Category Archives: News

Ten years ago, in the wake of an election which delivered the first hung Parliament since 1974. the Liberal Democrats entered a coalition with the Conservatives. Nick Clegg became Deputy Prime Minister leading five Lib Dem Cabinet Ministers and 20 or so junior ministers.

That decision has undoubtedly affected our party’s fortunes badly. We won 57 MPs in 2010, and just 8 in the brutal and devastating election 5 years later. In the intervening years, we had lost most of our MSPs, all but 1 of our MEPs, 40% of the council seats we defended and control of 9 councils. Although we have gained signifiant ground in local elections since, we are still on less than a third of our 2010 vote share in the opinion polls, – although we did, briefly, get back up there last year.

There is no doubt that the Liberal Democrat ministers delivered some brilliant and progressive measures. During that period there were huge advances in the fight against climate change, most of which have now been rolled back by the Conservatives on their own. Our Pupil Premium gave a lot more money to support disadvantaged children in school and its benefits were already being seen in terms of attainment and will continue to do so. Improving mental health was given high priority on the political agenda with Paul Burstow and Norman Lamb making more services available. Better consumer protection, shared parental leave, same sex marriage, a transgender action plan and ending the export of execution drugs to the US are just a few examples of the good that we did.

There is no doubt that we stopped the Conservatives doing some really awful things. We know this because they did them the very minute that we were off the scene – things like even more swingeing cuts to social security which drove up inequality and poverty.

The point of this article is to look at the context in which the party made its decision to go in to coalition. There are no silent words like “on earth” in the title. Why did we do a deal with the Tories, with whom we were fundamentally incompatible in values and outlook? We were under many different kinds of pressure. Hindsight, of course, tells us that we could have done some things differently but it is important to understand what it was like at the time.

The first consideration was that we had not been dealt a very easy hand. The parliamentary arithmetic didn’t give us much choice. The only way of getting a majority coalition between two parties was with the Conservatives. Labour and us, even if Labour were remotely interested in talking to us, would only have managed 315 seats so would have needed the support of other parties in order to govern.  Nick Clegg had always said that he would talk to the largest party first, so it was with the Conservatives, on 306 seats, that Chris Huhne, Danny Alexander, David Laws and Andrew Stunell sat down on the Sunday after the election.

In a context of a very fragile economy – and as they talked in the Cabinet Office, the Greek economy was on the verge of collapse – there was a sense that they needed to get on with it so as not to spook the markets. There was a huge pressure to form a stable government. And we certainly managed that. It was actually more functional than most of the single party governments of my lifetime. However, the economies of European countries seem to remain relatively spook-free in the weeks it generally takes them to form governments, and this was a lesson we would do well to learn in the future. Coming to an agreement in haste, within five days of a gruelling election campaign is not a thing we should do in the future.

The Scottish experience will have weighed heavily, too. Liberal Democrats had enjoyed 8 years of successful coalition in Scotland and could point to transformational change – the abolition of university tuition fees, free personal care, Single Transferable Vote elections for local government, free eye and dental checks. All of these things remain in place to this day. An SNP minority government had taken over in 2007 and we had struggled to make any sort of impact. I wrote about the Scottish experience in an article at the time: