The Global Fight for Liberal Values

In the defining fight of our political generation – liberal democracy versus rising authoritarian nationalism – open societies must stand together, rebuild our European defence and economic partnerships, and defend the rule of law to ensure we remain richer, safer, and stronger together.

Earlier this week I met with fellow liberal politicians from across the world at Liberal International’s London Security Conference 2026 at the National Liberal Club, where we committed to defending those critical liberal values. I was honoured to deliver a speech at the Conference, which you can read below:

Friends, colleagues, fellow liberals – it really is wonderful to stand up here and see Liberal friends from right across our continent and around the world.

Friends from Ukraine. We stand with you in your fight against Putin’s aggression.

Other friends from eastern Europe – also on the front line, who know exactly what is at stake when authoritarian power goes unchecked on Europe’s borders.

Friends from Canada – on the front line against a different kind of authoritarian bully. We stand with you too. Elbows up!

And Liberal friends from so many other countries. Different languages. Different histories. Different traditions. But one shared conviction.

That freedom is worth fighting for. That the rule of law is not negotiable. That human dignity does not stop at national borders. That when democracy is under attack – anywhere in the world – we Liberals have a duty to stand together and defend it.

And friends, that is exactly the moment we are in. An extraordinary and dangerous moment – for Britain, for Europe, and for the world. 

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the assumptions we used to take for granted – assumptions that have shaped our continent since the fall of the Berlin Wall – no longer hold. The assumption that international rules would broadly be respected. That trade would keep opening up, not closing down. That our security would be underwritten by a stable alliance with the United States.

Those assumptions are gone.

Vladimir Putin is still waging a war of conquest on our continent – bombing schools and hospitals, murdering civilians, and openly testing how far NATO’s resolve will stretch.

He has shown the world that territorial conquest is not some relic of the last century. It is happening now. To our friends and neighbours in Ukraine. Fellow Europeans who share our values and our way of life. 

And in Washington, we have a president who treats the Western alliance not as a partnership to be nurtured, but as a protection racket to be shaken down. Who admires strongmen and mocks allies. Who has taken a wrecking ball to the rules-based order that generations of British, European and American leaders spent decades building after the Second World War. 

Let’s be honest with each other about Donald Trump. 

This is a man who has threatened to abandon NATO’s critical Article 5. Who has flattered Putin while bullying Zelensky. Who has launched a trade war against friend and foe alike, wrecking supply chains and causing economic misery around the world – including in his own country. Who has cheered on the very far-right, anti-European movements that many of you in this room are fighting in your own countries. Whose national security strategy repeats far-right tropes of “civilizational erasure”, and threatens that the US Government will cultivate resistance in Europe.

This is a serious threat that I’m afraid too many leaders just aren’t facing up to. But not the people in this room. We get it. We know that we cannot pretend the United States is still the guarantor of European security that it once was.

Europe can and must shoulder greater responsibility for its own security within NATO. And that includes Britain strengthening our own Armed Forces, and working much more closely with our European allies.

And here is the thing liberals must understand, wherever we sit in Europe: Putin’s aggression abroad, Trump’s authoritarianism, and the populist, nationalist politics rising in our own countries are not separate stories. They are threads of the same story – tightly woven together.

The Kremlin doesn’t just send tanks and missiles across European borders. It sends money, disinformation and encouragement to the parties that want to break up the European Union from within. That want to hollow out the rule of law, and turn neighbour against neighbour.

We see it in Britain, with Nigel Farage’s Reform Party.

A party trying to turn our country into a smaller, meaner, more frightened place. Trying to turn our United Kingdom into their version of Trump’s America. No NHS. Gun laws rolled back. The media and the courts serving the man in power, not holding him to account. You will each have your own version in your own country.

In Germany, it’s the AfD, mainstreaming dangerous rhetoric that your country had stamped out so firmly. 

In Austria, it’s the Freedom Party that topped the polls for the first time since the war.

In France, it’s Marine Le Pen, dangerously close to the Élysée itself.

The parties who tell people that the answer to every problem is to blame the “others”, curtail people’s rights, and abandon your allies. Who dress up authoritarianism as “common sense”. Who are cheered on, quietly or loudly, by their friends in Putin’s Kremlin and Trump’s White House.

But friends, this fight can be won. And won convincingly, when we choose to have it.

Look at what happened in Hungary this spring. For sixteen years, Viktor Orbán built the model that every other populist wanted to copy: capture the courts, capture the media, cosy up to Putin, blame Brussels for everything. And in April, the Hungarian people threw him out. Not by a whisker, but in a landslide. Even after JD Vance came to campaign for him.

It’s a reminder that when the opposition organises, when it offers something better than fear, illiberal authoritarianism can be defeated. 

Orbán’s defeat should give every one of us in this room hope – and a model to learn from. 

This is the fight of our political generation. Not liberal versus conservative, in the old, familiar sense. But liberal democracy versus a rising international movement of authoritarian nationalism. 

A right-wing movement boosted every day – let’s not forget – by the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, and his social media platform. And that really matters, because this fight isn’t only being waged with tanks and gas pipelines. It’s being waged online too.

Look at what happened in Romania, where a presidential election was thrown into chaos and ultimately annulled, after a flood of Russian-linked disinformation and covert social media promotion turned a fringe, pro-Kremlin candidate into a front-runner almost overnight.

Look at Musk’s own platform, boosting nationalist parties in election after election, in country after country, dressed up as “free speech”.

This isn’t happening by accident. Hostile states and billionaire-owned platforms have discovered they want exactly the same thing: a divided, quarrelling Europe, too busy fighting amongst itself to stand together.

And friends, if that is the scale of the threat, then the scale of our response has to match it.

Liberals have to step up our fight against this. We have to get better at exposing disinformation before it spreads, protecting our elections, and holding platforms accountable, no matter how rich or powerful the people who own them. We have to fight back against nationalism and populism in all its forms. And we have to work together. 

That is what Liberal International exists to do. And it has never mattered more. And that means doing what you are all doing today. Sharing what we learn about disinformation and foreign interference as fast as the people spreading it do.

Standing behind our sister parties the moment they come under pressure – as this organisation has for liberals and democrats fighting a government sliding into Moscow’s orbit in Georgia, and for those resisting attempts to abolish meaningful elections altogether in Nicaragua.

It means coordinating our voices across Europe and beyond, so that when one of us is attacked for defending the rule of law, all of us respond – together, immediately, not weeks later once the damage is already done.

That is what solidarity actually looks like. Not a slogan. A discipline. 

Because as Liberals, we are proud internationalists. People who believe that our countries and our peoples thrive when we are open and outward-looking. And I strongly believe that the UK can be an incredible force for good when it stands tall on the world stage. And stands up for what is right. 

But for too long, Britain has been absent. Not by necessity, but by choice – the choice made by the last Conservative Government and cheered on by Nigel Farage. A choice to turn our back on our European neighbours, just at the exact moment the continent needed to pull together. Just as the threats to our shared security were multiplying.

I think that was a historic mistake. And most British people agree. 

So our party has set out a plan to fix it: a new UK–EU Growth and Defence Partnership. Let me tell you what’s in it, because I want to ask for your help to make it happen.

First, growth.

We want Britain back in a Customs Union with the EU, and back in the Single Market – tearing down the barriers to trade that have cost our economy tens of billions of pounds a year. The best way to tackle the cost-of-living crisis, and bring our countries closer together again. But just as important as the economy is defence and security. And the truth is, the two can no longer be treated as separate. Economic security is national security. Energy can be weaponised. Supply chains can be held hostage. We learned that the hard way with Russian gas, and we are learning it again with Trump’s tariffs and the Strait of Hormuz.

There are those in all our countries who look at Putin’s war on Ukraine and Trump’s war with Iran – and the way gas prices have sky-rocketed as a result – and say our response should be to abandon the fight against climate change, halt investment in renewables, and tie ourselves ever more tightly to dirty fossil fuels.

Trump in the US. Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage here in the UK.

But their plan wouldn’t bring down energy bills for the long-term. It would leave our economy more exposed to price shocks, our environment more exposed to extreme weather, and our security more exposed to the whims of foreign dictators.

That is not the way forward.

So instead, our Growth and Defence Partnership would include:

A new European Rearmament Bank, to help finance the continent’s rearmament at the pace this moment demands – with Britain seeking full access to the EU’s €150 billion SAFE defence-lending programme, so British industry can build alongside yours, not outside it.

Joint defence procurement. Building the defences we need together. Creating jobs here in Britain and across the continent. Closing the gaps that Putin is counting on us to leave open.

Deeper cooperation on intelligence, cyber security, and the protection of critical infrastructure. Because an attack on a power plant here in Britain – or air traffic control in Germany, or on the government itself in Latvia – is an attack on all of our security.

Collaboration on energy security, so that no European nation — east or west, large or small — can ever again be held hostage by an authoritarian regime turning off the gas.

And a new European Security Council, to improve the political coordination of Europe’s rearmament and give this continent the collective capability to meet NATO’s requirements — with or without reliable American backing.

Friends, that last point is the one I most want to land with you today. Even after Trump leaves office, we can no longer organise our defence on the assumption that Washington will always show up. Europe has to be able to defend itself. Not instead of NATO – but so that NATO survives whatever comes out of the next American election, and the one after that. 

I keep coming back to something Mark Carney said in Davos, because I think it captures this moment better than anything else I’ve heard.

He said: “Middle powers must act together — because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.”

If we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu. Think about what that means for every country represented in this room. On our own, we are all, in Carney’s terms, at risk of being on the menu: for Putin’s aggression, for Trump’s tariffs, for Xi’s espionage. 

But together – pooling our economies, our defence industries, our intelligence, our diplomatic weight – we are one of the largest and most capable blocs on the planet.

Together, we are very much at the table. That is the argument for what I’m proposing today.

Not because pooling sovereignty is an end in itself, but because it is the only way any of us stay at that table in a world of great powers throwing their weight around. Britain wants to help build that capability. We are one of Europe’s foremost military powers, a leading intelligence nation, a permanent member of the UN Security Council. 

We should be at that table – not because we’re owed a seat, but because Europe is safer with Britain fully in the room, and Britain is safer fully committed to Europe.

That is what our partnership offers. Richer. Safer. Stronger. Together.

Last year, I had the pleasure of visiting Estonia. I went to Tapa to meet the British troops stationed there on NATO’s front line, working side by side with their Estonian colleagues just a few dozen miles from the Russian border. I sat with soldiers who understood, better than most politicians back home ever will, exactly what deterrence means in practice – day in, day out, on the ground. And I met with Estonia’s Prime Minister to discuss how we deepen the ties between our two countries: on defence procurement, on cyber resilience, on the practical, unglamorous work of making sure this alliance holds.

What struck me most was the clarity. Nobody in Estonia needs convincing that Putin is a threat. Nobody needs persuading that freedom has to be defended, actively, every day.

I came home from that trip more convinced than ever that Britain has a great deal to learn from Estonia, and that we should be stepping up our own defence – and the defence of the whole of Europe against Putin – far more than we have so far.

Ukraine’s fight is all of our fight. Britain’s support for Ukraine must never waver. Europe’s support must never waver. We must keep defending our Ukrainian friends, defending our continent, and defending democracy, liberty, human rights and the rule of law – all the things Putin is trying to destroy.

All the things this movement, Liberal International, was founded to protect.

So friends, here is the choice in front of every democracy represented in this room. One path is to shrink. To close ourselves off. To hand over our economies, our security and our democratic institutions to men who tell us that strength means cruelty, and safety means walls. That is the path Putin wants us to take. It is, I fear, the path Donald Trump is already walking. And it is the path that Farage, Le Pen and their counterparts across Europe are desperate to follow.

The other path is the one liberals have always believed in. That we are stronger together than alone. That open societies will always beat closed ones.

That the answer to authoritarian aggression is not to imitate it, but to take it head-on and defeat it – with better alliances, better ideas, and the patient, unglamorous work of building support for values and institutions that outlast any one bully, in any one country.

That is the path I am asking Britain to take. And it is the path I am asking every liberal in this room to take, together, in your own countries and across our continent.

We have done this before. Liberals around the world built the rules-based order out of the wreckage of the Second World War.

We can renew it now, when it is needed most. I know you will share in that work, because it is what this event is all about. 

So thank you all. And let us leave today more energised, more organised, and more determined than ever. Ready to build the partnerships – economic, political, and yes, military – that will keep our people free. 

Not on the menu. At the table.

Richer. Safer. Stronger. Together.

Thank you.