Why don't people like Nick Clegg

[CalmShambala]

I know there is a thread on him already but not sure that OP will like me hijacking hers.

Why don't people like Nick Clegg?

I am not a Lib Demer so wouldn't vote for them, but I actually quite like him. He seemed quite honest and level headed to me, not on a power trip like most of the other MPs. I know he renegaded on uni fees but when it comes to lying through your arse and U turns, he seems to be better than the others.

What have I missed. I felt really sorry for him at the election.

But the thing is Error, they didn't mitigate the bad. They kept the Tories in power to roll out an austerity agenda. They'd have had more chance to mitigate the bad, if they had only voted in favour of good or at least not too terrible stuff and not voted for the shit stuff.
It's all a bit academic now anyway. They entered coalition, they found out that the consequences of propping the Tories up in government is that people who oppose Tory style policy won't vote for you again and people who support Tory policy won't vote for you because they can just vote for actual Tories. Bit sad really.

Once the coalition was over, the Tories scrapped maintenance grants which used to be given to the poorest students to help them with living costs at uni.

I wonder if they would have done that earlier if not for the Lib Dems.

I remember everyone's jaw dropping, when he had made a government with the conservatives rather than Labour.

For many many libdem voters it was like sleeping with the enemy, (including me)

Austerity wasn't a massive thing on cards, it was a Tory scare tactic.

The little money at the time after the global crash was being put into growing the economy on long term projects as well, the things like the refurbishment of schools, and building projects. Keeping as many people in employment as possible.

The coalition pulled the plug over night on so much, Businesses closed, or moved headquarter/ shut branches etc...

The effect was devastating up north.

But of course it was all labours fault

Not saying Labour hadn't made mistakes, but the way it was being handled was far better for the economy long term and keeping people employed then what the coalition did.

A coalition that wouldn't have been, if Nick Clegg hadn't gone with his ego.

I remember everyone's jaw dropping, when he had made a government with the conservatives rather than Labour

But how could he make a government with Labour when that still wouldn't give them a majority?

I remember everyone's jaw dropping, when he had made a government with the conservatives rather than Labour.

Apart from anyone who could add up? I'm sure that if Labour and the Conservatives had had similar numbers of MPs and a similar proportion of the popular vote, the LibDems would have preferred to go into coalition with labour. However, that didn't happen. It would have been entirely wrong for the party which had won the most seats and largest share of the vote to have been excluded from government.

There was a way to form a coalition government with Labour. This is only one news papers take on it at the time.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/election-2010/7691715/General-Election-2010-Gordon-Brown-appeals-to-Nick-Clegg-to-strike-deal.html

The constitutional precedent is that the current prime minister has the right to attempt to form the next government if no party secures an overall majority

Labour was poised to offer the Liberal Democrats a deal that would bring Mr Clegg’s party into a coalition government

Also here

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_general_election,_2010

Working link

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_general_election_2010

But Labour only had 258 seats. Added to the Lib Dem's 57 this only makes 315 which is short of the 326 needed. I know that Labour had the constitutional right to try to form a government but with the number of seats they had, it wasn't possible.

Did you bother reading, they needed a smaller party to make up the other 10 seats.

Some media and people talked that this could work well and looked to how some countries in Europe did it.

It wasn't something that couldn't happen or work. It was a valid option.

One that many libdems voters (and probably smaller parties were hoping for)

But Nick Clegg had more status with the Tories......

Did you bother reading, they needed a smaller party to make up the other 10 seats.

You haven't looked at the results have you?
Conservatives 307
Labour 258
Lib Dem 57
DUP 8
SNP 6
Sinn Fein 5
Plaid Cymru 3
SDLP 3
Green 1
Alliance 1

Which 'smaller party' are you talking about?

Got to love mumsnet, even when when you get your arse handed to you on plate.

In the words of someone long ago......

I don't need this shit, my man's got two jobs!

Can't even flounce properly

again

They didn't have the numbers to go into coalition with labour and Gordon Brown has been heavily defeated so it would have been difficult to support him as PM.
I don't really get what Lib Dem voters wanted unless it was just to be righteous and have a protest vote.
He went into coalition and got 30/40/50% of Lib Dem policies though and in return had to vote for some things he would rather not have. The alternative was to get none of their policies implemented.
I'm not a big fan of his policies and wouldn't have supported the lib gems but yes I do feel very sorry for him. I think in the future he may well be judged more favourably.

Because he betrayed his supporters. "No tuition fees" was a central plank of his campaign and he knew that it was a key reason many people voted for him (Lib Dems had a big student vote, for example).

Lib Dems are a curious party because they draw people from both the left and the right of Labour. The left-leaning voters were obviously appalled to see Lib Dems help Tories into power - in many cases they voted Lib Dem tactically to keep the Tories out.

He deserved to lose his seat - it took two tries to do it.

But they voted for a party with zero expectation of them winning, therefore zero expectation of the tuition policy actually being implemented in the first place. It's a bit weird that they then said that they had been betrayed for not getting something that they didnt expect in the first place.

witchandtrevor It took 5 days of no government being formed before the Lib Dems actually solved the problem for everyone. It was a total mess, and I think they did the only thing they realistically could for the good of the country.

But sometimes, noble, you use your vote not in the expectation of returning an MP but in order to send a signal (that's why I've voted both Lib Dem - never again - and Green in the past).

Sometimes the signal will be a significant number of votes for that party or MPs returned (which persuades others to vote for them next time). Sometimes the signal is to the ruling party, to show what matters to voters.

noblegiraffe.

Totally agree.

It's the politics of protest where you take no responsibility for anything and just moan about everything whoever is in power does sake in the knowledge that the people you voted for will never be there (but it didn't work this time).

Does no one remember that Clegg made a clear commitment in that campaign to coalition with the party with the most seats? He cooked his own goose then. Plus the Labour Party didn't quite do well enough to have gotten over that magic line even with lib dem support (sound familiar?).

I am a natural lib dem voter - they need PR. Successive governments have and will continue to make fools of themselves over 'free' tuition. We need better polices than blanket free tuition, you may want to be sold a dream, but it's a donkey and it has a huge opportunity cost as Clegg and any other sensible politician has found.

But the Lib Dem voters did take responsibility - which is why they decapitated Nick Clegg (and the others).

NoLottery, I'm old enough to have benefited from free tuition and full maintenance grants - there are precedents. You could model various scenarios (and I'm sure they have) between the old days when only around 10% of people went to university under those terms, and the current mass participation.

Model the costs? Yes, but what about the opportunity cost - spend most of that money on earlier education and offer targeted fee relief for nurses, teachers etc.

I understand that we all want students to have 'free' tuition, I'd like everyone to have everything they ever needed but the opportunity cost of this policy is huge in an age when pensions and healthcare are consuming huge amounts of public spending.

The lib dems realised this, Corbyn's team will eventually have to accept this when they are up to their noses in debt. I feel Blair and clegg made the right choices in the face of huge long term aging population costs.

Totally free tuition is not sustainable alongside everything else without other spending suffering.

"He had one flagship policy - abolish tuition fees..."

Hold tight, people, because I am going to blow. your. fucking. minds.

Tuition fees was not actually a major Lib Dem policy. Here's the 'flagship policies' section of the Lib Dem 2010 manifesto:

The first mention of tuition fees is on page 33 of 57. And as Fayrazzled says, the policy was forced on the leadership by the members.

But the right-wing press leapt on the opportunity to absolutely crucify them for it, and managed to convince everyone that it had been a major part of the campaign.
Screwing over for years the only party with a chance of taking true-blue shire seats off the Tories. How convenient.