The disquiet with the Liberal democrat party over the coalition with the Conservative party led by Prime Minister David Cameron was thrust into open when former LibDem leader Charles Kennedy voiced his opposition to the deal.
Deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, who has convened a meeting of his LibDem party in Birmingham on Sunday, is meeting his party members to explain his decision to form a coalition with the Tories. The LibDem activists will debate the coalition deal at the meeting. Mr Kennedy, in an article in the Observer newspaper, said he had abstained from voting on the coalition deal on last Saturday when it was put in front of party MPs and peers and the party executive for approval. “It is hardly surprising that, for some of us at least, our political compass currently feels confused. And that really encapsulates the reasons why I felt personally unable to vote for this outcome when it was presented to Liberal Democrat parliamentarians,” he said. In a remarkable revelation, Lord Paddy Ashdown, former LibDem leader, claimed that former foreign secretary David Miliband could have helped the LibDem-Labour coalition if he had made his support clear.
“I think there was a failure of action by those who could have staked out very clearly this where they wanted to go. By this, I mean David Miliband,” Lord Ashdown said in an interview.
“There was a point, and I will say to you that not directly but indirectly I know that this point was made to him: that he ought to come out clearly and say if he was leader of the Labour Party he would back this. But I fear greatly that he decided that for reasons of a leadership election, he wouldn’t. I think that’s true of others, too.” He also blamed the Labour party’s “knuckle-dragging Neanderthals” — John Prescott, David Blunkett, John Reid and Jack Straw — of killing off any chances of a “progressive alliance” between LibDems and the Labour party.