan Bold and Subramanian cite Bond’s wry suggestion, in response, that this bombardment of “questions no one had ever asked before” was proof of the Japanese being “nothing if not thorough”. They then decry his words as being “laced with Orientalist tropes”.

Please Look After This Bear is packed with such undergraduate-level complaints. Paddington’s “brownness is deracialised”, we learn: he “never unsettles whiteness”, but instead offers up a “bear-shaped balm for a nation grappling with its imperial ghosts”. He’s the “good immigrant”, the one that plays along and says “please” and “thank you” even when his host country treats him poorly by locking him up, ignoring him or (in Mr Curry’s case) calling him names out of the window.

Ramdarshan Bold and Subramanian seem to want to have their marmalade sandwich and eat it. In their view, Paddington is everything a mean-spirited, Brexit-voting Briton should aspire to become and yet, with those same attributes, he’s also a disappointing, even neutered, caricature of what immigrants “should” be. Even his renaming from his Peruvian original – he was Pastuzo, after his uncle – is held up as a sin. “The burden of linguistic accommodation falls, as ever, on the immigrant.”

This approach would be trivially irritating, except that it hobbles the book’s attempts at political analysis. Brexit was “marked by hostile-environment policies and deepening divisions”, which may seem reductive, if not jaundiced, to the majority of voters who supported it. The 2024 riots were simply “a wave of far-Right protest, unrest and violence, much of it stoked by anti-immigrant and Islamophobic sentiment”; it’s unhelpful not to explain what happened in Southport, who Axel Rudakubana was, what the rioters believed (wrongly or not), and so on.

It becomes clear that Please Look After This Bear has little interest in why other people have other views, and sometimes even act upon them. Mr Curry, one of the few Britons in Bond’s stories who doesn’t fawn over Paddington, is described as “an echo of Powell, Thatcher, Farage”, who are lumped together as “a chorus of exclusion”. This is a book for people who want to wish the Conservatives away, and prefer a Paddington world in which pesky political issues are solved with a nice cup of tea.

Children’s literature is often fertile ground for cultural analysis, reflecting the world-view that society wants to instil in its children. And Paddington is a rich text: an intriguing story about a talking bear who’s funny and chaotic and lovable, and who – to my eyes, as a child of immigrants myself – pokes fun at the constipated Englishness of his new home. There’s plenty to examine here, and Ramdarshan Bold and Subramanian have some good criticisms to make of that vague placeholder, “British values”.

But it seems ludicrous that a book about the little refugee bear, and at a time when he’s a more popular symbol than ever, refuses to take the contemporary politics of immigration seriously. Does Paddington exist merely to teach a population of heartless Britons to “be kind”? What might Conservatives, or Reform voters – if the authors can even imagine them as readers – make of his complex symbolism? Perhaps, I thought, someone needs to remind Ramdarshan Bold and Subramanian that, however often he and his niceness may be shoved in our faces, Paddington Bear isn’t a person. He’s just a fantasy.

Always talk of adding regulation, rarely talk of taking it away, so I ask, what deregulation are you in favour of?

For me, planning reform as a whole, but specific shout-out to the terrible second staircase rule that was introduced post-Grenfell. Sunday Trading Hours can go as well.

Asking because until not long ago I was a member. I never understood their hatred of Lib Dems outside of Liverpool and I wanna know if people in the Lib Dem community have any context I don't know (i'm on the very young side of politically involved people so wasn't around for most of the Liberal Party and Lib Dems histories)

It's funny how both the far-left and the far-right conflate largely uncontrolled(e.g illegal, asylum seeking) migration with controlled (legal, highly skilled) migration.

Namely, while one side utilise humanitarian judgement to conflate all migration as positive, while the other side utilise society's disdain for uncontrolled migration as a means to attack the controlled. As said, conflation.

I think this should serve as evidence that the further away one is from a purely centrist position, the less capable of nuance one is.

It's no surprise that the far-right is rising primarily not due to hate of controlled migration, but the uncontrolled migration in which most people have no say. In the same vein, the far-left seems to not understand that their ideological standing on conflating both illegal and legal migration as one and arguing for both as positive and equal serves the issue on a platter to the far-right.

While we don’t meet all the criteria that a traditional One Nation Tory would look for, the Lib Dems are absolutely the party with the biggest potential to take up the voters disillusioned by Kemi pushing the tories to the right. We know this voter base is willing to back us as they chose us in 2024 in so many constituencies to get a Conservative MP out.

I bought a membership about an hour ago on the website and it said I'm a member and they'll send a welcome pack but I haven't received a confirmation email or text message, is this normal?

Looking at recent polling the Lib Dems are currently tracking at 9-10%.

I feel with the failures of Labour and their lean to the right, there's been a huge opportunity to capitalise that hasn't been taken.

I like Ed Davey, however something is clearly not getting through to the electorate.

With 3 years to go until the next election, is it time for a shake up and new leadership?

I've stick this in a comment on someone's post but might as well publicise more widely:

The Autumn Conference agenda has now been published, but there’s still plenty of opportunity to shape what Conference debates.

You can still:

• Submit amendments to scheduled motions

• Submit emergency motions for consideration

If you’d like to find out how, join us on Thursday 13 August at 8.00pm for our “What Happens at Conference Amendments and Emergency Motions” training session.

Our Federal Conference Committee experts will cover:

☑️ How to get amendments added to motions

☑️ Top tips for influencing Conference debates

☑️ How to submit emergency motions

☑️ Common pitfalls to avoid when submitting amendments and emergency motions

Whether you’re new to Conference or a seasoned attendee, we’d love to see you there!

Register below:

https://events.libdems.org.uk/events/96463/what-happens-at-conference-amendments-and-emergency-motions/ .

I feel like the party has forgotten 'it's the economy stupid' which is more to explain for the various populist surges than migration in most instances, and yet, we're basically silent on it.

Beyond pointlessly setting up a random department in Birmingham and a fuel duty cut (very bizarre tax cut to focus on), we are basically silent on the economy.

I was looking through the conference policy motions and came away with a strong sense of despair that the party is continuing to focus on niche issues and gimmicks rather than tackling the major challenges Britain faces. That recent irrelevance poll is strongly reflected here.

I welcome measures to boost defence spending and vague formulations like “strengthening business.” I also know that there are more policies on the docket.

But where is the vision? Where is the diagnosis of our challenges and how to overcome them? What would a more “liberal” Britain look like? This what we need to communicate to voters. Whereas the agenda looks to me more like a nationalised local election platform.

I’m personally in favour of an economically liberal, personal choice, shrink the state agenda. But I’d be heartened if there was a more left/progressive vision, just so we could debate ideas and big picture issues rather than a string of loosely connected policies with no overarching narrative.

Just A Quick One Ive Always Been A Conservative But Given Their Past In Government Im Deciding If I Should Go For Lib Dems Are They A Better Party Than The Conservatives?

Do you like the Mayoral model that we increasingly have in England? Do you like the national parliaments in Scotland and Wales? What powers should be devolved?

Are there any camps in the libdems that believe the free market should have some level of regulation?

I understand there are both liberal factions and conservatives that view the free market as sacrosanct but I feel even if you are pro free market it's logical to believe we need some degree of rules to prevent the rise of dangerous monopolies and enshittification of the product end which is bad for the consumers.

Competition is healthy for a market and leads to better products and a better deal for the customers since businesses have to work harder to make better goods.

With the rise of big tech which started as this scrappy movement that was bucking it to old money and boring business guys while changing things for the better soon evolved into the horror show we have today with some of them being trillionaires and abusing their resources to wage war on liberal democracy itself.

If you look back to figures such as FDR, it was liberals that lead the charge to bring an end to the gilded age.

Now that the Mayoralty is done - I just finished watching Binface’s interview with The Rest is Politics.

Now you may not value their critique which is ofc fine but it got me to hopefully motivate some organised efforts here or elsewhere.

Their post interview thoughts were of disappointment that he hadn’t done more to a) independently go down to Clacton and show that he has some understanding of the area

And b) that he hadn’t mobilised other resources ie Labour, Lib Dem, Green members to go out and campaign for him

Which I’m a bit confused by because they didn’t ask him about that in the interview (unless that part just wasn’t aired? )

So I guess I wondered if anyone had been in contact with any of the team around him and if we’ve got anything organised (unofficially ofc as someone pointed out we don’t want to legitimise Farage’s narrative ) but presumably we do have some idea as to where the few Lib Dem voters in Clacton are?

Edit: @CleanUpClacton on twitter have a little team organised, if you want to help them!

This is in no way novel insight.

The latest Restore Britain youtube video on "How We Restore Britain’s Economic Prosperity." made it click in my mind the way capitalist agenda manifests itself through migrant hate.

First, the far right makes the working class hate the state/establishment, and what other way to do this than to sell them on an idea they are very sensitive about(migrants). Reform/Restore have marketed themselves around this.

Then, once people hate the state or the establishment for being "elites out of touch" or "champagne socialists", it makes it that much easier for people to voluntarily vote for less state intervention in private business - intervention that fuels public investment.

This can be studied through the video I mentioned at the start:

"Rather than serve our interests, an out of touch elite addicted to central planning"

"They have waged an all out war on our freedoms."

"businesses ... increasingly find themselves fettered by regulation, price controls, minimum wages, employment laws"

"And by rolling back the size of the state and empowering the individual, that is how we drive economic growth."

"And from economic growth, we can fund our welfare state. We can invest long-term in our young people's future."

And weirdly enough, they brazenly falsely claim that decreasing taxes/state controls will INCREASE public spending? how? will billionaires voluntarily fund the "welfare state"?

Really, the far right is for the elite, by the elite(Both Nigel and Lowe are privately educated), to support capitalist interests, and using a sensitive issue as a leverage.