Compared to what the current Conservative government is doing, I feel the Lib Dems did a pretty good job of tempering their ambitions, without bringing the entire system to a standstill (which I do not believe for a second to be a good idea).
Nick Clegg clearly pulled back on tuition fees to get a referendum on AV which in hindsight he probably wishes he hadn't done and that then set the tone for media portrayal over the following 4 years.
Any liberal who says they "sold-out" during the coalition only need to look at current Tory policy to realise that the LDs did an excellent job pulling the Tories back. I voted Lib Dem in the last two elections FWIW.
For example, the LibDem manifesto for 2010 promised to "Switch traffic from road to rail by investing in local rail improvements, such as opening closed rail lines and adding extra tracks, paid for by cutting the major roads budget." [1]
What actually happened to the major roads budget? Well, come 2013, the coalition was embarking upon a massive programme of road-building, proudly trumpeted by Danny Alexander (LibDem chief secretary to the Treasury) as "the greatest investment in our roads since the 1970s". [2] That's not compromise, that's a 180° U-turn on your manifesto commitments. Meanwhile, actual rail reopenings were happening in Scotland thanks to the SNP, and in Wales thanks to Labour, but not in England.
So, no thank you. I had voted LibDem in 2012 and at every general election since the age of 18. Not in 2015 and not again.
[1] http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/ge10/man/parties/li...
[2] https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/speech-by-chief-secre...
They would have done a better job by supporting and conditioning a minority government. Let Tories get all the flak while you bring home electoral victories. Instead, they got all the flak, didn't significantly change anything (they resisted or delayed a few "reforms" like this bill, which will now go through), U-turned on all their manifesto promises (which, one suspects, the leadership only endured because of their grassroots activists and not because they believed in any of them) and made themselves unelectable.
"A pretty good job" sounds a lot like "a heck of a job"...
They made a terrible job of promoting their role and position (PR referendum, tuition fees etc) and the allowed the Tories to use them as the fall guy for a remarkable range of things. The PR referendum should have been an eeasy sell for them considering the UK is one of the least representative democracies on the planet. On tuition fees, making huge public commitments, signing oversized documents for the cameras, then rowing back because reasons can be a textbook case of how not to do it for decades.
Thatcher even said that there was "nothing to be afraid about" (paraphrasing slightly) over Blair's government. The Labour Party has not been a party of labour and work for a very long while, rather a typical liberal party as seen in the two-party systems of North America. One cannot claim to be part of a worker's party if he supports mass immigration to replace nationals for cheaper work and a welfare bureaucracy that pays more for slacking than working.
The decision to support the barely amended IPB is upsetting and a disgrace to the Labour Party. I would have hoped that Jeremy Corbyn would get the party to oppose the British surveillance state, consistent with his principles on war, human rights and so on and so on.
A liberal bill would minimise the state's authority to do this sort of thing.
aka Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Dianne Feinstein, Joe Lieberman... total hawks on civil rights (except on '60s causes like abortion and black voting, which most sane people already take for granted), but still very much "liberals" in the American sense.
In the European sense, "liberals" are also pretty much "liberalists", aka freetraders/pro-business with a right-wing approach to civil liberties and immigration.
The meaning of liberal issues as being about individual-rights and protection-from-state is rapidly disappearing. I guess it's been subsumed in the "libertarian" hodgepodge.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interception_Modernisation_P...