My explanation for the British Liberal Democratic Party’s annihilation in the 2015 UK General Election

By Oliver Green

There are several factors that sealed the fate of the British Liberal Democratic party at the 2015 UK General election. The first one is that the junior partners of coalitions always suffer in the subsequent election, as the results of elections across Europe and in British political history have shown. Therefore there was always the inevitability of losing and alienating core Liberal voters when the party went into a Conservative led coalition, as many of whom were positioned around the left of the Labour Party and included disillusioned Labour voters in the North and tactical Labour voters in the South West.

Secondly, it was always going to be easy to use the Lib Dems as scapegoats for the shortcomings of the five years of coalition government, particularly when one primary political aim of Nick Clegg was to be seen to water down the Conservative 2010 manifesto as much as possible. But being the leading partner also makes it virtually effortless to pinch the good and popular Lib Dem policies on things like tax exemptions for people on lower incomes and re-brand them as One Nation Conservative policies, and this David Cameron has did most effectively, and in the process he successfully built a new electoral coalition of Conservative and Liberal voters, making it possible to incorporate an area of policies that were once the preserve of the Liberal Democrats and now incorporate them into a new centrist brand of One Nation Conservatism, leaving them without a leg to stand on. Thirdly, having served in a Conservative led government they also lost the anti-establishment and protest vote, which was seized upon by the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), which is also where all the disillusioned Labour voters in the north went.

The fourth factor I’m going to highlight is that of trust and credibility, which is down to the then Party Leader, Nick Clegg himself, regarding his decision not to protect his flagship policy to end University tuition fees in the coalition negotiations, and which proved unpalatable to most Liberal voters, especially the youth arm of the party’s electorate. Then there was the inexorable Scottish Nationalist (SNP) surge in Scotland resulting from the mobilisation and galvanism of SNP support from their campaigning throughout the Scottish Independence referendum, and this the Lib Dems were never in any position to do anything about, and subsequently suffered the same fate as Labour there. Now there’s one final and certainly most crucial factor in the final stages of the election campaign that I would also like to highlight, and that was the very real threat of a minority Labour government propped up and held to ransom by the SNP, possibly in a coalition, but much more likely on a vote by vote basis. This was something that David Cameron very shrewdly and effectively communicated to the English electorate, who understood that voting Conservative was the only guaranteed way of stopping it, and as long as the SNP remain as strong as they are, then this will continue to be a factor in future elections, especially for as long as Labour remain unelectable.