Don’t get me wrong, I will probably cave at the last minute and vote SNP again for a number of reasons. Mostly, being supportive of a number of their progressive policies that I have benefited from over the years, and also because my constituency is a two horse race between them and the Tories who I will never vote for. Though the SNP are probably now at their lowest point in years since they finally managed to oust Sturgeon.
I will also never vote Labour, they have no identity here and during the 2019 election they were campaigning for the Tories to oust SNP here, so 100% fuck them too.
I once voted for Lib Dem and we ended up with the catastrophic Clegg/Cameron coalition (though due to FPTP my vote didn’t matter there.)
I would like to vote for Green, but it would be a wasted vote here.
It’s just bizarre to me that Westminster’s voting system is such that a vast majority of votes in the UK are binned, how is this considered normal?
Sorry for the rant, but I am just so incredibly disillusioned with politics in this shitehole of a country but absolutely refuse to be passive about it since that is what they want us to be.
Instead of spoiling it, vote for your local Monster Raving Luny party candidate and help get their deposit back. (Or any other niche party you like)
Otherwise - unless you were a student at the time (me 😭) wasn’t the coalition a much better result than a full conservative government?
Not really, the conservatives steam rollered the lib dems. Ultimately it was just a conservative agenda enabled by the lib dems.
The lib Dems, unfortunately, relied on us votes being rational. They gave up most of their agenda to get a vote on changing away from FFTP. Unfortunately, enough people used it as a protest vote against them.
This isn’t particularly true tbh, whilst they absolutely gave up on student loans, they still got a lot of their manifesto implemented. To the point their activists bragged about it during the 2015 election.
https://whatthehellhavethelibdemsdone.com/
The major problem is that they also believed in the economically illiterate policy of austerity, so it didn’t matter what they achieved because they were still burning the house down.
There was compromise though, I can’t remember exactly what it was, but I seem to remember them taking the crazy off the top of the conservative agenda and bringing them closer to centre?
That was before I could vote though, so wasn’t entirely paying enough attention.
In a word, yes. They moderated the Tories. Arguably that moderation made the Tories seem less bad and led to them winning in 2015.
The lib dem bend-over can be summarised in two letters:
AV
I didn’t vote Lib Dem to end up with the fucking tories, which is exactly what happened. I’m not surprised their support plummeted after that.
I was a student at the time, but fortunately, I’m Scottish, so the student loans fiasco didn’t apply.
What did you expect then? They would never have got a majority, a coalition or vote trading is the best they could have hoped for.
They didn’t do as much as they had hoped, but probably still better than a Tory majority (for the apparent userbase here). The alternative would have been either a minority government or another election?
I didn’t expect much if I am honest, I wasn’t that politically engaged during that election. I took the time to read and appreciate the manifesto, went off to vote, then realised afterwards what you had outlined there. Again, fortunately it didn’t matter because my constituency didn’t return a Lib dem MP, but I was still pissed.