UK politicians pledge coalition will last

British politicians pledged Saturday that the country's year-old coalition government would remain intact, after the Liberal Democrats' bruising defeat in local elections and electoral reform embarrassment brought divisions between the party and Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservatives sharply back to the fore.
Voters dealt the Liberal Democrats a harsh one-two punch this week, overwhelmingly rejecting the party's push for electoral changes and stripping away hundreds of local council seats in Thursday's vote. The results capped off a bitter campaign that pitted Prime Minister David Cameron and his Conservative party against Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg's Liberal Democrats, the junior partner in the coalition. The debate over the Alternative Voting referendum known as AV reached all levels of government, with coalition colleagues and even members of the same parties sounding off against each other.
Offering voters a chance to usher in electoral reform was a long-held ambition of Clegg's Liberal Democrats who joined with Cameron's Conservative Party in Britain's first coalition since World War II following last year's inconclusive national election.
But Britons voted to stick with the first-past-the-post system, under which the candidate with the most votes and not necessarily an absolute majority wins a seat in the House of Commons, rather than change to a system under which voters ranked candidates in order of preference.
It was Clegg who emerged as the universal punching bag Saturday after 68 percent of voters said "No" to the AV in what The Sun newspaper characterised as the "Liberal DemoCrash." Various other tabloid headlines decried the party leader as "on his last Cleggs," "Not a Clegg to Stand on" amid calls for his resignation.
The loss of nearly 700 local council seats or more than a third of the seats they had held previously for the Liberal Democrats is considered by some as the first true test of the party's strength since the government was formed which could threaten the endurance of the coalition.