Lib Dems propose tech levy to fund £250m online crime agency

The Liberal Democrats arrived at their annual conference in Brighton facing an uncomfortable truth: despite winning their best election result in a century just two years earlier, most voters had no clear idea what the party actually stood for. It was this gap—between electoral success and public recognition—that shaped the announcements emerging from the gathering.

Max Wilkinson, the party's home affairs spokesperson, was set to unveil a proposal to create a new Online Crime Agency with an annual budget of £250 million. The agency would focus on some of the internet's darkest corners: child sexual abuse material, trafficking networks moving drugs and weapons, and the emerging threat of deepfake pornography created with artificial intelligence. The money would come from a levy on large technology and AI companies—a direct tax on the platforms where these crimes flourish. Wilkinson planned to tell delegates that these corporations had enabled the offences and should bear the cost of fighting them.

The timing was deliberate. Party leader Ed Davey had already announced other cost-of-living measures: a 10-pence reduction in fuel duty for three months and a cut to the bus fare cap from £3 to £1. These were concrete proposals, the kind meant to stick in voters' minds. Yet the party's own research suggested they had a serious problem. Polling released at the conference by More in Common showed that just 39 percent of voters said they understood what the Liberal Democrats stood for—a figure lower than every other major party, including Restore Britain, a political newcomer that had launched only in February with a single MP.

The numbers were stark across multiple measures. Only 16 percent of voters reported hearing from the Liberal Democrats in recent months, compared with 66 percent who had encountered messages from Reform. On social media, just 3 percent said they had seen Davey, against 20 percent who had seen Nigel Farage, Reform's leader. The party was static in national polling at around 12 percent, and there was a creeping sense that in an increasingly fragmented political landscape, the Lib Dems risked becoming invisible.

Davey pushed back against this narrative in media interviews on Sunday morning, insisting his party was making genuine change, not merely chasing headlines. He pointed to eight consecutive years of winning council elections—a record the party had never achieved before. "I'm talking about real change, not just talking about the bubbles," he told the BBC. Yet beneath the surface, frustration was building among some of his own MPs. Several said privately that the party's message had grown too vague, that its support relied too heavily on tactical voting in a limited number of places, mostly in the south of England.

Tom Gordon, the MP for Harrogate and Knaresborough, spoke openly at a conference fringe event about the geographic imbalance. The Lib Dems held just four seats in the north of England against 58 in the south. "If we want to be a party of government, then we need to have a message for the whole country, not just parts of it," he said. One unnamed MP acknowledged the deeper problem: "We already have quite a lot of policies, if people look at them. It's less about what you get if you vote Lib Dem than why you should—about what we represent. And people don't really know that."

A longtime party activist captured the sense of disconnection in a single image: "The voters only seem to properly notice us once every four years, when there's an election. It's a bit like being curling at the Winter Olympics—the rest of the time we're forgotten." The conference, then, was being framed as a turning point. Party figures saw it as an opportunity to establish a more coherent policy platform on the economy, immigration, and now crime. But the challenge went deeper than policy announcements. It was about identity, about giving voters a reason to think about the Liberal Democrats when an election was not imminent, about building a message that could reach beyond the party's traditional strongholds and speak to the whole country.