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Comment by aldous | Hacker News Reader

Clegg's credibility in the UK is pretty poor due to some well publicised policy u-turns during his tenure in political power, most notable being tuition fees. He went from hero to zero very quickly over there, becoming almost an archetype of the slimey, untrustworthy politician.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/12/nick-clegg-...

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I can’t help but feel that Clegg get an unfair rep for that. The tuition fees thing was never going to happen, and was always put out by the Lib Dem’s to apply pressure to the two main parties (Conservative and Labour).

The Lib Dem’s then made the fatal mistake of actually making it into government, which they obviously never anticipated happening when they originally made the tuition fees promise.

Personally I think Clegg and Lib Dem’s did a fantastic job of reigning in the worst aspects of the Tory party, and the UK public raking them over coals for tuition fees has only benefited the Tories by removing the only thing that stopped them going off the rails completely. Which of course happened immediately after the Tories got rid of the Lib Dem’s and we got Brexit a year later

There may be some truth to that, and they did get the Conservatives to run a referendum on changing the electoral system from "First Past The Post" to "Alternative Vote". In some ways, getting that referendum should have been an incredible win worth sacrificing some short term policies. Unfortunately the campaign for the change was a disaster, and the misinformation and fear mongering about the change pushed the country to vote it down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_United_Kingdom_Alternativ...

> Unfortunately the campaign for the change was a disaster, and the misinformation and fear mongering about the change pushed the country to vote it down.

It was an absolutely extraordinary level of bullshit, especially the ads trading off changing the voting system cost vs NHS funding, which was really a prelude to how bad the Brexit debate would be.

Good points. I guess a counter is if seemingly 'cast-iron' pledges are put out there for the electorate (such as the scrapping of tuition fees) and people subsequently turn out in big numbers to vote for them (this was the year people were turned away due to large queues forming at the polling stations - obvs not all students voting for Lib Dems but you see my point) it's understandable that people will expect said pledges to be delivered on. The Lib Dem’s flagship political broadcast was titled “Say goodbye to broken promises” for example. The ire is understandable, whether one agrees or not.

I dunno how much the campaign for reform can be blamed really; the bulk of the political and media classes were rabidly against it and it's very easy to make any kind of PR sound more confusing than it is.

Nah, they made a commitment against tuition fees which they then reversed spectacularly. If they'd merely said, "since we're unable to agree on the changes to tuition fees they will be left at current levels in this parliament", I think people would have accepted that. It was the (three-line whip) voting to treble them that did them in.

It was the electorate that got rid of the LibDems, not the Tories. They went from 57 MPs to 8, largely because they broke promises like the one on tuition fees.

It was the Cameron/Clegg government that normalised food banks in British society.

I'd like to know what the fantastic job they done was, because if it's solely holding off a Brexit situation for 5 years I could argue their relatively weak opposition whilst in coalition actively enabled a shift further to the right and their extremely weak position by 2015 allowed Cameron to be so assured of the centre-right vote that he could court the UKIP vote with a referendum he assumed would never pass.

He did get voting reform to the point of a referendum in the UK at least, which regardless of how badly it was executed is something (and I don't think I can blame him for that too much, it was doomed with the UK's media), it's just a shame that seems to be the entirety of what he managed.

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