As a Liberal Democrat candidate at the last General Election, I found myself working out answers to the inevitable questions which I knew would come about the Coalition Government. The questions that all Liberal Democrats have had to contend with in debates, on doorsteps and across the media since the Clegg-Cameron press conference in the Downing Street Rose Garden in 2010.
I write this as someone who broadly supported the Coalition, while not being blind to its faults. I worked as an intern for a Lib Dem MP during the middle of the Coalition, and I was inspired to sign up as a Party member by Nick Clegg’s resignation speech; an act which came not out of any pleasure at his standing down, but out of the realisation that the Lib Dems’ electoral failure was leaving a gaping hole in British politics.
Since then my view of the Coalition has been mainly that I think we did some good things, that many Lib Dems can be proud of. However, rightly or wrongly, we have not been judged kindly for this period, and I believe that it is time to move on. Rather than continually look back at the past, it is time to take the present by two hands and look to the future. This is not a judgement on what happened during the Coalition; it is a rallying cry for us all to move forward together.