Sir Ed Davey: We felt we had a duty to talk about caring for our disabled son
It’s hard for politicians to cut through. It’s even harder when you are leading the fourth largest party in parliament with only 11 MPs.
How do you insert yourself into a conversation that’s happening largely between the Conservatives and Labour, with a sprinkling of Reform’s Nigel Farage in the mix?
Well, Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey has done it two ways.
The first through endless silly stunts – be it repeatedly falling off a paddleboard on Lake Windermere or riding a giant waterslide in his swimming trunks in Somerset.
But the second, and far more profound, way to reach voters has been to open up about his own childhood, caring for his dying mother, and now, as a father himself, raising a disabled son.
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The decision to make a highly personal election broadcast, which showed Sir Ed at home with his 16-year old son John, as well as footage of him at his childhood home in Nottingham talking about his mother dying of breast cancer when he was 15, has, in part, been to highlight the world of carers.
But it has also been to try to show a side of this political leader the electorate don’t know.
Since the short film was released three weeks weeks ago, it has been viewed over 6.4 million times on the leader’s X feed. That is what you call cut through.
In an interview with Sky News at the Daveys’ family home in Kingston, Sir Ed and his wife Emily Gasson explained that revealing the caring responsibilities they both shared at home for John, who has an undiagnosed neurological condition and needs round-the-clock care, was a “gradual thing”.
“We started talking about it quite gently in my first year or so of leadership [and] we got this reaction from people saying, ‘thank you for talking about it’, and we sort of felt we had a duty to,” explained Sir Ed Davey, as he sat holding Emily’s hand in their back garden.
“I’ve talked more about my whole life as a carer, because I lost my father when I was four. So my mum was widowed, aged 36 with three boys under 10. Then she got ill.
“When I was nine, she told us she had breast cancer, and my little brother and I nursed her until she died when I was 15, so I was a young carer.
“And then we had our first child John and we realised after about a year that he was going to be severely disabled. So, I have had a caring role in different ways in my life. And it’s quite clear millions of others do too.”
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The party leader continued: “Carers take a huge burden off the NHS but get very little support and they’re not recognised. And it [has] almost become part of our political thinking – to talk about our experience and hopefully touch people’s lives, but also make it quite a serious point.
“People need the care and support when they’re caring, but also if they do, that can be good for the rest of society.”
Emily, who is also a local Lib Dem councillor, said she doesn’t use social media, but wasn’t surprised that the film of Sir Ed at home with John went viral.
“I think I can understand why people are being attracted by it, because I’m sure… so many people have had a similar experience or a member of their family [have had] a similar experience, so you can understand why it touches people in so many different ways,” she said.
“But as I say, we’re not unique in any way, shape or form… this story or what happens to people when they have [this experience] is never told. It’s never spoken about. It’s, you know, people just get on with it.
“A lot of the thing about being a carer is it’s absolutely exhausting. It’s physically exhausting. It’s emotionally exhausting. By the end of the day, you’re finished, you know, 9pm you’re absolutely finished. So your voice is not going to be heard because you’re just exhausted.”
Having told their story, Sir Ed put health and care at the heart of the Lib Dems’ manifesto launch two weeks ago, with an £8bn package of services in England.
Plans included giving everyone the right to see a GP within seven days, as well as free personal care for older or disabled people at home.
Sir Ed said the proposals would be funded by reversing tax cuts for banks, and closing tax loopholes exploited by the wealthiest individuals, which he claimed would raise £7.2bn.
He told me this could be achieved by investing £1bn in HMRC processes – although independent experts have been less sure, with the IFS think tank saying there was “uncertainty” around whether more resource into tax collectors would really squeeze out much more.
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What is in the Lib Dem manifesto?
With the Lib Dems eyeing a return to being the third largest party in parliament once more – and the latest MRP polling putting them on 48 seats – Sir Ed said he wanted to champion carers and social care in the next parliament, and wanted to see a cross-party commission to tackle the social care issue once and for all.
“This is a big issue, a long term issue,” he said. “[We need] some proper work where people come around the table and say, ‘we have to do this – there are consequences, but we’re all going to sign up to it’.
“And I think if you don’t do that, you won’t get the political commitment, won’t get consensus, and you won’t bring people with you.”
As for his campaign, the Lib Dem leader has come under some criticism for all the stunts he’s pulled off, with questions around whether in the quest for more exposure, he was throwing away credibility.
Sir Ed roundly rejected that, telling me that people were “fed up with politicians”.
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The Lib Dems’ wet and wild campaign week
He added: “I think [the public] are disillusioned. Politicians haven’t reached out to people. And I think by showing you’re a normal person, whether it’s the stunts and having fun, as well as the serious message and the stuff about being a carer, I think it shows I get it.”
Another question mark over the Lib Dems is their record in government in the coalition years, as the party who propped up the Conservatives and went along with austerity cuts.
Sir Ed faced difficult questions over it from a live audience at the BBC’s Question Time event last week.
Asked it he regretted going into coalition, he demurred and talked about what he thought the Lib Dems achieved in government – be it progress on renewable energy or same sex marriage.
But he also acknowledged the experience broke the bond of trust between his party and the public, which has taken years to rebuild.
In 2010, Nick Clegg’s Lib Dems had 57 MPs. In the 2019 election, the party had its worst performance yet and returned just 8 MPs (they got to 11 by the end of the parliament via by-elections).
Sir Ed has faced a grilling over his role in the coalition government with the Conservatives in 2010. Pic: PA
“You know, I lost my seat in 2015,” said Sir Ed. “When I became leader, I said to the party, we need to wake up, we need to wake up and smell the coffee. People had lost trust in us and I got that.
“And so we did two things: we are not going to promise something in this election we can’t deliver and we realised we needed to rebuild trust and listen to people. What are their problems?
“And so our whole manifesto has been built around what people are telling us.”
After a very difficult decade, Sir Ed is hopeful for this election as the party targets 85 seats up and down the country where the Lib Dems are second behind the Conservatives – with 40 of those across the Blue Wall in the South East and a further 25 in the South West of England.
He said: “In the Home Counties and the West Country, we’re finding – and this has never happened before in my lifetime – people who have always voted Conservative saying they’re going to vote Liberal Democrat, because they can’t bring themselves to vote Conservative.
“That is different, and that’s why I think we can do very well at this election.”
Opinion by: Fraser Edwards, co-founder and CEO, Cheqd
Brutal honesty has its place, especially when confronting discomfort, so here’s one that can’t be sweetened with honey: 96% of imported honey in the UK is fake! Tests found that 24 of 25 jars were suspicious or didn’t meet regulatory standards.
Self-sovereign identity (SSI) can fix this.
The UK Food Standards Agency and the European Commission both urge reform to tackle this concern by creating a robust traceability database within supply chain networks to ensure consumer transparency and trust. Data, however, is not the problem. The issue is people tampering with it.
This is not the first time products have been revealed to be inauthentic, with the Honey Authenticity Network highlighting that one-third of all honey products were fake in 2020, a fraudulent industry amounting to 3.4 billion euros ($3.65 million) of counterfeit goods entering the EU in 2023, as reported by the European Commission.
What is EMA, and how does it affect honey?
Economically motivated adulteration (EMA) involves intentionally substituting valuable ingredients for less expensive products such as sweeteners or low-quality oil. This practice leads to severe economic and health complications — and, in some cases, disease — due to the poisonous additives from substitute products.
The adulteration often involves creating an ultra-diluted blend containing minimal nutritional value, and counterfeiters call it… honey.
Fraudsters dilute the product with high fructose corn syrup or increase the thickness with starch or gelatine. These adulterants closely mimic honey’s chemical profile, making it extremely difficult to detect with traditional tests such as isotope ratio mass spectrometry. Fake honey lacks the essential enzymes that give real honey its flavor and nutrients. To make matters worse, honey’s characteristics vary based on nectar sources, the harvest season, geography and more.
Some companies filter out pollen content, a key identifier of a honey’s geographical origin, before exporting it to intermediary countries like Vietnam or India to further obfuscate the process. Once this is done, the products are brought to supermarket shelves and labeled with false certifications to command higher prices. This tactic exploits the fact that many regulatory bodies lack the means to verify every shipment.
The hidden cost of food fraud
The supply chain is profoundly fractured, as a jar of honey passes six to eight key points in the supply chain before it arrives on the shelves in the UK. Current practices make authenticity verification extremely difficult. Coupled with the inefficient paper-based bureaucracy that makes it hard to track origin obscuration attempts in intermediary countries, we cannot reliably determine the true extent of food fraud.
One Food and Drug Administration (FDA) estimate suggests that at least 1% of the global food industry, potentially up to $40 billion per year, is affected — and it could be even higher.
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Fraudulent practices don’t just harm consumers — they destroy beekeepers’ livelihoods, flooding the market and destroying profitability for legitimate traders. Ziya Sahin, a Turkish beekeeper, explained the frustration with food fraud regulation:
“Our beekeepers are angry, and they ask why we’re not doing something to stop it. But we have no authority to inspect,” he said. “I’m not even allowed to ask street sellers whether their honey is real.”
While there’s a growing appetite for more reliable testing and stricter enforcement, solutions are lagging. The EU’s latest attempt to fix this? Digital product passports are designed to track honey’s origins and composition, but they are already being criticized as ineffective and easy to manipulate, ultimately leaving the door open for fraud to continue.
EU passports are an ineffective solution
The European Union’s Digital Product Passport aims to tackle this by enhancing traceability and transparency in its supply chains. By 2030, all goods in the EU must have a digital product passport containing detailed information on the product’s lifecycle, origins and environmental effects.
While the idea sounds promising, it fails to recognize the extent to which fraudsters can forge certificates and obscure origins by passing products through intermediary countries alongside officials who turn a blind eye.
At the core of this issue is trust. Despite history showing that these rules can and will be bent, we rely on governments to implement laws and regulations. Technology, on the other hand, is agnostic and doesn’t care about money or incentives.
This is the fundamental flaw of the EU’s approach — a system built on human oversight that is vulnerable to the corruption these supply chains are already known for.
Self-sovereign identity (SSI) for products
Many people are already aware of the scalability trilemma, but the trust triangle is a key concept in SSI that defines how trust is established between issuers, holders and verifiers. It makes fraud much more challenging because every product must be backed by a verifiable credential from a trusted source to prove it’s real.
Issuers, like manufacturers or certification bodies, create and sign verifiable credentials that attest to a product’s authenticity. The holder, typically the product owner, stores and presents these credentials when required. Verifiers — such as retailers, customs officials or consumers — can check the credentials’ validity without relying on a central authority.
Verifiable credentials are protected by cryptography. If someone tries to sell fake products, their missing or invalid credentials will immediately reveal the fraud.
Government reforms must extend beyond current regulatory oversight and explore the approach outlined in the trust trilemma to safeguard supply chains from widespread adulteration and fraud.
SSI provides the underlying infrastructure necessary to reliably track the identity of products across multiple bodies, standards and regions. By enabling tamper-proof, end-to-end traceability in every single product — whether a jar of honey or a designer handbag — SSI ensures sufficient validators confirm the data is correct to tackle fraud and obfuscation attempts.
SSI also empowers consumers to independently verify products without relying on third-party databases. Buyers can scan the product to authenticate its origin and history directly via the cryptographic certifications confirmed by the validators to further reduce the risk of misinformation even if it reaches the shelves. This would also help reduce corruption and inefficiencies, as many checks are made on paper, which can be easily altered and is a slow process.
As honey fraud methods continue to expand, so do these products’ harm to consumers and local businesses. Steps taken to tackle these methods must thus also broaden. The EU’s Digital Product Passports aim to improve traceability; but unfortunately, they fall short of fraudsters’ sophistication. Implementation of SSI is a necessary step to effectively address the extent fraudsters take to ensure their product arrives on shelves.
Opinion by: Fraser Edwards, co-founder and CEO, Cheqd.
This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.
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PayPal says the US Securities and Exchange Commission has abandoned its investigation into the payment giant’s US-dollar stablecoin.
PayPal said in an April 29 regulatory filing that the SEC concluded its investigation into PayPal USD (PYUSD) and wouldn’t be taking any action.
The company said it received a subpoena from the SEC’s Division of Enforcement over its stablecoin in November 2023.
“The subpoena requests the production of documents. We are cooperating with the SEC in connection with this request,” PayPal stated at the time.
In its latest filing, the firm said the SEC notified it in February that the agency “was closing this inquiry without enforcement action.”
PayPal has said its stablecoin is 100% redeemable for US dollars and “fully backed” by dollar deposits, including short-term treasuries and cash equivalents.
However, the stablecoin has struggled to gain momentum in a crowded market dominated by rivals Tether and Circle. PYUSD has a market capitalization of just $880 million, less than 1% of Tether’s (USDT) $148.5 billion.
PayPal’s stablecoin has seen better growth this year with a 75% increase in PYUSD circulating supply since the beginning of 2025, according to CoinGecko. It remains down 14% from its peak supply of just over $1 billion in August 2024.
Earnings on PYUSD, Coinbase partnership
That growth could be bolstered by a company announcement on April 23 introducing rewards for PYUSD in a new loyalty offering that will enable US users to earn 3.7% annually for holding the asset on the platform.
Meanwhile, on April 24, PayPal announced a partnership with Coinbase to increase the adoption of PYUSD.
“We are excited to drive new, exciting, and innovative use cases together with Coinbase and the entire cryptocurrency community, putting PYUSD at the center,” said Alex Chriss, PayPal President and CEO.
Related: PayPal to offer 3.7% yield on stablecoin balances: Report
The payments giant also reported robust first-quarter earnings and the completion of significant share repurchase activities.
The firm beat Wall Street estimates, earning $1.33 per share in the first quarter, topping analyst expectations of $1.16. Revenue rose 1% from a year before to $7.8 billion.
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