United Kingdom

not even the tuition fees on their own. All parties will court the students' vote and then betray them - I'm old enough to remember Blair doing so too; one of the things that put me off him well before Iraq.

It's their enabling of right-wing vicious mean-spirited Tories.

There are two possible narratives about it, I suppose. One is that the LibDems helped Cameron to power, and thus helped Duncan-Smith and others such as Shapps and Pickles to practice vicious sadism against poor people, and Lansley to sell off the NHS. The other is that maybe the Tories would have formed a government anyway, and would have practiced even more vicious sadism against poor people and sold the NHS even more totally. However, I do think that the nastiness of some of the Tories should have precluded the LDs remaining in coalition with them, even if they were daft enough to think that they could go in with them in the first place.

I think that the problem with the parties in general is that the MPs all have to play follow-the-leader, and so cannot act independently. And yes, this has some advantages with regard to the crazier Tories -Bill Cash and John Redwood unchained would be an even worse problem than they are now - but not with regard to 'wet' Tories under Thatcher, or anti-war Labourites under Blair, or anti-bedroom-tax LDs under the coalition.The LDs had the attraction of being 60 semi-independent MPs at a time when Labour were following Blair like cloned sheep, and the Tories were doing the same to the post-Thatcherites. Perhaps we should have all realized that this wouldn't continue if they did go in coalition; but we were mostly too horrified by the effects of disproportionately-large parliamentary majorities on elected-dictator types like Thatcher and Blair.

Also, most of the local LD councillors and MP candidates in my constituency were/are on the left of their party, and while I knew this intellectually, I didn't quite take in how RW some LDs were, even before the coalition.