As you've already heard, I'm sure, Gordon Brown resigned yesterday, opening the door for Conservative David Cameron to be Britain's new prime minister, with Nick Clegg's Liberal Democrats agreeing to a coalition deal that will give them five Cabinet spots, including Clegg as Cameron's deputy.
The BBC has some of the coalition details here.
While a Labour-led left-of-center coalition was a possibility, Brown just didn't have much legitimacy to govern, I think, or rather public perception of legitimacy, and a non-Brown coalition would have been weak, insecure, and short-lived. Indeed, as I suggested yesterday, the best thing for Labour, in the long run, was to admit defeat and regroup under a new leader and a new regime that leaves the Blair-Brown years behind.
It will be interesting to see how the Tory-LibDem coalition works out. The LibDems, after all, while a nominally liberal party that could be centrist, often run to the left of Labour, particularly in Scotland, and they seem to have given up a great deal for the sake of power, including their preference that the U.K. adopt a proportional representation electoral system for elections to Westminster. (The Tories have agreed to a referendum on the Alternative Vote system, which is decidedly not a PR system -- and which, ironically enough, could benefit Labour.) In addition, the LibDems have signed on with a governing party that will pursue right-wing economic, military, and immigration policies.
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