Can we talk about the collapse of Lib Dems?

Tuition fees didn't apply and they still lost all but one of their seats here. (The one they did win was only by 800 votes! And that was with the Secretary of State for Scotland as their mp!)

From what I can remember of 2010 people voted lib dem expecting them to go into coalition with labour. If they had done that where would we be now??

NC just seemed to have a personality clash with brown and preferred to chum up to fellow public school/Oxbridge/Londoner DC. They became the Tory-lite party, who made decisions to further their own careers.

NC always came across to me as very anti-Scottish, more so than DC.

I don't think there's any certainty they will ever come back from this.

Interestingly - Lib Dem membership has been shooting up since the election.
According to their website
"Membership of the Liberal Democrats is now at more than 54,240.
Since polls closed on Thursday, 7296 new members have joined the Liberal Democrats."

That's more than 15% in 3 days.
I wonder what is motivating the new members? Is it realising how fragile democracy is?

I don't think Libdem voters would have gone to UKIP. I just think going into coalition made people think what's the point of the Libdems?

I still voted libdem like usual. I also think they did the right thing going in to coalition. But I can imagine people thinking if the libdems are going to hook up with either conservative or labour to form a coalition, then the voters themselves might as well decide between conservative and labour and be done with it.

They needed to campaign on a very different agenda and really differentiate themselves from the others, rather than just being that something in between. That was their problem.

I think being the minor party in a coalition is an incredibly difficult position to be in. You don't have that much influence but you still get the blame. I feel they didn't deserve the outcome last week.

I think they would have won here without clegg, in fact I was asked if I would vote for them here if they had a different leader. I suspect the answer is no, but I am not sure as my previous lib dem mp was very good, and hard working. (To be fair I didn't vote lind em in 2010 either, but have done in the previous 2 elections). I suspect that's why he got very close 600 votes, to labour who won.

In the end it was the policies which pushed me back to Labour, rather than over to green. And it was unforgivable how many of their 2010 policies they gave up on, they went to the country with a broadly left wing manifesto in 2010, and then propped up the Tories. I do not think that was in the national interest, I think it was in the Tories interest, not those who voted for them in 2010. Mind you the reason I decided not to vote libdem in 2010 was clegg had said prior to the election that he didn't rule out a coalition with the Tories, but that never got much coverage.

As regards what they do next, they have to work out what they stand for, and if that's the centre they have to work out whether there is or will be space there if the Tories move right and so do labour!

I agree with all this. My DIL summed it up in 2010 by saying that she will never vote for them again and was true to her word. We didn't vote for them to put the Tories in.

I gave them the benefit of the doubt this time. Made not a fat lot of difference. I am in a real dilemma now - do I go back to them and help them rebuild, or do I go Green?

I live in one of the (very few) Lib Dem seats which are left, so their approach to rebuilding interests me - particularly as I didn't want my MP contesting the leadership. He is an excellent constituency MP and I'd like him to get the hell on with that.

I think to some extent they are being punished for having been willing to go into coalition. We clearly don't really do coalition politics yet - everyone expected another one this time around and it may be that this polarised the vote. Tuition fees were a major gaffe (and indeed my MP even in his acceptance speech was calling for distancing the party from those responsible for that decision) but coalition politics are hard. And every major party has made u-turns whilst in office, but I think people believed or expected more from the Lib Dems because until then they had been entirely a party of opposition.

I also agree Dinosaurs - if they had rejected the offer of a coalition in 2010 they would still have got slaughtered this time around. But perhaps if they had anticipated a bit more the scale of the slaughter they could have been more forceful during their one term in government - it's going to be a bloody long time before they get another, I suspect.

It will be interesting to see how SNP and UKIP do in the future, they have been the protest votes of choice this time round but while SNP have a lot of seats, they aren't in a coallision, there's no minority government to do deals with, the "vote SNP, get Tory" message might hit them hard.

While I thought he was odious, Farage was charismatic, interesting to see if UKIP can find a suitable replacement. If the Tories do offer an "in out" EU referendum, a lot of the reason for voting UKIP will fall away.

I think a lot of people voted for the in 2010 as another version of labour, but one without brown and who hadn't just fucked up royally with the economy. (And vince cable back then was one of the few MPs that seemed to have a good grasp of economics).

Many of those people missed that the word "Liberal" in their title puts them ideologically rather closer to the Tories than many had thought.

They were never "Labour lite", and that has shocked a lot of people.

Now people voting for them are voting for them, not as a protest vote, not as a "want labour, they can't win here, libdems are exactly the same".

I also think if they hadn't gone into coallision, they would have been slaughtered this time round, I could easily imagine hearing "one chance of power and they didn't take it, it's a wasted vote for them, they only want to be on the sidelines"

I also think while they did hd the Tories back they weren't as effective at that as many of their supporters would have wanted.

But yes clambering in with the Tories was unforgivable for many of their supporters.

I read an interesting article the other day saying that they have lost a lot of support to the Greens, and that many Green supporters aren't actually as radically left wing as the policies & are more in tune with Lib Dem policies.

I think they may recover a lot of support over the next 5 years as people realise how they did actually hold the Tories back. Austerity with a full mandate is not going to be pretty. In the next few months we're going to see the dumping of the human rights act - something the lib Dems blocked

A lot of people have joined the lib Dems (& greens) over the weekend - thousands in both cases. I actually joined the lib Dems last night although I didn't vote for them (voted labour/green in general/locals). I think many people feel the need to do something and they will recover.

There's an interesting '2nd place' map floating around Twitter - and thete's a lot of Orange on there still. The next elections will be interesting.

I think getting into bed with the tories for a bit of power did them no favours. All it said to me was that they want power no matter what. Also the tuition fee fiasco was a joke. They didn't need to support it, it would have happened regardless, they could have just said yes it's happening no we don't like it. As it stands it made nick clegg seem like a snake in the grass and since he's the face of the party they all got tarred with the same brush.v