Supporters of the Liberal Democrats come out with several contradictory lines to justify their party’s record in government from 2010 to 2015: “We didn’t do it—we had to do it—it would have been worse if we hadn’t done it—we were right to do it—Labour would have done it anyway.” It’s not surprising that the party struggles to explain away its record of complicity with the Tories as they laid waste to Britain’s social services and drove millions into poverty. Much better for the Lib Dems if that awkward history can be brushed under the carpet — and that’s what their single-minded focus on Brexit is meant to achieve. But we shouldn’t indulge their pretence that the political slate was wiped clean in June 2016. The record of the Cameron–Clegg government is a much better guide to what we can expect from Jo Swinson’s party than her insincere rhetoric about Brexit.

The Lib Dems’ Real Record One favourite Lib Dem claim, often parroted by their leader Jo Swinson, is that they had to go into government to exercise a restraining influence on the Conservative Party. This is the feeblest excuse of all. Despite running against an unpopular Labour government, in power for over a decade and grappling with the worst economic crash since the 1930s, David Cameron was unable to win a majority in parliament, falling 14 seats short. The experience of the last two years has shown how difficult it is for a party without an effective majority to get its agenda past Westminster. By adding their 57 seats to the coalition, Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems gave Cameron a massive boost, making it a simple matter to push through his radical austerity programme. In truth, there was nothing reluctant or half-hearted — let alone noble — about the support Clegg and his colleagues gave to Conservative economic policy. Ever since the Orange Book manifesto of 2004, the Lib Dems had been moving away from what they called “soggy socialism” and towards the same political ground as Cameron and his Chancellor George Osborne. They were very comfortable with the idea of “shrinking the state” under the guise of reducing the deficit. The fruits of that project can be seen everywhere in Britain today, after a decade in which the social fabric was mercilessly shredded. As Ann Pettifor has written, the economic case for austerity was profoundly deceptive: There is growing consensus among economists that Osborne’s post-crisis austerity programme deepened and 9lengthened Britain’s post-crisis recession, causing public and private investment to fall further and real wages to decline. Making large reductions to government spending is itself a major reason why the economy has been so slow in recovering. With Lib Dem support, Osborne cut total expenditure by £14 billion. Public investment dropped from £60 billion in 2010 to £35 billion in 2016. Such bald figures can’t properly convey the human cost of austerity, especially the cuts to local services, from libraries to childcare centres. It left Britain a poorer, meaner, nastier place. One Lib Dem advisor, Polly Mackenzie, boasted that her party had agreed to support punitive measures against welfare claimants in return for a 5p charge on plastic bags. She went on to recall that the courts subsequently found those benefit sanctions to be illegal, apparently believing that this reflected well on the Lib Dems. Now the director of Demos, an influential think tank, Mackenzie recently published an article describing the Tories she had worked with as “talented, compassionate, wise and thoughtful people”.