"Clegg sold his party down the river for his 15 minutes of fame"
Well he certainly shifted the outlook of his party, much as Thatcher and Blair had done previously for their, this happens. As the Guardian wrote in 2010
"But over the last few years the latter group, led by Clegg, Laws and Cable, has strengthened and steadily shifted the Lib Dems rightwards. In 2004 all three men contributed essays to The Orange Book: Reclaiming Liberalism, a surprisingly sharp-toothed volume which attacked "nanny-state liberalism", and called for the civil service to be "drastically pruned" and the NHS to be replaced by "a system of competing insurance schemes". The book's mixture of free-market toughness and liberalism on social issues was strikingly similar to the political recipe that Cameron and other Tory modernisers were beginning to concoct." And continues by quoting a Tory activist writing in the Telegraph in 2005 " "Cable would not look ill at ease in a Cameronian government . . . The electoral system is now so skewed [against the Tories] that . . . we might have to contemplate a Tory-Lib Dem coalition."
So what seems to have happened is a large group of people have happily voted for a party in the belief that they follow a set of policies that they did not. Like Labour before them, and to a certain extent the Tories as well.
As Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa, Bolton says below, all the parties are, to large extent offering the same policies, they just focus on minor detail and trivia to try and make themselves look different.
Well he certainly shifted the outlook of his party, much as Thatcher and Blair had done previously for their, this happens. As the Guardian wrote in 2010
"But over the last few years the latter group, led by Clegg, Laws and Cable, has strengthened and steadily shifted the Lib Dems rightwards. In 2004 all three men contributed essays to The Orange Book: Reclaiming Liberalism, a surprisingly sharp-toothed volume which attacked "nanny-state liberalism", and called for the civil service to be "drastically pruned" and the NHS to be replaced by "a system of competing insurance schemes". The book's mixture of free-market toughness and liberalism on social issues was strikingly similar to the political recipe that Cameron and other Tory modernisers were beginning to concoct." And continues by quoting a Tory activist writing in the Telegraph in 2005 " "Cable would not look ill at ease in a Cameronian government . . . The electoral system is now so skewed [against the Tories] that . . . we might have to contemplate a Tory-Lib Dem coalition."
So what seems to have happened is a large group of people have happily voted for a party in the belief that they follow a set of policies that they did not. Like Labour before them, and to a certain extent the Tories as well.
As Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa, Bolton says below, all the parties are, to large extent offering the same policies, they just focus on minor detail and trivia to try and make themselves look different.