MIGRANT SMEAR ‘A NEW LOW’ FOR LABOUR

Outrage after Labour leader says crisis in Mediterranean is PM’s fault

ED Miliband was accused of plunging the General Election campaign to a ‘new low’ last night by ‘weaponising dead migrants’.

The Labour leader and his party’s spin machine prompted the most bitter row of the campaign so far by suggesting that David Cameron bore personal responsibility for drownings of refugees in the Mediterranean.

Senior Conservatives claimed Mr Miliband was effectively ‘accusing the Prime Minister of murder’ in a ‘desperate and negative’ attempt to score political points by exploiting a human tragedy.

The controversy began after Labour spin doctors issued a briefing note which said Mr Miliband would use a speech on foreign policy to say the ‘tragic scenes’ in the Mediterranean were ‘in part a direct result’ of Mr Cameron’s Libya policy.

The Labour leader later insisted he was not saying Mr Cameron had ‘blood on his hands’, but was making a ‘very important point about post-conflict planning in Libya’

‘Reflects badly on him and his party’

after the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi.

The Prime Minister said only that Mr Miliband’s remarks were ‘ill- judged’.

But a senior Tory source said: ‘A few bad polls for Labour after a poor week of campaigning and Ed Miliband accuses the PM of murder. I think we can see who is getting desperate and running a negative and personal campaign.’

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg also condemned Labour’s intervention, pointing out that Mr Miliband had backed Western military intervention in Libya.

He accused Labour of astonishing hypocrisy, given the catastrophic failure of postwar planning in its Iraq conflict.

Mr Clegg told BBC Radio 5 live: ‘I think it is quite distasteful, actually, to reduce this total human tragedy of hundreds of people dying out in the Mediterranean to a political point-scoring blame game, particularly, I have to say, from a party that of course brought us into an illegal invasion in Iraq where there was no planning at all for the aftermath.

Mr Clegg said there should be ‘a little more adherence to the facts as to who is ending up on these boats, why they are and what we can do about it to stop this terrible human tragedy’.

Former Foreign Secretary William Hague said Mr Miliband’s remarks represented ‘a new low in shallow opportunism’, given that the Labour leader had said ‘nothing’ about foreign policy for five years.

Former Tory minister Richard Benyon accused Mr Miliband of ‘weaponising dead migrants’. He said a large percentage of those fleeing North Africa ‘ come from other countries than Libya so Miliband is wrong on every level’.

And former Defence Secretary Liam Fox said: ‘ Having tried to weaponise the NHS, Miliband is trying to weaponise drowning migrants. It’s quite offensive and reflects extremely badly on both him and his party.’

Mr Miliband, speaking at the Chatham House think-tank in London, was forced to deny that he had ‘politicised’ a tragedy.

Asked if that was true, Mr Miliband replied: ‘Nonsense. No. Look, what this is about is saying very clearly to the British people that there is a huge issue we face as a country which is learning the lessons of the 2003 Iraq War.

‘The problem is that in relation to Libya we have repeated the mistake because we haven’t done the post-conflict planning.

‘I think people should just read my words and I don’t think anybody in the foreign policy community or in the wider international community would disagree with what I’ve said about the failure of post-conflict planning.’

Labour aides pointed out that Mr Miliband did raise the issue of postwar plans after supporting bombing raids in Libya in 2011.

But footage of him also emerged from the same year suggesting the new Libyan authorities should be left to get on with it.

‘This is an important moment to recognise the National Transitional Council and their role in taking Libya forward, and we’ve got to be led by them. It’s very important that Libyans determine their future,’ he said at the time.

Labour’s shadow defence secretary Vernon Coaker was forced to concede that Mr Cameron is not responsible for migrant deaths in the Mediterranean. ‘Nobody would want to say that the Prime Minister, as a human being, would want to see the terrible things we have seen in the Med,’ he said.

In a bruising interview with the BBC’s Andrew Neil, Mr Coaker also struggled to explain when Mr Miliband had raised ‘consistent concerns’ about the issue of post-conflict planning.

A senior Labour source said the party ‘did not resile from anything’ in its briefing note and accused critics of a ‘ silly, utterly spurious’ response to a ‘serious speech’.

Labour accused the Tories of ‘personal attacks’ earlier in the campaign, when Defence Secretary Michael Fallon said Mr Miliband ‘stabbed his brother in the back’ in the party’s 2010 leadership contest.

WHAT a shameless hypocrite Ed Miliband is. Last week, he feigned outrage at defence secretary Michael Fallon’s ‘demeaning’ suggestion that, having stabbed his brother in the back to grab the Labour leadership, he might do the same to Britain by failing to renew Trident.

Yesterday, however, Mr Miliband and his aides considered it perfectly acceptable to make the vile slur that David Cameron’s policies on Libya were ‘in part’ responsible for hundreds of migrants drowning in the Mediterranean. Apart f rom that being offensive nonsense, Mr Miliband’s argument – that the toppling of Colonel Gaddafi has left Libya a deeply unstable country, from which the people traffickers can launch boat journeys to the West – ignores his own full-throated support for British military action against the dictator.

And, since the fall of Gaddafi (whom Labour had so cravenly courted, culminating in the tawdry 2004 ‘deal in the desert’) he has uttered barely a word about the failed reconstruction effort.

Indeed, had Mr Cameron tried to send in British troops to restore order, Red Ed would have opposed it – just as he did military intervention in Syria.

Meanwhile, it takes some front for any Labour l eader to talk about Prime Ministers who cut and run.

The Blair administration – in which Mr Miliband served as an adviser, MP and minister – invaded Iraq on a lie, brought down Saddam Hussein and t hen abandoned the country to become the cauldron of terrorism now threatening the stability of the entire Middle East.

Today, Mr Miliband hides behind the fact he wasn’t an MP at the time of the war – but he later voted FOUR times against establishing an inquiry into this most squalid foreign policy adventure.

The truth is that, for all his sanctimony, Red Ed and his spin doctors – who, never forget, sought to ‘weaponise’ the NHS – are veterans of gutter politics.