Reddit reviews 22 Days in May: The Birth of the Lib Dem-Conservative Coalition

> That's what happened anyway though. I realise there's an effort to change the narrative on the Lib Dems but 2010 resulted in them being seen as complete hypocrites.

There were books written in the same year that said the one of the reasons they went with full coalition was because they wanted to show coliations would work. It may be wrong but it isn't changing the narrative to state that now.

Sure. Both the Lib Dem and the Conservative accounts of Coalition negotiations emphasise the importance of establishing a coalition (rather than, say, a supply and confidence arrangement) as a coalition would allow the burden of painful cuts to be shared between two parties - it would help establish the political consensus, necessary for success, that these cuts were necessary.

David Laws is explicit about this in his accounts of the negotiations:

> [Besides the option of supply and confidence] there was, according to the Conservative leader, ‘a case for going further’ into a full coalition. The case was based in part on the need to tackle ‘the biggest threat’ to our national interest – Britain’s huge budget deficit.
That required, according to Mr Cameron, ‘a strong, stable government that lasts [and] . . . which has the support of the public to take the difficult decisions that are needed. . .’

> [...]

> The prizes for Mr Cameron were obvious: government, not opposition; stability, not chaos; joint responsibility for tough decisions, not sole blame for the painful cuts to come; and an opportunity to change the entire perception of the Conservative Party and to reshape British politics.

And later, more explicitly:

> Finally, David Cameron and his senior team seemed to have decided that a coalition agreement was not merely something that they wished to be seen to be trying to secure; it was something that they actually wanted to secure. This may have been because of doubts about how easy it would be to fight and win the second election, which we all felt was inevitable if a coalition agreement could not be struck. But there were also, surely, major advantages of a coalition from both a national and a Conservative Party perspective. The coalition gave the Conservatives the votes to govern strongly and to push through tough measures on the economy, while getting another political party to share the pain.


As for the Tory account, Seldon's Cameron at 10 has some good insight:

> Cameron and Osborne approve of the input of Laws over their first taster of cuts. Osborne misses Hammond, though finds Laws as ‘dry as a bone’ and ‘more fiscally conservative’ than any of them. Laws deals firmly with the unprotected departments including the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), Work and Pensions (DWP), and above all with the Home Office. After long torrid discussions, Home Secretary Theresa May settles in the nick of time – at 11 p.m. on Friday 21 May.7 Laws dispels altogether any apprehensions that the Lib Dems cannot take the heat of delivering Plan A on the ground. ‘Lib Dem support for fiscal consolidation was important, because it broadened the legitimacy for the strong action that was taken and it underpinned the whole government,’ says a senior Treasury official


So it's pretty clear that the Coalition was seen as necessary, by both sides, in the pursuit of massive cuts to public spending. The reason a Coalition was necessary is because voters react strongly and negatively to perceived losses, and so retrenchment programs are incredibly difficult to pursue without risking electoral oblivion. There's a really good paper (though slightly outdated) on this by Paul Pierson called The New Politics of the Welfare State. Page 176 onwards explains the conditions which facilitate the implementation of policies of retrenchment. Essentially, the major factors are electoral slack (a weak opposition in the form of a Labour Party confused as to which way to turn), a problem pressure (the GFC), and a cross-party consensus that retrenchment is the necessary response to the crisis (the Coalition with the Lib Dems). There's obviously a bit more to it than that, but the pdf isn't easy to copy & paste from, so I won't bother with quotes here. The case studies also outline why the Tories would never have been self-destructive enough to pursue these cuts without a partner back in 2010.