The New UK Government

The new ruling coalition is talking about fixing the term of a parliament at five years. I don’t see this holding up — the Tories and the Lib Dems are just too strange bedfellows for this coalition to last through the rest of 2010, let alone five years. The Tories are going to stall on the parliamentary terms measure, which will cause the coalition to fall apart. The Tories will try to avoid a no-confidence motion as long as possible; Cameron will likely ask for a dissolution after the U.S. midterm elections give him a sense of the way the political winds are blowing on this side of the Atlantic.