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‘Lib Dems will raze this place to the ground’: Mid Beds byelection duel could gift seat to Tories
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2023
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They had no choice LD plus labour would have been some 20 seats short of majority so would have been even worse than Mays minority con government relying on dup. A coalition if at least 4 parties would have been a nightmare to work. Their only option was Tory coalition. Maybe if people had given a swing of 10 more seats from Con to LD or Lab things might have been different.
They always had the choice of not doing it.
Clegg, some years afterwards, said that they had prioritised stability of government over things like student loans. Their subsequent wipe out showed that their voters disagreed.
The AV referendum was foolish (because it wasn't needed, they could have demanded the change itself) and while I don't expect people to have a crystal ball, the confidence the Tories gained from that decisive result, and then the Scottish IndyRef, laid the groundwork for Cameron to be overly confident towards Brexit.
The worst bit is that they actually got quite a lot of their manifesto enacted. That ended up making the Tories not seem quite so bad, even with austerity turbo-fucking the economy, as the Lib Dem's provided a sort of calming influence on the Tories more batshit insane policies like having a Common's vote on bringing back fox hunting.
The thing people forget is that the 2010 election was more a rejection of Labour - after 13 years of government, a global financial crisis, and the continued legacy of Iraq and Afghanistan - than an embrace of the Conservatives. A hung parliament had not occurred for quite some time, and a sizable amount of the Lib Dem vote - especially among millenials - was as a third option being neither labour or the tories.
Unfortunately, what we got was still the Tories.