> The precise wording will be very important, which is why all of these pre-speech announcements tend to irritate me rather. Why not wait until he's actually said it? Ho hum.
The speech was trailed by the Labour Party, which is how the Tories knew what was in it before it took place.
This was probably a bad area to attack. Miliband has had virtually nothing to say on any foreign policy since he became leader. Now in the run-up to the election he comes out with some 20-20 hindsight on Libya. That's pretty lame. The 2011 intervention into Libya was made by a multi-state coalition, not even by Cameron.
When Gaddafi was in power many of the migrants went from Tunisia rather than Libya. Since Gaddafi's fall it is easier to travel through Libya and catch a boat from there if, say, you're from Eritrea or Somalia.
The following background may be instructive:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lampedusa#North_African_immigration
A shame that Miliband did not mention this, perhaps because most of it happened on the watch of the previous Labour governments.