LONDON: A row broke out between British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg and a senior minister from Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservatives on Thursday in a sign of growing cracks within the coalition government before an election next year.
Clegg, leader of junior coalition partner the Liberal Democrats, said relations within the two-party government had reached a “new low” after comments earlier this week by Conservative Home Secretary (Interior Minister) Theresa May.
The coalition government has been in power since an inconclusive election in 2010, but tensions between the two sides have grown as they seek to differentiate themselves to attract support ahead of the May 2015 national vote.
In a speech to the Conservatives’ annual conference on Tuesday, May said the Liberal Democrats’ decision last year to block a Communications Data bill, which would have granted far-reaching surveillance powers, had put lives at risk.
“I thought it was one of the most misleading and outrageous platform speeches I’ve heard in conference season for a very long period of time,” Clegg said during a weekly phone-in on LBC radio. “It was absolutely appalling, I mean this is a new low-point in coalition relations.”
May, tipped as a potential successor to Cameron as leader of the Conservatives, told her party’s conference that the Liberal Democrats’ position on the matter was “outrageously irresponsible”.
“Innocent people are in danger right now. If we do not act, we risk sleepwalking into a society in which crime can no longer be investigated and terrorists can plot their murderous schemes undisrupted,” she said in her speech.
May gave examples of cases, including some involving children, that she said had been dropped due to lack of communications data, which can track suspects’ location as well as who they are calling or texting. Clegg said this had not been due to the law not being passed, but to an inability to match the communications to individual mobile devices.
Clegg, whose party is languishing fourth in opinion polls and is expected to lose many of its seats in the election after being largely wiped out in European elections earlier this year, said he had written to May demanding an apology.
“To say about another politician, particularly someone you are governing with, you are putting children at risk when it is not true is a level of outrageous misinformation I have to say I have not witnessed in the four and a half years I have been in this government,” he said.
