This is not about party allegiance, this is all about brexit.

Which, frankly, is scary in itself. Brexit, in whatever form, is far the only thing that matters in government. We also have significant and immediate concerns about the NHS, the education system at several different levels, our transport and communications infrastructure, our energy infrastructure, the environment and natural resources, the changing nature of work and employment, over-centralisation around London, the erosion of civil liberties, and other issues. Many of these could have far greater effects on the average citizen than anything to do with Brexit is likely to cause, even over the next few years and certainly in the long term, but they're being drowned out by an issue that is, in the big picture, simply not that big a deal.

However you are right that what should be happening is that the current intended prosecutions for electoral fraud should be completed (report due 12th of June) before any election is considered. The opposition parties should not be voting for to enact an election.

https://fullfact.org/immigration/immigration-and-nhs-staff/

That dates from last year, but suggests only 5% of NHS staff overall and 10% of doctors at that time were immigrants from elsewhere in the EU, and that this was a lower proportion than immigrants from non-EU nations.

Talk of farming collapsing also seems rather extreme. There are some important subsidies from the EU that do support genuine farming, but there is a lot more in the CAP that really doesn't.

I'm far more worried about not just underfunding but morale in the NHS, and in those who are leaving it or who might consider working within it in the future. For example, the figures for doctors planning leaving the profession in the near future compared to those starting to train to become doctors are not comfortable reading next to our predicted national demographics in the future.

I'm also far more worried about the kinds of conditions that make genuine farming need hand-outs to be viable. If that is the case then it seems likely that market forces and/or national resilience strategies have failed catastrophically already and those problems need to be addressed in their own right.

It's not that Brexit couldn't affect these things, I just think some of our existing problems are significantly bigger and their effects longer-lasting than any likely changes due to post-Brexit arrangements.

Actually, their behaviour in the coalition was the fact or that made me respect the LibDems tremendously. In my opinion they actually set aside party advantage in order to give the UK a working government. I believe that without their moderating influence the last government would have been a lot worse - hats off to them. And I speak as a (probably former) Labour voter.

Working government is overrated; Belgium took over a year to form a government and therefore ended up handling the financial crisis slightly better as there was no opportunity to do anything dramatically stupid.

The Lib Dems should have fought a lot harder and longer before agreeing to that coalition.

Is it, really?

People say things like this a lot at the moment, but the objective reality is that for a lot of graduates in the current tuition fees and student loans system, they are leaving university already tens of thousands of pounds in debt.

Earning anything resembling a "normal" graduate salary -- which of course isn't guaranteed these days -- they will then be making repayments that effectively increase their marginal income tax rate by a whopping 9%.

And with the current rate of inflation and the 3% extra interest that gets added on top, most of those repayments will actually just be servicing interest.

Bottom line: a young person graduating this year will have huge debts at the start of their career, they could be facing an extra tax-like burden for most of their working lives, and they're entering a workforce that demands more and offers less than any previous generation in recent history has faced. And that's before you even consider things like the housing market or the likelihood of that generation receiving a useful state pension by the time they retire.

How is anything related to Brexit, even in the most negative possible outcome, going to have anywhere close to that effect on the life of a young person who graduates this year?

There were always unpleasant people using nationalism as cover for doing unpleasant things, even though the current sentiment in many western countries has brought them a higher profile. They're still a relatively small minority, they've never amounted to much before, and I don't see them achieving much in the long term either, even if they cause nasty irritation for a while. More generally, broader nationalist sentiment might lead to a more isolationist foreign policy for a while, with the pros and cons that brings, but talk of that getting us into a war any time in the near future seems hyperbolic.

Russian aggression in Eastern Europe seems a greater and more urgent threat in terms of geopolitical stability, but then NATO seems a more likely forum to moderate that influence than the EU. Given that even NATO has had a limited effect on Putin so far, I don't see the UK's membership or otherwise of the EU making much difference to anything in this respect. With the US not knowing what its foreign policy is from one day to the next under Trump and with many of the other relatively powerful European nations systematically underinvesting in defence for years, I think there are much more influential factors that would need to change here before Brexit started to have much relevance in this context.

Meanwhile, with the tuition fees and student loans system we now have and with current inflation rates, we're talking about crippling around half of a whole generation economically, possibly for their entire lives. I'm already somewhat concerned that inequality and generational conflict could lead to widespread disorder within the next few years here at home, regardless of anything going on abroad. The effects of Brexit surely wouldn't help with that, but I don't believe any outcome in relation to Brexit (including completely stopping it) would fix these deep problems in our own society or their long term consequences either.

I genuinely admire that you are motivated enough to get involved with UK politics - and I wish you all the best. You've no idea the disappointment I had in the LDs though - I cheered them on in a handful of successive elections (they ousted the Tories in my home constituency West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine in '97 much to my family's delight) and in the run-in to 2010 was convinced they could rise up to challenge Labour and the Conservatives.

And then to join the Tories - it just boggles the mind, I cannot fathom how anyone didn't think "won't this completely kill us off?". For one this basically lost them the foothold they had Scotland (my home constituency was lost to the SNP, for example) and whatever was left of the younger supporters who weren't turned off by the association with the Conservatives were then burned by the Tuition Fee saga in England.

We'll never know what would have happened with Brexit if the Lib Dems were still in the coalition. But they completely capitulated on a single extremely simple promise in 2010. Now I (a previous Lib Dem voter) have no reason to believe they wouldn't do the exact same again.

But overall, yeah you are right. I do not understand the Lib Dems. And it fucking saddens me.

Now, one thing we did with the coalition was do exactly what we'd been saying before the election. It wasn't what the media reported, but it is what we said. Which was that we'd consider coalition with any party that got the most votes and the most seats. Which was the Tories.

Now, you should also remember that the Lib Dems have a shared history with both the conservative and labour parties. The SDP may be much more recent, but the flight of the libertarians in the 1920s and 30s (along with the telegraph newspaper) lost us what was an originally liberal idea: the market. Suddenly we were no longer the party of the market. And the Tories were a mixture of market purists, capitalists and moral conservatives (political theists). They've purged most of the moral conservatives now, and we're just left with the capitalists (the libertarians forgot all about the social conscience of Adam Smith without the rest of the Liberal party to remind them.)

Now, the Liberals who were left in the 40s and onwards were several things. Social liberal, internationalist, a little bit CND, etc. Radicals. Protestors.

Then we got this influx from Labour in the 80s, the right wing of the Labour Party, the SDP. Vince Cable. Shirley Williams. We grew up and became less of a protest party and more professional. We started winning by-elections and having more than 6 seats.

It is important to distinguish us from a European Liberal (centre-right) party. It is also important to remember that we're internationalists. And it is important to remember that we're not too different from a European Liberal party; we definitely believe in free trade across borders.

So, the European project is a part of British Liberalism which cuts across both internationalism and market freedoms. It's in the political DNA of nearly all Lib Dems.

Brexit is one of the few things we pretty much all agree on (that it's a terrible catastrophe).

I hope that helps you understand us a bit better.

I will be voting Lib Dem as I always have. Not that fussed about EU membership either way but if the LDs can capture a decent proportion of the 'remain' vote then that could mean a huge boost.

Best of luck!

We live in interesting times!

Labour is in a bit of leadership dispute and the Article 50 negotiations haven't had time to go bad. Now is probably the best possible time to call an election. This time next year Labour might have gotten their house in order and the first results of the negotiations with the EU will be in and under close scrutiny, and it is very likely the the government will have been forced to make some tough concessions. Both of those things are likely to make winning an election much harder.

Also if they win now they can conduct the Article 50 negotiations in peace and with clear mandate. Trying to win an election and negotiate Brexit at the same time will be much harder, if for no other reason than the fact that the person across the table won't have any idea if the person they're talking to now will be in charge when it comes time to actually sign the papers.

That is certainly one possible outcome. However the Tories seem rather convinced that they can keep and even increase their majority (although the Tories do seem to have a thing for taking big bets with the country on election outcomes). And if they end up even just keeping their majority it will remove the whole "Theresa May has no public mandate to negotiate Brexit" argument from the table. It will also give them 5 more years to ride out the Brexit storm before having to face the voters again.

If the Lib Dems became a Democratic/Liberal Socialist party, I'd be happier.

Capitalism = bad, Markets = OKish.

It's only the Tories who believe in unrepentant profit mongering as a good way to organise society. (Oh, and UKIP. are they still a thing?)

It was your austerity cuts that created the favourable climate for Brexit in the first place.

I'll probably be voting short term "stop this madness"

I would have prefered a Labour + LibDem coalition in 2010 and 2015, but for what its worth the Lib Dems kept the conservatives on the side of sanity between 2010 and 2015. Without the lib dems they were torn apart by the far right of their party.

That was a pun about currency value, yes? :)