I’m no fan of the Liberal Democrats but I’d struggle to argue that their manifesto is any more boring and uninspiring than Labour’s. It’s mostly pretty solid, middle-of-the-road stuff. Here’s everything you need to know, anyway.

THE GOOD

1. Free personal care for adults who need it.
2. More money on the NHS.
3. A ban on trans-inclusive conversion therapy.
4. Getting rid of the two-child benefit cap. 

As with Labour, the party is pledging to introduce free personal care in England, where it is currently mean-tested: this means that, depending on need, adults will be able to access nursing care, help with immobility problems, medication, and personal hygiene.

The party has also pledged to spend more money on the NHS, introduce 8,000 more GPs and ensure that patients with cancer begin treatment promptly, in an effort to tackle the life-threatening delays which have become a feature of the NHS. As with Labour, the Lib Dems want to institute a full, trans-inclusive ban on conversion therapy, as well as providing non-binary people with legal recognition. Planning to leave income tax as it is, they want to raise a reasonable amount of extra revenue (£27bn per year) by reforming capital gains tax, cracking down on tax avoidance, taxing banks more and introducing a new tax on frequent fliers. They want to spend more money on education and tackling climate change.

There’s nothing wildly exciting here, but the party has outflanked Labour from the left in some key ways. Unlike Starmer, the Lib Dems have committed to scrapping the two-child benefits cap – an austerity policy that experts have described as a “key driver of child poverty” in Britain. They also want to reduce the waiting time to receive the first payment from Universal Credit from five weeks to five days – anyone who’s had to use UC before will know that this would make a big difference.

THE BAD

1.  Can you trust a word they say?

By the late 1960s, the utopian dreams of the counterculture had soured into madness, paranoia, the Manson murders and the election of Richard Nixon. A generation of idealists who had, just years before, believed they could change the world for the better were left with an abiding sense of bitterness and disappointment. As Hunter S. Thompson wrote, “We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.” Millennials like me experienced our own version of this tragedy, and it was called “Clegg-mania”.

I myself was too young to vote in the 2010 election (👶), but I remember the excitement, the exhilarating sense of possibility that a white guy from Buckinghamshire might be our very own Obama. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be a young Clegg-head was very heaven! But we were all of us deceived: instead of abolishing tuition fees, as the Lib Dems promised, they teamed up with the Tories and spent the next five years signing off on a brutal programme of austerity from which the country has yet to recover. I have learned the hard way to take any pledges the Lib Dems make with a pinch of salt – as should anyone who had to pay £9,250 for uni. On the other hand, there’s no reason to believe they are any less trustworthy than Labour under Keir Starmer, a slippery snake who has rowed back on just about every single commitment that he has ever made. So yeah, whatever, vote Lib Dem if that’s what your heart desires. 

Read our cheat sheet on the Labour manifesto here.

Read our cheet sheet on the Green Party manifesto here.