That Carl Cashman Interview

by Simon Robinson, 09 Feb 2026

A minor controversy has been stirred by Liverpool LibDem councillor Carl Cashman, who claimed in an interview that 80% of LibDem members are LGBTQ

You can watch the snippet of the interview here: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DUSbvg5ErJT/, but this is what was said:

Interviewer: ... who feel politically disillusioned which is most of them, errm why should they take a chance on you and the Liberal Democrats?

Carl: 80% of Liberal Democrat members, I'm not, I'm not lying, 80% of Liberal Democrat members are probably part of the LGBTQ community.

Interviewer: 80%?

Carl: Yeah honestly, come to the Lib Dem conferences, you'll have a great time. [CUT] I think I think its, that kind of, like liberalism to me and I touched on this earlier, liberalism to me is to be unashamedly yourselves and not being judged for it. So - as long as you're not impacting anyone else's life, you should be able to live exactly the life that you want. And the LibDems try to put policies in place that make that happen and allow people to live that sort of life.

My own take: There is absolutely no way 80% of LibDem members are LGBTQ - it’s a patently false claim. I did wonder if it was intended as some kind of joke – and to be fair, Carl’s interview was with the (gay) Boys! Boys! Boys! Podcast, so his remarks were doubtless geared to that audience. But watching the video, he comes across as quite serious.

I actually find it worrying that anyone would want to make up a statement like that. And here’s why:

According to the most recent census data, in 2021 3.2% of the population identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or another sexual orientation (LGB+). This was for England and Wales, but we have no reason to think the answers would be that different in Scotland or Northern Ireland. A further 0.5% identified as not of their biological gender. Total 3.7%. If you exclude the 7.5% who chose not to answer the question, that comes to 4% of those who answered the question identify as LGBT+. Not 80%. 4%.

Now there’s a good argument that that 4% is itself skewed because older generations grew up at a time when anti-gay prejudice was rife, and if you were LGBT+, then you had strong reason to hide the fact. That’s no longer true today, and that’s reflected in the age profile of the figures. According to the census, just 1.2% of people aged 65+ self-identified as LGB, but 8% of 16-24 year olds. We can plausibly surmise that the true proportion is somewhere between those limits. Maybe more than 4% but still a small minority.

So however you cast that analysis, it’s clear that straight people make up at least around 90% of the population, probably more, with the LGBT+ community making up less than 10%. Set against that, for some time the LibDems have been very explicitly pushing themselves as LGBTQ-friendly. Since that is rather obviously likely to attract people who are themselves gay/etc., it’s a reasonable guess that the % of LGBTQ people in the LibDems could be somewhat higher than in the population at large. But 80%? If that were true, that would be just so completely unrepresentative of the UK population as to call in to question our relevance as a national party.

But I’m pretty sure it’s not true. In the first place, my own personal experience says otherwise: For example, just thinking about the LibDem members I’ve interacted with, far more are in heterosexual relationships than in gay relationships. In the second place, from what I’ve seen on LibDem online discussions, Carl Cashman’s claim has been met with general incredulity amongst members. And in the third place, it simply fails the plausibility test (what us computer scientists refer to as the ‘sniff test’): LibDem members, like members of most parties, are on the whole ordinary people, distinguished from the rest of the population mainly by their interest in politics and their motivation to get involved. There’s just no believable reason why that should almost exclusively mean, LGBT people.

And that brings me to the crux of why Carl’s interview worried me: His 80% claim amounts to saying that the LibDems are demographically lopsided on an extraordinary scale. If his claim were true, it would amount to a serious problem for a party that aspires to represent the country in Government. So why would a LibDem councillor want to give the impression that such an imbalance is something to celebrate? To my mind, that suggests that something is going wrong with our culture within the LibDems.

A national political party should reflect the diversity of the country in every sense: geography, class, age, profession, outlook, and yes, sexuality. It should not appear to be anchored primarily in any one identity group, however historically marginalised that group may have been.

In recent years, the LibDems have had an admirable record in promoting equality and representing previously underrepresented groups. But there is a difference between championing equal rights and allowing the party’s self-image to narrow around a particular constituency. If rhetoric begins to suggest that belonging to one group is central to what the party is, that risks signalling to others that they are peripheral. If we ever came to treat overwhelming dominance by any small demographic as a badge of honour rather than a warning sign, that would suggest we had lost sight of the breadth required to win and to govern.

We need to be a home for the whole electorate: equally welcoming to minority groups, and equally recognisable to the majority who do not belong to any particular minority.

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That Carl Cashman Interview

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