Cameron pushes back on snooping powers

It seems David Cameron’s found a neat way of needling his coalition partners over their resistance to the so-called ‘snooper’s charter’. Last week, Nick Clegg insisted on proper pre-legislative scrutiny before any expansion of surveillance powers goes ahead, while a group of Lib Dem MPs wrote a letter in the Guardian declaring that:

‘It continues to be essential that our civil liberties are safeguarded, and that the state is not given the powers to snoop on its citizens at will.’

And Lib Dem president Tim Farron told the BBC that his party is ‘prepared to kill’ the proposals ‘if it comes down to it’. ‘If we think this is a threat to a free and liberal society,’ he said, ‘then there would be no question of unpicking them or compromising’.

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So now Cameron’s pushing back. His explicit argument is that liberals have nothing to worry about, but he’s also managed to work in the implicit attack that Clegg was all for it before the pile-on from the press, the campaign groups and his backbenchers.