Friday 6th May 2011 | 11:18

Live election blog: Liberal Democrat reaction

17.45 Danny Alexander tells Sky News that the SNP's gains in Scotland will have "a lot of consequences".

“He’s performed magnificently in those elections and as a Liberal Democrat I’m obviously very disappointed by our performance in Scotland... But this is something that is going to have a lot of consequences I think for Scotland’s relationship with the UK.”

 

15.45 Jeremy Browne tells the BBC that the party needed to show they were "a serious governing party".

"The task for us is to demonstrate that we are a serious governing party that can stick it through the five years it takes to get this country back on its feet again, and that’s what we’re going to do.

15.30 Chris Huhne tells the BBC there is huge anger about the way the Conservative party have behaved over AV: "Frankly I think you will find from top to bottom of the Liberal Democrats extraordinary anger about the Conservative behaviour in the ‘No’ campaign.

“Look at Paddy Ashdown – you cannot get anybody in the Liberal Democrats closer to Nick than Paddy. Nick was Paddy’s protégé and Paddy Ashdown was livid about this – everybody else is as well.

"This is going to be a very serious change in the style of the Coalition. It is going to be much more transactional, much more business-like and we are going to deliver on our contract, but frankly this was very bad behaviour.”

13.45 Simon Hughes tells Sky News that Nick Clegg’s leadership is not under threat. "He is the person who led us into government after 65 years and he must be the person who leads us on through the next four years in the Coalition.”

12.48 Danny Alexander tells BBC News that independence would be "a very dangerous move for Scotland".

12.37 Vince Cable tells BBC News: "Both our parties need each other... we’re clearly the more junior partner in terms of numbers of seats. We’re not arguing power politics here."

11.15 Jeremy Browne tells BBC News: “Labour aren’t facing up to the tough choices today. They are getting the protest vote that maybe the Lib Dems got in the past but we are trying to make hard-headed tough decisions in the national interest.”

9.40 Danny Alexander tells BBC News that it was a "very dissapointing night" for the Liberal Democrats but that Labour had not lived up to expectations.

9.42 Lord Razzall tells BBC News he believed the Coalition would "hold together" and that the next year would see "a little more distinctiveness".

08.05 Nick Clegg says: "We need to get up, dust ourselves down and move on, because we’ve got a really big job to do." He adds: "There are also some very strong memories of what life was like under Thatcherism in the 1980s and somehow a theory that that’s what we’re returning to."

07.47 Paddy Ashdown tells ITV's Daybreak that his party was "over-optimistic" in thinking that voters would distinguish between compromise and betrayal. "We believed, perhaps a little over-optimistically that the British people would understand the difference between compromise and betrayal.

07.15 Danny Alexander tells Today: "I think there’s no point denying that the AV issue has been a difficult one between the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives, but I do think any damage that has been done can be repaired."

06.50 Paul Scriven, leader of the Liberal Democrat council in Sheffield, tells BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "We’ve actually taken seats down there [in the South] so I think later in the day there’s going to be a north/south divide. People may look back and say actually just after one year we were a bit harsh on the Liberal Democrats". Asked if Mr Clegg was the right person to lead the Lib Dems, Mr Scriven said he was "absolutely the right leader". Mr Scriven later told BBC News that Nick Clegg "has to stay where he is".

03.28 Liberal Democrat councillor in Liverpool Richard Kemp confirms that the party has kept just two of the 12 council seats it was defending. He says: “I’ve been a member of this party for 45 years. It was written off before I joined it...There’s always going to be a core of us that are liberal that have nowhere else to go, that are proud to be liberal.”

02.51 Lib Dem party president Tim Farron admits he is seeing good friends lose their seats tonight, adding: "I guess what we’re seeing is something from a personal point of view which is very, very difficult to take, but something I suppose is inevitable. What we’re seeing, I suppose, is the first Lib Dem mid-term for 80 years."

02.26 On Sky News, Jeremy Browne suggests voters are misdirecting their anger, saying it is "a shame if people vote on national matters for a local council. People will wake up tomorrow morning, and we will still be borrowing £400m every day – they need a party to make decisions about this. That has fallen to the Lib Dems and the Conservatives."

01.47 Birmingham Leader Lib Dem group leader Paul Tilsley tells BBC Radio 4 “It’s looking very, very bad… the voters are giving us a kicking. The Liberal Democrats, true to junior partners in every coalition are reaping the whirlwind.”

01.05 Sir Menzies Campbell tells BBC News that “There is a coalition effect, one can’t deny that.
We didn’t ever pretend that this was going to be an easy night for us...but be in no doubt about our resilience, and our determination to continue with a coalition that in our view was necessary in the interests of the country.”

00.48 Mike Hancock tells the BBC “We have done well, we’ve worked hard – we will be disappointed, some good people will have lost their seats, and we’ll have to pay the price for making some mistakes."

00.13 Ed Davey says that he hopes hard working councillors "will hold onto their seats" but he is not pretending that there will not be losses.

23.50 Simon Hughes tells BBC news that Sheffield will feel the full force of "anti-Nick Clegg sentiment", and that the Liberal Democrats may well lose control of the council.

23.10 Vince Cable tells Sky News: "We're very durable, we've got a lot of stamina. Many of us have been there in the hard times, the late eighties where we went through a terrible period... a lot of our people are guerrilla fighters, they've been out there fighting in the jungle for years. They're tough."