The frustration of being stuck in the political middle ground, being held to accountable for unkept promises by the same electorate that shyed away from committing to an unequivocal mandate, and being attacked from all sides.
Caught in the Middle
All these people who complain about broken trust from the Liberal Democrats seem to forget one little detail - the LibDems were not voted into majority power. If the people don't vote us the means, then they should not be surprised when some promises cannot be kept. There are many good things that have simply gone unnoticed, and many bad things which would have been worse had it not been for our restraining the Tories. The trouble is there is no Liberal press to speak of. It's quite polarised, and in the interests of both left and right to misrepresent - or simply omit to report - the Liberal position.
And for those miffed about the LDs not coalescing with Labour (quite apart from the majority vote indicating favour for the Tories), lets not forget it was they - in particular Gordon Brown and his smug "prudence" - that were chiefly responsible for the country being caught with its pants down when the US credit economy collapsed. To quote an oft-repeated saying: "Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
Granted there has not been much visible dissent before now. But that's the nature of coalition and compromise. (You can hardly come out and say "the Tories wanted to do X but we stopped them".) It has happened, but with a little more discretion. Sadly that plays into the Tories' hands in particular - they get to claim kudos for what's popular (even when it has its roots in LibDem policy), and deflect the blame (or use the LDs as a smoke screen - as with tuition fees). Besides, even when things have come into the open it's not in the left- or right-wing press's interests to report any of this stuff. As I said, there is no middle-ground liberal press in this country. It is totally polarised. None of the media wants to put the LDs in a favourable light. None of them. (Mind you it would have been worse still if we had been in majority government.)
I think responsible people went into this coalition with eyes open. They didn't like it. They knew that to people at large it would not reflect well on the party, but they did it anyway, because it needed to be done. It has been characterised that the LDs have been Tory lapdogs and shooed things through, but in truth that hasn't been the case. The fact is they put themselves in harm's way to protect the country from the excesses of the Tories, who would otherwise have won outright at a forced re-election three months later (after heaping the blame for failing to form a government on the LDs).
I get that people don't like the results of the coalition. I get that people feel let down. But I also think it's their own fault, in many resepects. What they should remember is that right up until the wire it looked like the LDs had a real chance to form a PROPER independent majority government. They would have had the authority and the mandate to do things right, but the voting public got cold feet and in the last few days many ran, scaredy-cat, back to familiar territory of instead of voting for the greatest good, voting tactically against what they saw as their own greatest evils.
