Catalogue Number
NMLH.2010.1.3.1
Object Name
leaflet
Title
'In many parts of Britain... It's a two horse race. Labour is in a distant third place and cannot win in many areas. Supporting them just helps the Conservatives. Only the Lib Dems or the Conservatives can win.'
Place
UK
People
Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg
Events
Elections, 2010 General Election
Description
A leaflet featuring silhouette images of three horses with riders. A yellow horse is just passing a blue horse. A red horse is trailing far behind the yellow and blue ones. The message reads 'In many parts of Britain... It's a two horse race. Labour is in a distant third place and cannot win in many areas. Supporting them just helps the Conservatives. Only the Lib Dems or the Conservatives can win.'
This leaflet was produced for the 2010 General Election by the Liberal Democrats. The messaging was intended to encourage centre and left wing voters who would typically vote for the Labour Party to instead vote tactically for the Liberal Democrats in order to keep the Conservative Party from forming a government. The statistical claims on the leaflet are uncited, and during the election campaign, skepticism about Liberal Democrat statistics being misleading led to critique in the press and parody accounts on social media like Facebook's 'Lib Dem bar charts are why I have trust issues'.
The results of the 2010 General Election led to a hung parliament, and the Liberal Democrats ultimately formed a coalition government with the Conservative Party, which oversaw the austerity economic regime in the early 2010s. Nick Clegg, then leader of the Liberal Democrats, became Deputy Prime Minister to Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron. The Liberal Democrats participation in the coalition included introducing policies that went directly against their 2010 manifesto, such as tripling tuition fees. Voters responded to this, and the Liberal Liberal Democrats saw their number of MPs collapse from 57 in 2010 to 8 in 2015.
