No new evidence has been provided though. The Liberal Democrats have, however, helped a party who is massively against them on most important issues to power. Every vote for the Lib Dems was basically a vote for the Conservatives.
To be fair, though, there'd be as many (more?) people making the equivalent comment in response to them cosying up to Labour.
As far as votes are concerned, the Conservatives didn't win, Labour didn't win, Lib Dems didn't win. Labour may be better off for having lost the chance of a merger, the core/grassroots Conservatives might well wish they were in opposition again instead of how they are, Lib Dems appear to have the balance of power but only time will tell whether
that goes as planned. Who knows if "The Public"[1] won. I personally think not, but that we'll survive it anyway and get on with life.
[1] Apparently "The Public" voted unanimously for a hung parliament. Well, no... Maybe people liked the idea of it and even voted accordingly to do their bit to attain that end, but nobody actually put a cross against "hung parliament" on a voting form. Everyone voted for someone specific (if they voted/got to vote, and didn't then spoil their paper) and it was a far from unanimous mish-mash of different voting intentions that gave us our result.
[Pre-posting additional reply]
A lot of the votes for lib dems were "against labour" votes anyway (ditto for conservatives), so those people get what they voted for. Not Labour.
EDIT: Probably importantly, they're still putting a bill before parliament for voting reform.
The trouble is that the surge was arguably
away from the Lib Dems, so most "against <standing candidate>" votes would have had to have been countered by "towards conservative" votes to get the result we had. Well, more complex than that, but YSWIM.