He said: “We made a pledge; we didn’t stick to it, and for that I am sorry. When you’ve made a mistake, you should apologise. But more importantly – most importantly of all, you’ve got to learn from your mistakes. And that’s what we will do. I will never again make a pledge unless, as a party, we are absolutely clear about how we can keep it.”
Unfortunately, Nick Clegg would not be given another chance to keep another election pledge. It is thought that their entering a coalition was the key reason for why five years later in the 2015 general election, the Liberal Democrats lost 48 seats in the House. Just before the results came in on the evening after the vote and an exit poll came out suggesting the party would retain only ten Members of Parliament, former Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown famously said “If this exit poll is right… I will publicly eat my hat.” In actuality, they only managed to retain eight seats.
The Liberal Democrats had been smashed. The party, which it was thought might be able to remain in government by entering into a coalition with either the Labour or Conservative party, had now become almost politically irrelevant. After the worst election result in its history, Nick Clegg duly resigned as leader.
This of course triggered a leadership contest in the party and Tim Farron arose as victor against his only rival Norman Lamb in July 2015. In his first party conference later that year Farron said that the Labour party was no longer interested in providing “credible opposition” to the Conservative government and that the Liberal Democrats would fill that space.
And this year under the leadership of Farron the Liberal Democrats, as a definitively pro-EU party, campaigned for Britain to remain a member of the European Union (EU) in the nation’s referendum on the subject. Soon after it was revealed Britain had voted to leave, Farron declared that if the Liberal Democrats were elected to government at the next general election he would ignore the result of the referendum and keep Britain in the EU.
This was arguably a shrewd move to try to get more support for the party among those who voted Remain in the referendum. Many such voters were left hugely upset at the result of the vote and so many of them might start to feel increasing sympathy to the only UK-wide party which will still be standing on a doggedly pro-EU platform at the next election. The Conservative party has never been a pro-EU party, always having been divided on the matter since before Britain joined what would later become the European Union, the European Economic Community. And whilst an overwhelming number of Labour party MPs were pro-EU like the Liberal Democrats they have to accept the result since a large number of their traditional voters voted to leave.
Even if just a fraction of the 16 million people who voted leave were won over by Farron’s pledge, it would make a big difference to the prospects of the 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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