国际英语新闻：Britain's Deputy PM: Coalition gov'ts are future for Britain

LONDON, July 10 (Xinhua) -- The new British Deputy Prime Minister said on Saturday that coalition government was now the norm in Britain, and the old system of two large parties taking it in turns to rule was a thing of the past.

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said in a newspaper interview that the pattern of alternating the government between the right-of-center Conservative party and the left-of-center Labor party which had prevailed for more than 60 years was broken by the general election result of May 6 and would remain broken.

"We are living in a society where the old duopoly of the parties has broken down for good. I don't think this is a one-off accident," Clegg told the Guardian newspaper.

The former ruling Labor party had been in power for 13 years before May 6, having won three general elections on the trot, the best it had ever done. The Conservative party had ruled before Labor, from 1979 to 1997 having won four general elections in succession.

Before then, stretching back to the Second World War, there had been continuous periods of Labor rule followed by Conservative rule.

Clegg is the leader of the third party in British politics, the Liberal Democrats, who were always excluded from government, because the first-past-the-post electoral system almost always over-rewarded the election winners, and gave them a strong majority in the House of Commons.