The Welfare Reform Act (2012) brought about changes to benefit entitlement and assessment for disabled people, with measures to reduce the budget in this area justified within parts of the Conservative Party and right-wing media through the use of narratives of deserving and undeserving citizens. Using a case study of the Sun newspaper's publications on disability in 2012, this paper illustrates that increasingly negative perceptions of disabled people in society are congruent with dominant portrayals of disability benefit recipients as undeserving in the right-wing press. In line with previous research, this supports the idea of a level of media influence on the public.

Social liberalism has consistently been highlighted as arguably the defining feature of David C C Party. However, this article challenges the perception that modernisation has fundamentally transformed the position of social liberalism in contemporary conservatism, questioning the extent to which the Conservatives under Cameron have deviated from their socially conservative Thatcherite ideological inheritance. Two key aspects T C policy areas. The first is the issue of equal marriage rights for same-sex couples, and the second is W Ctransforming Conservative attitudes and policies in a socially liberal direction has been very limited, challenging the widespread characterisation of the Coalition as a fundamentally government.

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Parties in coalition governments must address the ‘unity/distinctiveness’ dilemma: how to maintain governing cohesion, while sustaining individual identities. Within the Cameron–Clegg government this is a challenge for both parties, but it is more so for the Liberal Democrats as the junior partner. This paper considers how the Liberal Democrats negotiated this dilemma in relation to ministerial portfolio allocations. While the Liberal Democrat strategy of placing ministers in almost all departments has served the Coalition well in terms of governing unity, it has limited the extent to which they have been able to assert their distinctive contribution to Coalition policy‐making. This is demonstrated through an examination of the Liberal Democrats' influence on Coalition welfare policy. A lack of clear policy contributions is potentially highly damaging to the Liberal Democrats electorally, as it suggests that they have made little substantive contribution to the Coalition beyond propping up their Conservative partners. Accordingly, the paper reflects on lessons for junior partners in future UK coalition governments, suggesting that concentrating ministers within one or two departments may provide a more viable means of carving out a distinctive governing legacy.

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