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I would accept not being able to abolish tuition fees, but having a three-line whip imposed to vote to increase them after making a "personal pledge"? No, that was definitely wrong. The Lib Dem party should have revolted at that point and fees should have been left at their level.

Agreeing to a referendum on the voting system without securing agreement that the Tories would not campaign against it was also incredibly tactically stupid.

The coalition negotiations were far too quick and cheap. It should have been over a few weeks rather than a couple of days. Anyway, the public punished the Lib Dems by re-relegating them to minor party status.

> I would accept not being able to abolish tuition fees, but having a three-line whip imposed to vote to increase them after making a "personal pledge"?

This was key for me that turned it from being the unfortunate reality of politics into a serious breach of trust. I remember saying at the time that I'd have accepted keeping fees but tripling them was like slapping your voters in the face.

I understand they were stitched up by the Tories: the budget gutted university funding, meaning the choice was increase fees or watch higher education collapse. That being said, they needed to find another way.

From a strategic perspective, too, it was the biggest cause of their 2015 annihilation. Their entire message of "we'll moderate the Tories" had the ready response of "you mean like tuition fees?"

I always assumed that the LDs planned to stay in coalition for a few years, then exit over some point of principle, restoring their reputation as an independent party. Failing to do that seems like a clear mistake on their part, in hindsight. A lot of things could have been different now if they had made that move in 2014 or so.

Maybe with hindsight, but their main policy was/is electoral reform which would end up with more coalitions. They needed to prove coalitions can work. Funnily enough, I'd argue they managed to do that after seeing the governments FPTP has given us since the 2015 election.

>Failing to do that seems like a clear mistake

It wasnt any more a mistake than the decision to take a bribe was a mistake.

It might not have been high up in their agenda, but it was still there and every single Lib Dem MP signed the Vote for Students pledge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_for_Students_pledge) in support of it. So no matter what the outcome was, generations of students have incurred fairly ridiculous levels of debt as a result and many hold the Lib Dems responsible and feel betrayed. They may have been powerless to stop it, or they may have been ineffective - but the damage is done either way

It might not have been high up their agenda, but it was high up their campaign material and was a major reason why they won so many seats. It's also worth noting that they positioned themselves to left of Labour in that election campaign, and that as "kingmakers" they had the option of forming a coalition with Labour which would have allowed them to have gotten a lot more of their manifesto passed.

I am 100% not a fan of the LibTory years, but LabTory would have been a minority government. At the very least this would have been difficult to pull off.

You mean LibLab, I'm guessing.

Yeah, too late to edit now…

A collation of Labour and Tory would have been bizarre - why would they have done that?

They'd be pretty much impossible to vote out, I suppose.

Whilst unthinkable at a national level right now, it has happened before and is happening in Scottish councils with nods and winks.

>In contrast, the Lib Dems did manage to pass same-sex marriage

It's my pet peeve when people claim this.

The UK already had same sex marriage, it was just not called marriage. Labour brought that in. The bill you refer to just renamed it, plus it gave religious orgs a get out from equalities legislation and tidied up non-same-sex marriage rules.

And the only reason it passed was because of Labour. The majority of Tories voted against their own parties bill. And 10% of Lib dems did too.

Like so many of Clegg's achievements, it was a triumph of (false and misleading) advertising over substance...

In exchange for not supporting a bill that didn't really do what was claimed, the tories got total support for all of their economic and social policies.

> The UK already had same sex marriage, it was just not called marriage.

Sure, but marriage isn't just about legals/financials. Socially/culturally, civil partnerships are a "runner up prize" compared to marriage; e.g. the recent extension of civil partnership to opposite-sex couples didn't get much fanfare.

In any case, I was specifically referring to the 2013 act, rather than the broader notion of marriage/partnerships/etc. It's the inconsistency which frustrates me, to see people thanking Cameron/Tories for delivering same-sex marriage (i.e. the 2013 act) in one breath, and blaming Clegg/LibDems for delivering tuition rises in the next.

> And the only reason it passed was because of Labour

Absolutely. The LibDems couldn't do much to swing votes themselves; hence the back-room negotiations, whips, etc.

> And 10% of Lib dems did too.

True, but that's still just 4 MPs; so I'm not sure it's too statistically insightful. Still disappointing considering the whole point of liberal philosophy is personal freedom (unfortunately some like to interpret "personal" as "the corporation I own/represent", and "freedom" to include freedom to pollute, freedom to choose my own health & safety levels, etc.)

> In exchange for not supporting a bill that didn't really do what was claimed, the tories got total support for all of their economic and social policies.

To be clear, the bill which did that would be the AV referendum (which LibDems most cared about). Also, some Tory policies were blocked by the LibDems, e.g. the Digital Economy Bill.

I also used to argue that it was unfair to criticise the Lib Dems too harshly over tuition fees, because they hadn't won the election, and as the junior partner in a coalition obviously had to compromise on parts of their manifesto. Reasonable people could perhaps disagree on how hard they should have negotiated with the Conservatives on that point.

Then someone pointed out to me the tuition fee thing wasn't just a manifesto policy. Every Lib Dem candidate in that election had (at the direction of the campaigns department) signed a personal pledge to vote against a rise in tuition fees during the next parliament. Most of them broke that pledge in pretty spectacular fashion (at the direction of party leadership).

I didn't really have an answer to that, and still don't.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_for_Students_pledge

> The media put a lot of focus on tuition fees, but they weren't high up the Lib Dem agenda

Lib Dems target students and young people who are generally more liberal, their main selling point to them was tuition fees. Young people got them to government and they immediately turned on their voters.

I think the Lib Dems rapidly found the difference between being in permanent opposition and being able to promise what they like, and being in government where hard choices need to be made.

That's the story of Brexit too.