On Call Clegg this morning, Nick Clegg said he’d written a strongly worded letter to Theresa May demanding an apology after her claim in her speech to the Conservative Conference that the Liberal Democrats had put children at risk by vetoing the Communications Data Bill.
From the Guardian:
I thought it was one of the most misleading and outrageous platform speeches I’ve heard in conference seasons for a very long time … absolutely appalling. This is a new low point in coalition relations.
May talked about the National Crime Agency having to drop cases they were going to take to court. But, Clegg said, the facts were quite difference. The NCA dropped the cases because it could not link IP addresses to mobile devices. He said he had been urging the Home Office to address this for months.
And guess who has been dragging their feet to deal with it? The Home Office. I think I’m entitled to be a little bit aggrieved to hear a Conservative home secretary somehow claim that my party is putting children at risk when it is their inactivity which is doing just that.
He added:
I have made it very, very clear to her that I expect an apology from her for making such a false and outrageous claim … To say about another politician, particularly someone you are governing with, that you are putting children at risk, when it’s not true, is a level of outrageous misinformation that I have not witnessed in the four and a half years I’ve been in this government.
If Nick’s letter is published, we’ll put it here. May has also received a letter of complaint from Julian Huppert.
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11 Comments
Well Clegg would say that wouldn’t he
And the worst thing?
This is a simple straight forward technical solution to the problem that phone networks could be pushed into rolling out… Rather than using Carrier Grade Network Address Translation (cgNAT) they could deploy end to end IPv6 and each device would be traceable…
But that would require someone in government to pay attention to the technical community who keep point things like this will only get worse as ISPs running out of IPv4 address space start deploying cgNAT rather than transitioning to IPv6
James, that’s not quite the problem – the problem is with telcos not keeping records of which IP address is assigned to which device(s) at a a particular time. That would likely be made simpler with IPv6, but the records would still need to be kept.
cgNAT is a problem too – the most obvious one being that blocking IP addresses is the most immediate recourse a website like LDV has to abuse, and if those addresses are being shared then innocent people might find themselves blocked from Facebook, Wikipedia or important sites like Lib Dem Voice (or increasingly online-only Government services) due to the actions of strangers.
My local party put forward an IPv6 motion to Conference, but it was rejected because it was “unlikely to lead to a good political debate.” I’ve asked for details of a working group etc. to submit this to but heard nothing back, and also submitted IPv6 deployment as a brief amendment to the Crime and Justice paper motion (due to the above issue) but again heard nothing.
I do think it’d be good for the Lib Dems to have policy on this sort of thing. Yes, it’s not going to lead to big Conference debates and references back (unlike Baroness Benjamin’s misguided web censorship motion), but if we’re not looking at important issues like the fundamental capacity of the Internet, which major party is?
Why not take the opportunity to show some backbone and state that this is a coalition breaker.
That may’s comments have proven that the relationship with the Tory Party is now irretrievably broken down and it is not in the countries interest for the party to remain in coalition.
For May to make accusations against the Liberal Democrats and state that “Thirteen of these were threat-to-life cases, in which a child was judged to be at risk of imminent harm. In a three-month period, the Metropolitan Police had to drop twelve cases because communications data was not available. These cases included sexual offences and potential threat-to-life scenarios relating to a suicide threat and a kidnap.”
“The solution to this crisis of national security was the communications data bill. But two years ago, it was torpedoed by the Liberal Democrats.”
“This is outrageously irresponsible, because innocent people are in danger right now.”
Everyone knew that as the election grew closer the Tories would start to play dirty and turn on the Liberal Democrats. After all in order for them to win a majority at the next election, they need to take a lot of seats from the Libdems.
This shows the kind of dirty tricks campaign that the party is going to be facing over the next few months.
I do not understand how you can maintain relationship with your coalition partners when you have been outright accused of putting children’s lives at risk and from sexual abuse.
The Liberal democrats need to regain their identity in order to fight the 2015 election.
A few angry letters back and forth with the home office is not going to do that for you.
You can not afford to allow the Conservatives to paint the party with this kind of stain.
And you can not rely on the media to fairly report the Liberal democrats side of the argument.
The daily mail, telegraph, sun etc. will all be publishing articles that favors Theresa May’s side of the story.
I am really angry at what Theresa May said.
As a victim of Childhood sexual abuse I take it very personal when political parties try play politics and political point scoring at the expense of victims of these crimes. It is abhorrent and deeply disrespectful to those that have suffered.
I want to see cross party consensus to tackle sexual abuse.
Tougher sentencing for those that commit these most heinous acts
Early interventions to support the victims of crimes to try and limit the impact and consequences of long term mental health disorders that results in being a victim to such heinous crimes.
I do not want to see political parties using us victims as a political football to score points against one another.
We deserve better than that.
People may recall I have written extensively on LDV about these matters.
In fact I am so hurt personally by Theresa May’s comments, that I am going to write to her personally and express this to her.
I am not a Liberal Democrat, I do not do this out of support for Liberal Democrats, but out of support to my fellow man, women and children who have been victims to these crimes.
If the Tory party wants to have a discussion on sex related crimes against children, then lets have it, but lets have one that will make real changes to peoples futures, rather than a mudslinging match that is aimed at political point scoring and based on untruths.
“May talked about the National Crime Agency having to drop cases they were going to take to court”
Easily resolved bya statement from the National Crime Agency as to the reason fro dropping the cases.
Well said, Matt.
What will do Nick and Co do if May gives no apology? Will he find the backbone to tell the Tories to shove it?
I agree with Nick. May is outrageous full stop. Her Immigration people waste fortunes of our taxpayers’ money hounding people who have perfect legal right to be here while letting in thousands of illegals.
How many outrageous pledges did the speech contain?
@Matt
Well said – I agree with almost everything you say and as a Lib Dem I’m angry too at Theresa May’s disgusting lies. I agree too that as ever we as a party won’t get a fair ride from the press and I hope you do write to Theresa May yourself. My only point of disagreement with you is the suggestion that we as a party need to be out of Coalition in order to have our own identity. By being in Coalition we’re not remotely trying to pretend that we like and agree with the Tories but that despite our differences we’re able to work in the national interest and provide strong and stable government, promoting our own ideas where we can and stopping some of the more loony Tory ideas where we have to. In the long run we have to do this in order to bury the idea that the Lib Dems are unable to govern, unable to take tough decisions, that Coalition can’t work etc etc – all the things that killed our vote in the past. That the Tories are now getting angry and showing their true colours shows that to some extent at least this is working.
That the Tories have played dirty is nothing new is it? What about their campaign against changing the electoral system to AV, when they rubbished our leader in a very dirty manner. It was 2012 after the budget in which we did not make it clear enough where we disagreed with Tory policies that we should have been more vocal in airing publicly our differences with the Tories, even at risk of the coalition. Too late now ? There only a few months to convince the public of what we really stand for.