Protesters wearing masks of Scottish National Party (SNP) leader Nicola Sturgeon hold placards outside Chatham House, a foreign affairs think-tank, where Labour leader Ed Miliband delivered a speech in London yesterday.

Guardian News and Media/London

David Cameron has criticised Ed Miliband after Labour suggested the prime minister is responsible for the deaths of migrants in the Mediterranean due to failures in formulating post-conflict plans in Libya.
As Labour accused the Conservatives of manufacturing the row, on the grounds that Miliband had not made such an allegation in a Chatham House speech, the prime minister described the claims as ill-judged.
Speaking at a Tory rally in Lincoln, the prime minister said: “Let me be clear about what Ed Miliband has said. I have learned as prime minister that it is so important in a dangerous and uncertain world that you show clarity, consistency and strength on these foreign policy issues. People will look at these ill-judged remarks and they will reach their own conclusions.”
Cameron questioned Miliband’s intervention after the Labour party suggested in a briefing note for his Chatham House speech that he would draw a direct link between the deaths in the Mediterranean and the failure to plan for the post-bombing phase in Libya. The briefing states: “He will say the refugee crisis and tragic scenes this week in the Mediterranean are in part a direct result of the failure of post-conflict planning for Libya.”
William Hague, the former foreign secretary who appeared alongside the prime minister at the Lincoln rally, was more forthright in attacking Miliband. In a sign that the Tory leadership had decided that the present and former party leaders should perform a hard cop, soft cop routine, Hague described Miliband’s remarks as opportunistic.
The former foreign secretary said: “Foreign policy is not something that you can just discover 13 days before polling day. This is the first time in five years that Ed Miliband has troubled himself to make a full-length speech on foreign policy. I have never known in that time the Labour party to set out a different policy towards Libya or the Arab world in general. He cannot come to foreign policy with some ill-judged and opportunistic remarks after five years and say: maybe this will tackle it.”
Douglas Alexander, the shadow foreign secretary, said the row was manufactured by Downing Street because Miliband had not planned to make such an allegation in a speech delivered at the foreign affairs thinktank Chatham House yesterday.
In his speech, Miliband said: “In Libya Labour supported military action to avoid the slaughter Gaddafi threatened in Benghazi. But since the action, the failure of post-conflict planning has become obvious. David Cameron was wrong to assume that Libya’s political culture and institutions could be left to evolve and transform on their own.
 “What we have seen in Libya is that when tensions over power and resource began to emerge, they simply reinforced deep-seated ideological and ethnic fault lines in the country, meaning the hopes of the revolutionary uprisings quickly began to unravel. The tragedy is that this could have been anticipated. It should have been avoided.”
Speaking on BBC Radio 4, Alexander said: “This manufactured row is designed to obscure the facts. The speech rightly highlights the loss of influence that David Cameron has overseen, and it also highlights the widely accepted failures in Libya where the international community rightly took action to prevent Benghazi being turned into a slaughterhouse and then has abjectly failed to engage in post-conflict planning. That is widely understood and recognised.”




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