Future of liberal democracts hang in balance

As the Liberal Democrats were holding this week their annual conference in Glasgow, Scotland, seventy-five percent of the British adult population, said they would not vote for the small party. That is the grim news facing the party leader Nick Clegg as he was trying to rally his troops before the forthcoming general elections due in 2015, commentators said. The figures come from inside as senior party sources revealed them following internal polling on the state of the third important party in the UK political landscape. Some senior party sources admitted today that they lost a lot of support by going into coalition with the Conservatives. The party has lost support because of perceived "u-turns" not least over tuition fees for university students, a controversial issue which went against previous commitments made by the Liberal Democrats, the commentators noted. They believed that Cleggs credibility has been badly hit by this touchy decision which affects millions of university students. This years annual conference is meant to be a "showpiece for Lib Dem policy," the commentators pointed out. The aim will be to argue that the party is different to David Camerons Conservatives, to stress what it has been responsible for in office, and to drum up ideas for the next manifesto. "Unless we tell people what we have achieved in Government no one will," said the party sources. They stressed that the party always tries to remind voters that while they backed a hike in tuition fees, the four policy areas that they printed on the front of their previous manifesto (around tax, schools, the environment and political reform) all made it into the Coalition agreement. However, some prominent party figures argue that the partys leadership is facing a huge test and the best hope would be to ditch Clegg and head into the next election with a new leader at the helm. It is the first time in more than a decade that the UK party has chosen Scotland for its policy get-together, commentators noted. And during this years gathering the party is taking a gamble by positioning itself as a professional coalition partner, the commentators said. In an unusual move for Clegg the political leader of the smaller party in the coalition government, he has conceded there is no hope of the party winning an outright majority in the 2015 general election. He is staking the party's political future on convincing voters that they need it to be in government to prevent the two larger political parties the Conservatives and the opposition Labour Party- from wrecking the economic recovery. Coalition governments were rare in the UK as the current coalition is the first here since World War II. Power-sharing arrangement is common in European countries such as France and Germany. It now looks set to become a regular occurrence in the UK, the commentators added. They believed that it is more likely than not that in the future the UK will get more coalitions and Clegg himself is a firm believer in that theory. Meanwhile, during the conferences deliberations the Liberal Democrat leadership is determined to stick to the austerity drive they agreed with Prime Minister David Cameron's center-right Conservatives in a bid to prove they are more trustworthy with the economy than the center-left opposition Labour Party. But the Liberal Democrats are also pushing forward policies that will show that they are more compassionate than their coalition partners on balancing the government books. According to opinion polls the outcome of the next general election would bring about another hung parliament (where no party secures an overall majority). Meanwhile, although the outlook for the British economy is brightening, house prices are on the rise and consumer confidence is recovering, support in the polls for the centrist Liberal Democrats is even weaker than for the UK Independence Party, a small anti-European Union group that has yet to win a parliamentary seat. The Latest (YouGov) survey puts Labour on 38 percent, the Conservatives on 34 percent, UKIP on 13 percent and the Liberal Democrats on 8 percent well below the 23 percent of the vote it won at the 2010 general election. Commentators say the party, which spent decades in opposition watching power switch between Labour and Conservatives, have suffered from the compromises they have made in government.