Clegg says era of two-party politics is gone for good

Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron (R) and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg speak to company representatives during a round-table meeting with business leaders in a room at the handball arena, at the 2012 London Olympic Park, in London May 12, 2011.

LONDON (Reuters) - Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg Thursday shrugged off the drubbing his party has received since joining the Conservatives in government, and said the British tradition of two-party politics was over.

The Lib Dems have been battered by accusations they have compromised their principles to join the Conservatives in power after last year's general election, and Clegg in particular has seen his star plummet in opinion polls.

The deputy prime minister has been excoriated for going back on his election pledge to abolish university tuition fees, one of several compromises he says were necessary to achieve the coalition's aim of eliminating Britain's budget deficit.

The coalition has made eliminating the deficit, which had topped 10 percent of national output, by the end of the current of the current parliament in 2015 a key pledge, and Clegg said his party would be rewarded in future.

"By 2015 .... we will be presenting ourselves to the British people in a wholly new and different manner than before," he told reporters at a lunch in parliament.

"What we will be able to say, which we couldn't say for 60 or 70 years, is that we can be trusted to sort out the economy. That's an extraordinarily important, important thing."

The Lib Dems had come to power in May last year in Britain's first coalition government since World War Two in 1945, after decades in the political wilderness.

Many supporters have abandoned the party over compromises it says it has had to make as the minority partner in government, and last month the Lib Dems were trounced in local polls and a referendum the party had pushed for to change the voting system.

Still, Clegg said the current coalition government had changed the country's political landscape, which had in the past been dominated the Conservatives or left-leaning Labour.

He said issues which had in the past polarised society -- and directed votes to just the two main parties -- were gone or dissolving, such as class division, communism versus capitalism and employers versus workers.

"I think whatever the ups and downs of my party is, I think the fundamental transmission mechanism in politics has changed for good," Clegg said.

"The idea that after this exceptional experiment in coalition politics for these five years that we can revert back to the politics of the 1950s .... that people either voted Conservative or Labour because that's what their mums and dads did, that's what their communities did .... that's just gone."

(Edited by Keith Weir)