Having done articles on the Labour party and the Conservative Party (and one on the Scottish National Party, sort of) I thought in the interest of fairness to do one on the current position of the Liberal Democrats, the fourth largest party in the House of Commons.
Back in the British general election of 2010 the Liberal Democrats lead by Nick Clegg managed to win 23% of the vote and 57 seats in the House of Commons. Oddly, they won over a larger share of the electorate than they did in the previous general election in 2005 (in which they won 22% of the vote), yet failed to retain as many seats (they lost five seats overall), due to the disproportional electoral system we have in Britain, known as the first-past-the-post system.
In spite of this overall loss, still not achieving the electoral breakthrough many Liberal Democrats have probably wished for since its birth in 1988, the party managed to negotiate with the Conservative party to form a coalition government. This was because neither party had won enough seats to form a majority in the House of Commons by themselves and neither had any other party.
So with the Conservatives’ 306 seats and the Liberal Democrats 57 seats they were able to form a majority of 37 seats (since any government needs 326 seats in the House of Commons to have a majority, it having 650 seats in total). Although it was expected that the coalition would come under huge strain over its five year lifespan, with some thinking (and hoping) it wouldn’t last till the next election, it looked like a good match. At least it certainly did at the leadership level, since Nick Clegg was considered to be on the right of his party, which tends to be centrist, and David Cameron, the Conservative leader, was considered to be on the left of his right-wing party. So in theory their political worldviews met quite nicely in the middle.
However, by making compromises with the Conservatives on their election pledges, and in particular their pledge that if they were elected they would scrap university tuition fees (and if not vote against any motion made in the House of Commons to raise them), they became very unpopular with many of their supporters, especially their student supporters. In fact it is likely that many Liberal Democrat voters were made upset simply by the fact that their party was willing to work with the Conservative party. This is because many Liberal Democrats supporters are to the left-of-centre politically speaking and so whilst they might have countenanced a deal between them and the Labour party, the prospect of them working with the Conservative party for a whole parliamentary term was much harder to stomach.
As a result of the perceived betrayal of university students by the Liberal Democrats, agreeing not only to not reduce university tuition fees with the Conservatives, but also agreeing to allow universities to raise tuition fees to a maximum of £9000 a year (which many universities promptly proceeded to charge for most, if not all subjects), Nick Clegg came out and apologised to the voters who had felt let down by his party.
Image: By West Berkshire Liberal Democrats from Newbury, England (IMG_1781) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
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