Daily Junction.mobi portalBefore 2010, coalitions were seen as alien to British politics. The 2010-2015 coalition proved they could work (the government lasted the full term and passed major legislation), making future coalitions more likely if hung parliaments occur.
The coalition taught the Lib Dems that junior coalition partners are punished by voters. In Germany, junior coalition partners often survive or even gain votes; in the UK's adversarial system, they are blamed for enabling the senior partner's unpopular policies.
The coalition's deficit reduction programme established austerity as the political consensus from 2010-2019, with Labour under Ed Miliband accepting the need for cuts. Only under Jeremy Corbyn (2015-2020) did Labour fully reject austerity.
The AV referendum defeat killed electoral reform as a mainstream issue. The Lib Dems still support proportional representation, but no major party is likely to offer a referendum.
The Lib Dems' 2024 success was concentrated in southern England (the Blue Wall) and Scotland. They have almost no presence in northern England, the Midlands, or Wales, making them a regional rather than national party.
The 2010-2015 coalition was the UK's first peacetime coalition since the 1930s, formed after a hung parliament with Conservatives on 306 seats and Lib Dems on 57. The Lib Dems' broken promise on tuition fees—voting to triple them to £9,000 after pledging to abolish them—became the defining betrayal that destroyed trust with young voters. The 2015 election was catastrophic: the Lib Dems lost 49 seats, falling from 57 to just 8 MPs, with a vote share collapse from 23% to 7.9%.
The Alternative Vote referendum (2011) was defeated 68% to 32%, denying the Lib Dems their key constitutional reform and exposing their weakness as junior coalition partners. The coalition's austerity policies—benefit cuts, public sector pay freezes, NHS reorganisation—alienated the Lib Dem base and allowed Labour to reclaim centre-left voters.
The Lib Dems have partially recovered, winning 72 seats in 2024 through a Blue Wall strategy targeting wealthy Conservative seats. However, their vote share (12.2%) remains far below 2010 levels, and they are now a regional party concentrated in southern England. The coalition's legacy is mixed: it proved coalitions can work in the UK, but it also showed that junior partners pay a heavy electoral price for compromise. For the Liberal Democrats, the coalition was a Faustian bargain—five years of power in exchange for a decade of irrelevance.