The cabinet's fall comes shortly before the local elections, which as already scheduled are to be held on 3 March. The municipal elections can however scarcely be seen as a poll for the Lower House elections.

Many of the electorate will likely decide how to vote in about a week's time even more so than usual based on their sentiments on national politics. It is already certain however that the results of the two elections will differ markedly from one another. They reason is the Party for Freedom (PVV).

DUTCH MP Geert Wilders is due to screen his controversial anti-Koran movie in the House of Lords next month. Wilders has accepted an invitation from Lord Pearson of Rannoch to screen his film 'Fitna' on March 5.

Back in the 1990s, when I was working on a book with a congressman in Washington, D.C., I was able to walk freely in and out of the building where his offices were, and to tag along with him around the halls of Congress, without anybody ever stopping me, asking me my name, or demanding to see some identification.  A couple of years later, when a friend of mine was working on the staff of a senator in Washington, D.C., I was able to walk right into the Senate office building where he worked, and the situation was the same: nobody stopped me at the entrance, and I made my way up to the senator’s offices and let myself in, simple as that.  Once, when my friend gave me and my partner a tour of some of the more remote, unfrequented areas of the Capitol building, and took us along on the underground train that connected the Capitol with the senatorial and congressional office buildings, nobody anywhere asked for our I.D. or detained us at any point along the way to ask who we were and what we were doing there. 

Geert Wilders, the radical anti-Muslim Dutch politician, will seek to test free speech in Britain next month when he makes a second attempt to visit the House of Lords to screen a controversial film equating Islam to Nazism.

Mr Wilders has accepted an invitation from Lord Pearson of Rannoch, the leader of UKIP, and Baroness Cox, a crossbench peer, to show his anti-Islam film Fitna in the Palace of Westminster on March 5.