http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11803719

To me, this reads like "We didn't win the election, so we are free to back-track on as many manifesto promises as we like."

Bollocks!

+1

+1 Where do we have an online riot?

Technical term ?

I don't see the problem with that. Liberals are the minority party in the coalition, the Tories clearly won vastly more votes in the election, so to have the Liberals enforcing their will over the Tories on something like this would be a clear case of the tail wagging the dog.

The Liberals have limited political capital and need to spend it wisely, their manifesto is not the one that got voted in, so it is just a wish list of reforms against the Tory one which did.

Fundamentally, it's a cop out. They may be the minority in the coalition but there wouldn't be a coalition at all of they didn't hold the balance of power. They could and should use that balance of power to push through the agenda which they presented to the voters and upon which the voters voted.

We pretty much knew this already but we can now say for absolute certainty that party manifestos at election aren't worth the paper they are printed on. Any party who gets elected can just say "well, we said we would do that but since then the situation has changed so we're going to do this instead". It's like a builder giving a written quote then, after the work is done, claiming the fee is entirely different. If a builder did that to you, you wouldn't use them again...

As I said in another thread, this is the LibDems tossing whatever political credibility they may ever have had away for something approaching five years in power. They're exchanging power right now for the possibility of power in the future, because their vote will almost certainly collapse from now on. The complete folly of the bargain they've made is things like this show in fact they have no real power right now and are just a prop to let the Tories do what they want. I pretty much expect huge chunks of their vote to defect to Labour from now on and we pretty much will have a two party political system again.

Jon

I also suspect a large number of floating voters will switch to Labour after the cuts as well. The coalition are hoping that the reforms and cuts work. Some of the reforms will work but not all, some are necessary but not all. The Liberals will probably spend another century in the wilderness as a result of their actions, so even PR/AVplus will not help them next election.

I laughed at 'It won't even affect you, so don't worry about it'.

As I understand it, the students will have a chance to ruin his Strictly hopes at least

Well I suppose they could try that. And then the coalition would last about 3 weeks and there'd be a general election, no policy would be in effect, and the Libs would get the blame for that too. And then it would be demonstrably proven that the UK can't do coalition politics and we have to have the same old crap with 45% of the vote equaling a parliamentary landslide.

The Libs are supposed to believe that coalition politics can work in this country, but it can't if you have a situation where smaller parties routinely hold a gun to the prime minister's head. This issue is not serious enough to justify that, so they are doing exactly the right thing.

Anyone who decides that they would rather be a tribal politician and define themselves by their antipathy to the Tories can leave the Libs and join Labour with my blessing. They were always fake Liberals anyway, and their allegiance is not worth courting.

I appreciate the argument but what we've got is the other end of the scale. Rather than the small party holding the others to ransom,what we've got is the small party basically just giving in and all the big parties policies being implemented. Things that they specifically said they were against are being brought through and they're not only not opposing them, they're defending them. The simple questions this - if a purely Tory government had come to power, what would we have seen that we haven't seen anyway? What difference have the libdems being in the coalition actually made?

I don't want stable government if the cost is that parties can just say what they like before elections and then ignore their promises afterwards. What's the point of that? We don't have a democratic process if the government isn't beholden to it's people and if they can just tear up their manifestos after they get into power then the bare fact is they aren't. You might as well vote for whichever posh boy has the nicest suit, because you've got nothing else trustworthy to go on.

I think it's too soon to say what the influence of the party amounts to. Like it or not, the first task is the budget and the deficit and it's no good to have policy shifting left and then right on that subject. A clear policy that's most of what the Tories want but ameliorated by the influence of Libs is all that's on offer.

Personally I would prefer education to be funded by tax, but there's clearly no mandate for tax rises as with parliament balanced as it is, so deficit reduction is going to be a matter of cost cutting.

Well the deficit will only get larger with the cuts. Look at Ireland. At the start of the crisis the government actually had a surplus and now has a deficit of 32% of GDP, and it will probably default in a couple of years no matter what the ECB does. The UK is about to follow the Irish down the austerity path to oblivion. At least we have not guaranteed all the banks debts which is their biggest mistake.

As for mandates there was no mandate for anything severe. The public certainly did not vote for spending cuts as savage as have been imposed on us. If there was, the Tories would have had an absolute landslide.

The cuts designed to reduce a structural deficit. Apparently Ireland didn't have one of those, so the analogy you refer to is false.

Well we only had a structural deficit of 3 or 4% not 25%. The rest is as a result of the collapse in tax revenues from all businesses. That is what hit Ireland as well.