1. SLF News

Lib Dem Spring Conference 2026

Thank you to the hundreds of people who joined the SLF across our fringes, lunches, workshops and at our stall, at Lib Dem Spring Conference 2026.

Don’t worry if you missed us, you can find out about our activity here, including:

🟠 Pre-Conference Lunch

🟠 Vision Workshop

🟠 Fringe: Liberalism

🟠 Fringe: Economy

Read here: https://www.socialliberal.net/2026_spring_ldconf

Books with Banks

Read our newest series form SLF Council Member, Simon Banks, where he explores and reviews books that touch on liberalism and how these books can help 21st century social liberals define and communicate our ideology to community, country and world

Article 1: Jonathan Parry's Liberalism: True, False, and Useful?

Article 2: Helena Rosenblatt's Lost History of Liberalism

2. Social Liberalism in Westminster

The Strait of Hormuz and Britain’s role in an interdependent world

The biggest international story running through Westminster this week was the renewed crisis around the Strait of Hormuz. By 17 April, Starmer and Macron were co-chairing an international summit on securing freedom of navigation, with the UK saying more than a dozen countries were prepared to contribute to a defensive mission when conditions allowed. Reuters also reported Yvette Cooper urging the full resumption of shipping through the strait, underlining how tightly foreign policy and domestic economic stability have now become linked.

The political significance of the story lies in the way it collapsed the usual distinction between “foreign” and “domestic” policy. When supply routes are threatened, the effects are felt in fuel prices, inflation expectations and business confidence at home. Westminster was therefore not only discussing security and diplomacy, but also the government’s economic exposure to global instability and the limits of national resilience in an interdependent world.

Mandelson, Starmer and building trust in politics

One of the most politically toxic Westminster stories this week was the continuing fallout from the Mandelson affair, with Keir Starmer under pressure not just over his judgment but over whether he had told the truth about what he knew and when. Reuters reported on 17 April that Starmer was resisting calls to resign after saying it was “staggering” that he had not been told Peter Mandelson had failed security vetting, while opponents accused him of pleading ignorance in a way that strained credibility.

The story became more damaging because it was no longer only about Mandelson’s conduct, but about Starmer’s own authority and honesty. Starmer had already said in February that Mandelson had “lied repeatedly” about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, so the row now raises a more awkward question for Downing Street: whether this was a failure of basic due diligence, or whether ministers have not been fully straight with the public about the appointment and its aftermath. In Westminster terms, that shifts the controversy from a personnel problem to a broader question of trust in government.

Closer EU alignment returns to the centre of the political argument

Westminster also spent much of the week arguing over Starmer’s attempt to move Britain towards closer regulatory alignment with the European Union. Reuters reported on 13 April that the government planned legislation to support alignment in areas covered by UK-EU agreements, with ministers arguing this would ease trade, reduce burdens on business and help lower prices, while opponents warned it risked reducing Parliament to a “spectator”.

What made this significant was that it pushed the Brexit argument back into practical rather than symbolic terrain. The issue at stake was less about identity than about the kind of trade-offs the government is willing to make in pursuit of economic stability, smoother market access and improved relations with European partners. Westminster was effectively revisiting an old question in a new form: whether autonomy is most usefully measured by formal distance or by the ability to secure workable outcomes.

3. Reports out this week

Economics and Welfare

• Institute of Economic Affairs: A Growth Mindset? (13 April)
  • This report examines public attitudes to economic growth and argues that support for growth is broad, but shallowly understood. Its most politically useful point is that people are more open to pro-growth reform when growth is framed in practical terms — lower bills, higher wages, more homes and better services — rather than as an abstract economic objective.

• Institute for Fiscal Studies: Who is helped by Help to Buy schemes? (15 April)
  • This IFS working paper asks who actually benefited from Help to Buy. Its core argument is that affordability gains were concentrated among higher-income individuals, suggesting the schemes often accelerated home purchase for people already likely to buy rather than transforming access for those otherwise locked out of homeownership. That makes it especially relevant to current arguments about housing fairness and the design of future support.

• Institute for Government: Designing and delivering employment support (16 April)
  • This IfG report looks at how government can better support people who are out of work because of ill health or disability. It lands in the middle of a live debate about economic inactivity, welfare reform and whether the state has the practical capacity to deliver support that is both effective and humane.

Education and children’s services

• Education Policy Institute: Educational psychologists in England (16 April)
  • EPI describes this as the first comprehensive national assessment of the educational psychologist workforce since the pandemic. The report highlights major regional disparities in provision and warns of rising costs, attrition and an inability to meet the government’s ambition of including more children with SEND in mainstream schools.

• HEPI / London Economics / NUS: Understanding the Plan 2 loan repayment system (week of 13 April)
  • This report argues that changes to student loan terms since 2022 have left the Treasury making a surplus from the 2022/23 undergraduate cohort, while lower- and middle-income earners have been hit harder than higher earners. It proposes a more progressive stepped repayment model and feeds directly into the broader argument about intergenerational fairness, graduate debt and trust in the student finance system.

Health and care

• The King’s Fund: 10 actions the government and NHS leaders should take on NHS admin (15 April)
  • This piece focuses on a chronic but often under-discussed part of NHS performance: administration. It argues that improving patients’ experience of admin is not a peripheral issue but a core part of making the health system function better, at a time when public frustration with access, communication and coordination remains high.

• Re:State: Beyond caring: a new funding model for later-life social care (16 April)
  • This report argues that England’s adult social care funding model is failing under the weight of unmet need, unfairness and rising financial pressure. Its central proposal is to separate later-life care funding from working-age adult social care and create a dedicated contributory fund for care in later life, making it a significant intervention in the long-running argument over how social care should actually be paid for.

Local government

• LPIP: AI in Local Government: Adoption, Benefits and Challenges (14 April)
  This paper takes stock of how councils are using artificial intelligence, drawing on 101 published case studies and wider stakeholder engagement. It finds growing use of large language model tools, chatbots, predictive analytics and other systems, with the strongest evidenced gains in organisational efficiency and customer benefit, but it also argues that wider deployment will depend on stronger evidence, better capability and more careful governance.