Only one of the three major parties emerged from this election with fewer votes than in 2005 and with a lower share of the vote: the Labour party.
In 2005, Tony Blair polled 9,562,122 (35.3%). In 2010, Gordon Brown polled 8,604,358 (29.0%). By contrast the Lib Dems went up from 5,981,874 (22.1%) to 6,827,938 (23.0%), and the Tories up from 8,772,598 (32.3%) to 10,706,647 (36.1%).
The figures do not lie: the Labour party lost this election.
But (and I’m afraid it’s a big but), they retained second place, some 6% and almost two million votes ahead of the Lib Dems. For whatever reason, we got squeezed out by the “two old parties”. Our hope, which until 10pm on Thursday night seemed pretty reasonable, that we could edge Labour into third, and from there replace them as the major progressive force in British politics now seems all too distant.
In many of our top Labour target seats – from Islington South to Edinburgh South – and in some of our held seats – Chesterfield and Dunfermline – Labour came back from the seeming dead, and beat us. We knew these would be tough fights. In Oxford East, where I live, the local Labour party has, to give credit where it’s due, got its campaigning act together. Local election results in recent years have proven they know how to get out their vote, backed by the financial might of the trade unions. As a result, I have been less surprised than others that we missed out on some of our top targets, where Labour knew they had a fight on their hands, and gained in other, more long-shot, targets, where we were able to take advantage of Labour complacenecy.
It’s always unwise to try and forecast the future in the immediate aftermath of an election: so much could change in the British political landscape even in the next 24 hours let alone the course of a parliament. But it does seem as if our hope of displacing Labour as the voice of progressive politics is at the very least on hold.
Perhaps this doesn’t matter too much if three-party politics is here to stay. After all, no matter how disappointing the Lib Dem result, it’s still the case that the Labservatives attracted just 65% of the vote, their lowest level of support in modern history. That long-term trend seems unlikely to go into reverse: at some point, whether in the next few months or a little longer, the public desire for their votes to count will be too great to withstand: some form of proportional representation is, I believe, almost inevitable.
But the fact still remains that, however poor was this election result for Labour, it wasn’t the disaster it might have been: they have proven their tenacity. The Lib Dems can, and should, continue be the real voice for progressive voters, but it’s clear we’re going to face a strong rival for some time to come.
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33 Comments
Tell me it isn’t true
http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/anthony-barnett/are-lib-dems-selling-out
“l me it isn’t true”
I believe you’re misinformed about one thing at least. The backing of 75% of the Lib Dem MPs will not be enough by itself. 75% of the Federal Executive must back any deal as well.
I do wish Lib Dem ‘voters’ would just let Nick Clegg and the Cons talk. I note Simon Hughes comment that there will be no deal without a deal on electoral reform…
I’m pleased Stephen has pointed out the obvious which in my experience isn’t often obvious. The vote share and seat lead over the Lib Dems means they have the mantle still of ” leadership” of the progressive part of the spectrum. The number of councils they ahve regained will some extra institutional heft to that more quickly than some of us thought.
However stephen is also right to say that with Labservative at a new low of 65% then FPTP is close to the edge.
To go further than Stephen does this feeds into what the BBC is now calling coalition discussions with the Tories.
1. If the Lib Dems now join a Conservative led government there will immeadiately be space on the left for Labour to fill quickly and there current edge in terms of Leadership of the progressive vote will become a virtual monopoly.
2. Given the coincidence of Labservatives 65% and a hung parliament is our best chance of driving through a reform submerging ourselves in a government that frankly isn’t going to deliver a comprehensive successor to FPTP?
The answer to the question is NO. The result for Labour is appalling on any possible measure. If the trade unions could do it for Labour in Oxford and Islington, why not Bradford and Norwich, where the threat was equally obvious? You forget that none of the opinion polls during the campaign indicated that Labour would come third in terms of seats. In fact, the actual reuslts show that even if we got what the opinion polls were predicting we would still have won fewer than 20 extra seats.
What we have to worry about now is the imminent destruction of the Liberal Democrats that will be the inevitable result of any kind of deal to put David Cameron in No 10.
I wish people would stop quoting the total number of votes as if it means something. There’s hardly a constituency in the land where a good proportion of the electorate aren’t forced to vote tactically, so the popular vote is literally meaningless.
I suspect Clegg realizes that a deal with the Conservatives with no electoral reform would fatally damage the Lib Dems. No matter how bad a deal with Labour would be to many people, it’s not as damaging to the core vote as a deal with the Tories and no electoral reform. Clegg has a choice to make: very short-term power with the Tories, or long-term survival of the party (and potentially PR).
For many though recent events are showing the Lib Dems to be more a return to the Liberal Party, almost abandoning much of its social democratic voice. I agree that a form of PR is inevitable, but with this, I feel, will come a realignment of politics in which voters will want a real choice once more, the Lib Dems have abandoned much of their radical agenda since 2005 becoming just ”another party” trying to fight it out at the centre. The Lib Dems will not be the progressive voice in politics – that will be taken up by a realigned Labour Party, a party with the size and funds to do so, the Lib Dems will continue to occupy the centre and will probably see support static around 23-25%, with realigned centre left and centre right parties gaining 28-32% at any one point, with the greens and far right parties picking up the rest.
Conventional wisdom suggests that the LibDems lost votes in the waning days of the campaign over their positions on immigration and Europe, but I can’t help wondering how many votes they lost as a result of (1) their premature crowing about having consigned Labour to the dustbin of history, which smacked of unwarranted hubris; and (2) their pronouncements about preferring to collaborate with the party earning the most votes and the most seats, which obviously was always going to be the Tories in this particular election.
A lot of Labour voters were/are unhappy with Brown’s leadership, and/or unhappy with “new” Labour behaving like “Tory-lite” for so many years. It seems obvious to me that many of those voters would have voted Lib Dem had it not become so clear that “Vote Clegg, get Cameron” was the truth of the matter.
For most voters who consider themselves progressives, Labour, despite having lost its way in so many respects, remains the lesser of two evils as compared to the Tories. That is especially true now, when the Tories were so gravely, desperately, wrong about the appropriate response to a global economic meltdown. Until and unless electoral reform changes the current reality — that either Labour or the Tories will be in No. 10 — the first priority needs to be on keeping the Tories out, especially when the Tories are channeling Herbert Hoover.
We could, and frankly should, have been sitting here today with a solid Lab-Lib coalition, with a seat total comfortably above 326 and a new PM, if (1) Clegg had played his cards a little bit closer to his vest, rather than suggesting eagerness to prop up Cameron; and (2) the LibDems had focused their limited resources on taking out Tories rather than spending so much effort on targeting Labour seats.
Now the LibDems are in a no-win situation, or very close to it, but have no one but themselves to blame. The only way this situation becomes salvageable for the LibDems is if Cameron gives ground on real electoral reform, and his party likely wouldn’t allow him to do that even if he personally were willing. What is more likely to happen is another election under FPTP sooner rather than later, in which the LibDem results will be even worse than they were this time.
Elizabeth,
We DID target Tory seats, and won three of them: Chippenham, Eastbourne and Wells. How many Tory seats did Labour win? If the Liberal Democrats didn’t exist, Cameron would be in No 10 already, taking instructions from his billionaire puppet-masters in Virginia and Florida.
@ALW, Elizabeth, indeed Stephen: Could someone please define “progressive” and explain what unites the “progressive side of politics”? Labour under Blair and Brown has done many things that most liberals reject, so is it true to say that the Lib Dems are also “progressives” if Labour are defined as “progressive”?
I don’t think so, if Liberal Democrats didn’t exist, a lot of their votes would have gone to Labour, in fact I would suspect a Labour majority if it were the case. I also believe, if the Liberal Democrats put PR on the back burner, and become Cameron puppets, they will lose a lot of their support to Labour next time around.
No Stephen,
The LibDems lost the war – and may be about to sell out on PR
You may be about to be killed by an exploding cow.
You may.
@ALW
The Lib Dems will not be the progressive voice in politics – that will be taken up by a realigned Labour Party
That would be the amnesiac view of recent history then…
@Sesenco, point taken about Labour’s failure to take out Tories and the LibDem’s having taken out three of them. But how many Labour MPs did the LibDems defeat, and might it not have been better to have used those resources to defeat more Tories instead? I agree with you that the worst-case scenario would have been Cameron “in No 10 already, taking instructions from his billionaire puppet-masters in Virginia and Florida,” so I just think defeating Tories should have been an even higher priority than it apparently was.
@Niklas, I think the lowest common denominator for “what unites ‘the progressive side of politics'” is being against efforts to steal from the poor to give to the rich, which is precisely what the Tories hope to do with their plans for brutal budget cuts combined with reducing the inheritance tax. Certainly a lot of things Labour has done in recent years — like invading Iraq, eroding civil liberties and letting bankers bring the economy to its knees for want of adequate oversight and regulation — were anything but progressive, and since Labour has paid dearly for those errors, I’m hopeful that a chastened and reformed Labour will show better judgement in the future and win back some of the trust it has squandered. Given the dearth of possible outcomes under FPTP, I thought the best result this time would be a LibLab coalition where the LibDems had sufficient leverage to put Labour right on civil liberties, etc. Now the best I can hope for is that the LibDems somehow manage to limit the damage the Tories will do.
I agree with Jez’s comments above.
Better to have a deal with the prospect of getting PR than working with the Tories and not getting PR and fatally damaging our reputation with the electorate.
There could be another election in a few months (the BBC thinks maybe around October) if we sit with the Tories then our reputation with the electorate will be damaged (if it looks like we will drop all of our policies at the first sign of getting into bed with the Tories).
At least with Labour, the SNP and Plaid we agree on many things.
Elizabeth – I think you make a reasonable point about the late swing back to Labour being due to perceptions of what the LibDems might do in the event of what seemed certain at that point to be a hung parliament. I would be interested to know whether this was the line that Labour took in the seats it was defending from the LibDems in their last minute leaflets and phone calls. Nick might have been wiser to fudge the issue a bit more than he did towards the end, though it would always have been the largest party he had to talk to first. But with more LibDem seats taken from Labour it wouldn’t have made much difference to the arithmetic would it? Where you are wrong is to suggest that resources that we used to attack Labour seats should have been used to attack/defend against the Tories. With the possible exception of Oxford West I don’t think there’s much more we could have done. I live in a seat that was held by the LibDems and into which Ashcroft has poured huge resources over the past three years. We had a superb candidate, a huge and enthusiastic team of helpers, as much in the way of resources as we needed, excellent literature, and outcampaigned the Tories all down the line. We lost by 3000 votes.
One of the reasons that there is not overwhelming public support for PR (under 50% according to YouGov today) is because people don’t believe that coalition government can be made to work in the Westminster parliament.
Another reason is that people are afraid PR will mean an endless Lib/Lab coalition, permanently disenfranchising the third of the population who vote centre / right.
We have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to show that coalition can deliver strong government, and that PR does not mean you always get Lib/Lab. Let’s use it. Who knows? We might even convince a few more Tories of the virtues of PR.
Oh yes, and it isn’t a choice between Tories / no PR and Labour / PR. Even if the arithmetic of the ‘rainbow coalition’ actually worked, Brown has only ever shown support for AV. That’s what ‘electoral reform’ means to him.
The electorate knew that Nick would talk to the Tories first, so I seriously doubt that there will be a huge backlash against the LibDems for going with the Tories — if anything, quite the opposite: backlash if we fail to strike a deal.
I don’t much like it, either, but as a lifelong Liberal/LibDem that’s how it looks to me.
I wonder if the tactical errors in the LibDem campaign are part of this mess. The effort the LibDems put into winning Oxford East meant that they became extremely vulnerable to losing Oxford West to a not hugely inspiring Tory candidate looking to win on the Cameron bounce.
In Oxford East / Durham / Edinburgh South / Aberdeen South / Glasgow North the 2005 anti-war/anti-tuition fees vote nearly drove Labour out. There was never as much anger in 2010 as there was in 2005, and the expected surge was from people who had voted Labour in 2005 and were on the verge of voting Tory until the TV debates.
Whatever happened between the opinion polls and the election caused the LibDems to fail to win both Oxford seats. Blaming it on union money sounds like sour grapes. According to Straight Choice Steve Goddard put put 24 leaflets in Oxford East – compare that to Evan Harris’ 8.
We have just had our best result ever, in terms of votes, The two old parties have had their worst result ever. The surge showed our potential to grow more. Why are some of us so bloody negative ?
The answer to the question is that this is politics, not death or glory.
Long-term incremental improvement achieves far more and far more sustainable gains than any quick fixes.
How the people voted is their legitimate personal choice and if we couldn’t convince more people according to the conditions facing the country then we need to up our game still further.
A switch to any form of PR will paper over a few of the cracks, but it is still no substitute for a deep-held commitment to civic and social engagement which requires the political elite to prostrate themselves to their public and force them to acknowledge they will do our bidding, not the other way round.
It angers me that some members say we cannot do a deal with those we may have disagreements with – this is our chance to convert our opponents to a more realistic and balanced way of thinking by acknowledging our concerns. We cannot waste this rare opportunity.
The noises being made that the Tories are still hopelessly wedded to an outdated form of aggressive non-cooperation with our European partners makes a lie of their come hither eyelash fluttering towards us. So a wide-ranging deal (ie a coalition or pact) is obviously massively less likely than many will fear.
Whether we can finally agree a deal is beside the point of whether we make a show of sitting down to make an attempt to.
I’d also argue that given the local election results Labour didn’t lose this election, but Gordon Brown did.
So it is completely proper that we should also keep our lines of communication with potential alternative cooperative groupings open, as Alec Salmond suggested, although the maths makes this by far the less pragmatic option.
A limited short-term arrangement accepting the will of the people is correct – so go back to your constituencies and prepare for another election!
Dane: assuming you meant ‘certainty’, I think the best offer that’s going to be made is for the Labour leadership to agree to seek to put the country to a referendum. Absolutely every Tory MP will vote against, so that means that a pro-referendum vote (not a vote for PR, but one just to hold a referendum) would require effectively 100% support among Labour MPs. If you think that Brown (or Miliband or Johnson or Harman) can offer ‘certainty’ that every Labour MP will vote as whipped (when PR would kick dozens of them out of a job), you have far more faith in Labour party discipline than I think is merited.
If Lib Dems really were offered the certainty of PR and turned it down, I have no doubt that you are right, they would never be forgiven. But that offer will not – nay, cannot – be made, so the argument is purely theoretical. The actual choices will be:
Offer 1: Bolster up the Conservatives in a not-really-coalition and in October, when the next election is called, be lambasted by Labour for ‘helping to push through Tory cuts’, while meanwhile being fingered by the Tories for them ‘not being able to make the cuts that the country really needed, because of our Liberal partners’. In short, if/when Tory policies prove disastrous, both the big parties and all the newspapers will characterise it as a Lib Dem failure.
Offer 2: A Labour aspiration-not-a-promise to deliver a PR referendum, and seats in an unstable minority coalition. No actual delivery of the referendum, and a share in a short-term government that ends in a lost vote of confidence at a moment that best suits the Conservatives and Unionists to table one.
Or reject both offers, file into the opposition benches and be characterised by the pro-Tory media as the party that would not, when the call came, ‘act in the national interest’ (total bull, but when did that ever stop the press?) and by Labour as ‘the party that turned down the offer of PR (also total bull, but when did that ever stop Campbell and Mandelson?)
Any ugly set of choices. I don’t see the faintest glimmer of hope in advancing the cause of PR in either of the first two. Yet another spell in opposition, heading towards (sooner or later) yet another first-past-the-post election may be a heartbreaking prospect, but I’m beginning to feel that a ‘stick to your guns’ approach may still provide a better platform for a breakthrough than a fatal compromise of principles in exchange for being able to drag a couple of makeshift canvas stools to ‘the top table’ for a few months.
The iniquities of the voting system have, I feel, *never* been as clear to such a large number of people as they are right now. I wonder if this isn’t a moment to frantically mobilise around that anger and dismay, not muddy the waters in a credibility-losing coalition.
If the Lib Dems pass up their opportunity to return government of the country to the people in exchange for drinking coffee at Camerons Cabinet table then the centre left of British politics might as well give up
Pundits seem to suggest that ‘Cleggmania’ did not deliver as promised. I would suggest it DID and that without it the Tories would now have a majority of 10-20 seats. At the start of the campaign the Lib Dems were struggling for 18-20% in the polls. That might have delivered only 10-20 Lib Dem seats, with most of the losses turning blue. The third party squeeze and vitriole from the Murdoch press was always likley to knock the final voting figures back from the heady 30-32% polls of three weeks ago. A rise from 18% to a final 23% was down to that first debate and no-one should forget that.
To say that the people have spoken but we are not quite sure what they have said is either disingenuous at best or deliberateley obtuse The people have plainly said a plague on all your houses we want control over our politicians in future and want the country governed in our interest not in the interest of political parties
For 4 consecutive elections the Tories failed to get a majority. And they are in power thanks to the Lib Dems. What a sellout to their voters. Even top Labour MPs were saying vote for Lib Dem in marginal seats. Most peopel in the UK are left of centre and we have right wing party in power.
No one won the election. All lost. Some lost less than others. Like those in mid-table at the end of the football season. They did not win the title, but never lost as they were not relegated. It is like Stoke City, Fulham and Sunderland arguing who was best in the league this season. Only a few points apart yet some scored more goals and some had better goal difference. Rather petty to argue about pedantic details in mid-table. It highlights the shambles of a system we have.
Labour never lost in that they could have been in power if they wanted to – but at a price. The price to them was not worth it.
In the sordid shameless dealings Labour won – even Labour Lord Faulkner agreed in Question Time. The Tories did not implement fully what they wanted – they mainly represent the top 5-10% of the population and their gift to them, inheritance tax, was not delivered, as was many others. You could say they partially lost, but not by much. As Lord Faulkner said the Tories didn’t give much away.
The Lib Dems sold out on PR, which would have stopped the likes of the Tories getting in power ever again. The Lib Dems allowed the most hated main party in the UK get back into power.
And hey pretso most of the cabinet are from private schools, which amounts to 5% of the population. We have 99 universities and this displays we have gone backwards. We are being ruled by a ruling clique. Private schoolie kids Cameron and Clegg back slapping.
So thank you Nick Clegg for putting back in power in he hated most destructive party the UK has ever seen.
No one won, and none lost either. Also the Tories had TWICE the election budget of Labour, the ruling government, so the election was not fair.
We need:
* Elected House of Lords
* Fixed terms
* PR
* Fixed election budgets for all parties
* No foreign ownership of British media – Sky is Tory biased and US/Auss owned, as is the The Times, Sun, etc. London Evening Standard is Russian owned.
* Transparency in party doners
* No foreign funding of parties
Then see if the hated Tories get in with sweeping powers like Thatcher did. She had no more than 43% of the vote and the House of Lords was overwhelmingly pro Tory full of large landowning hereditary peers. A Medieval system, that was originally geared to keep the wealthy, wealthy. There was no stopping this unrepresentative Thatcher government, because of the warped unfair system we have, and it wrought carnage on the UK. To the point it was costing a fortune to protect the government from its own people, and MI5 was investigating Labour MPs for being Labour MPs.
The left of centre parties, who represent most in the UK, have always fought with one arm behind their backs. That has to change big time and the opportunity was there with the Lab-Libs. The Lib Dems screwed it up.
John. The only two parties who have been acting sensibly, grown up and willing to compromise have been the Lib Dems and the Conservatives. The latter surprised me, a lot. But it tells me all I need to know to be able to judge who “screwed up” and who did the right thing.
Andrea Gill, I disagree with you. Clegg was more concerned with a ministerial car than grabbing the Holy Grail – a decent version of PR. He sold out on what the Liberals have been preying for, for the past 80 years. We have a right wing party in power when most in the UK voted left of center.
Those who voted tactically to keep out the Tories and those for the Lab-Lib progressive alliance support by The Guardian and The Independent were betrayed. This putting this hated right wing anachronistic party back in power is sickening to many. The Lib Dems could have made a Progressive alliance with Labour work if they had wanted to. The high profile position and flash car was too tempting.So, Nick Clegg, who most people in the UK had not heard of a few months before the election, has been shot to a high profile position out of the blue. Egos were satisfied rather than other more important points.
“The Lib Dems could have made a Progressive alliance with Labour work if they had wanted to.”
How could they have done, considering that at best it would have been a minority government, needing exceptional discipline to muster every single vote, when a deadly combination of Labour backbenchers and party grandees like Reid and Blunkett had very publicly declared they would have nothing to do with it?
As a Lib Dem supporter I view myself as very much on the left. I left the party a couple of years ago, because I felt Clegg was taking it too far to the right. Indeed, I feared the party might end up getting into bed with the Tories in a hung parliament.
I was dismayed by the election result and by the talks with the Tories, and I was hoping against hope that the progressive “rainbow coalition” could be made to work. My hopes rose on Monday when the formal talks with Labour opened. But they were progressively destroyed as the degree of opposition from within the Labour party became apparent. That left no alternative to Cameron becoming prime minister – though I’m still not entirely convinced a coalition rather than a “supply and confidence” agreement was the right way to go. We’ll see how it turns out.
The behaviour of senior Labour politicians since then has done them no favours at all. First there was the attempt to blame the Lib Dems for “choosing” a coalition with the Tories rather than one with Labour, when the latter had been very publicly sabotaged by people within the Labour party. But even worse has been the rank hypocrisy of Falconer, Adonis, Straw and others in claiming the 55% threshold for a dissolution motion was a “constitutional outrage”, when their own manifesto commitment to fixed-term parliaments would have required something at least as strong.
The best would not have been a minority government. The Welsh and Scottish nationalists said they would join in a Lib-Lab alliance.
I assume you have not read the reports of senior Lib Dems people.
Vince Cable was telephoning Gordon Brown twice a day from Friday onwards and right until the last minutes on the Tuesday, according to The Times. A meeting was setup for Vince and Darling – two able financial men. Vince taking to Brown made him resign as party leader immediately to accommodate an alliance. Ashdown, Campbell, Steel and Kennedy were all pleading to go with Labour. Steel openly said the Lib Dems do not need seats in the cabinet just guarantees on certain issues. When the negotiations were underway with Labour on the Tuesday morning, top Tory Rifkin was fuming on TV. Labour were the best alliance even if no cabinet seats.
Clegg et all, could have formed an alliance with Labour. As regards to an overall majority the Greens and Irish SDLP would be right behind a Lib-Lab Progressive Alliance. The Welsh nationalist saids they would clearly be behind an alliance. The Scots may have taken a bit more tempting, but were clearly dismayed at the Lib-Tory alliance.
Cable, Darling and Brown are financial heavy weight and the perfect trio to get us out of the Credit Crunch. He is also a great advocate of Land Valuation tax and maybe could have got the thin edge of the edge in.The Lib Dem Alter and Labour Land Campaign are Land value Taxation pressure groups. The Tories have none being a party of vested interest large landowners.
Labour Introduced PR
Labour introduced PR in the Euro and Nationalist elections. They are not anti-PR as the Tories are. The Labour party has been committed to reform since the 1997 manifesto which pledged them to “recommend a proportional alternative to the first-past-the-post system”. While alternatives to first-past-the-post have been introduced for elections to the devolved administrations, the European Parliament and London Assembly.
The Labour Party tried to introduce legislation that would require a referendum to be held by October 2011 in the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill. However, this was dropped from the bill during the pre-election rush to get stuff through Parliament because of Conservative opposition. The Tories scupper it again. And they will do as much to do the same to PR at every opportunity.
The Tories WILL CAMPAIGN AGAINST PR
The Tories say they will give a referendum for AV – BUT WILL CAMPAIGN AGAINST IT. And it is only the minimal AV system, which is not much better than what we have. Labour said they will go with it. AV is the thin edge of the wedge for proper PR. The Lib Dems have to run with Labour here.
The Lib Dems have missed the chance to virtually guarantee AV by going with Labour – the first step of their Holy Grail they have sought for 80 years. Now it is very iffy.
Labour were the party to stick with as their record shows from 1997 to the world-wide tidal-wave Credit Crunch in 2008. Brown bailed us out to save the economy otherwise you would be in soup line.
Pre Credit Crunch under Blair/Brown since 1997. Facts…….
* The UK had the longest sustained economic growth in history.
* The UK economy has been the world’s most robust.
* The pound has been almighty strong.
* Until the world-wide Credit Crunch there was no Boom & Bust
* Inflation was at record sustained lows
* Interest rates at record sustained lows
* 9/11 caused a recession in most of the western world. It never happened here.
ZERO UNEMPLOYMENT – the country even absorbed over 1 million eastern Europeans and still not have an unemployment problem.
* Provincial cities went on massive building programmes – look at the skyscrapers in Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, etc.
* etc.
You cannot bluff and economy for 11 years. Labour did not mess this country up they put it back on line after the carnage of Thatcher. They inherited a basket case. The Tories devastated cities like Liverpool, Sheffield, etc, and had the highest unemployment in history and no depression as an excuse. The world-wide Credit Crunch screwed it up. Without the borrowing to buy stakes in banks, you may have been in a soup line. Before the Credit Crunch, the country was booming – look at all the skyscrapers that sprouted up in provincial cities, when under Thatcher/Major nothing was built with skylines unaltered for decades. Just follow the timeline. People have short memories.
Labour were the party to go with, as they have the record and expertise, especially in financial matters, and the Lib Dems could have been with them right now.