Tremors felt in London

Gordon feels a little shaky

I don’t know if South Shields residents felt the earth shake last night after the biggest UK earthquake of the last twenty five years, the BBC are reporting that it was felt as far north as Newcastle, but it didn’t rouse me from my sleep!

However, there appear to have been tremors in London as members of the Labour Party make it plain to Gordon Brown and the whips that they are not happy with his plans to hold suspects without charge for up to 42 days. Perhaps the days of ministers riding roughshod over centuries of hard won civil liberties are about to be numbered, maybe after a little overnight shaking they will wake up to the fact that we have sufficient laws on the statue book already to deal with most terrorist threats.

Since the power to detain suspects was extended to 28 days in July 2006, only 11 people have been detained for longer than the previous 14-day limit.

Police and security chiefs are deeply anxious that the loss of the legislation would undermine their battle against al-Qaeda-inspired terrorism at a time of growing success.They want the 42-day power in place to deal with any future case where they would have to arrest a large number of suspects involved in multiple, complex plots.

Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, said last year: “If you can see the epidemic moving towards you then you start to take precautions before it arrives.”

Since when did the government ever tell us that the police wanted sweeping additional powers to make multiple arrests in advance of an epidemic? It worries me greatly to read some of the statements attributed to Sir Ian Blair, a policeman who so far has hardly covered himself in glory in the TWAT (The War Against Terror) - a libertarian state should be seeking to limit the powers of it’s police rather than extending them.

Perhaps he sees an epidemic of people reading the wrong material on the internet who obviously need to be detained for lengthy periods without charge, perhaps he’s happy to see houses torn apart in the fruitless search for non existent terror factories, or better still let’s just have a shoot on sight policy where we can ask questions later and still keep the job!

If we look a little dispassionately at the major cases brought before the courts where misguided men have sought to train for, recruit for, and engage in terrorist acts we will see that success has been achieved entirely within the framework of existing statutes. Our liberties and rights depend upon the protection of parliament, our liberal democracy, our common law, and centuries of traditional British fair play, it should not be within the remit of any elected government to dissipate and erode those rights at a whim.

When the Labour Party learns to involve society in a more engaging manner with it’s police force they may find that good old fashioned methods (”I saw, I heard, I witnessed, I knew”) will reap rewards. These things will happen in a society which feels free and comfortable within it’s laws, rather than threatened by them.