42 Days and all that

Tomorrow in the Commons Gordon Brown will enter the battlefield to prove he is "Well 'ard" when he tries to force the 42 day detention law through Parliament.

As Bob Marshall-Andrews says in a piece in the Independent entitled This folly has provoked a unique alliance

The strong and growing opposition to detention for 42 days has created strange and wonderful bedfellows. Lord Peter Goldsmith, the former Attorney General, joins the usual Labour suspects in predicting ethnic and racial tension. (In view of his responsibility for the Iraq war this may reek of atonement, but the apostasy remains remarkable nonetheless.) Lord Falconer, devoid of his many jobs, embraces the Tory and Liberal opposition, while Liberty and the Director of Public Prosecutions drink happily from the same cup.

I join the growing list, which includes, a former Attorney General, The Lord Advocate of Scotland, Police Chiefs and MI5 of people who really don't understand why he wants this piece of legislation. The powers that are currently available are more than strong enough to handle any situation that does occur. Gordon Brown keeps insisting that there are threats existing which cannot be fully explained, you'll just have to trust him. Trust is a word no longer available to the current Labour Party, all trust has long disappeared.

Just to show how desperate the Government has added a last minute bribe to waverers, this time it's a bit less than the £2.7bn it tried on Crewe and Nantwich voters. It is the promise to pay any detainee £3,000 per day for each day over the 28 day current limit if the suspect is not charged. The coffers must be really low if their bribes are only worth a maximum of £42,000(42 is a popular number) now.

Claims of Ministers or police sexing up dossiers (Where did we hear that before?) have also been made by the Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti.

Bob Marshall-Andrews finishes off in the article with this.

Finally, when MPs vote today we must confront the most dangerous fallacy based upon a perception of public apathy – that they don't care. We must understand that the British do not articulate liberties easily any more than they define them in lists or guard them as properties or beneficence gratefully received from their masters above. For us, political and personal freedoms are not gifts or indulgences, they are defining characteristics as a nation....
....If Labour MPs of principle accede to the whip tonight they will deserve the censure that will inevitably follow led by the strangely united political forces whose opposition this folly has provoked.

I don't think many people could have put the case better.

Bob Marshall-Andrews: This folly has provoked a unique alliance - Commentators, Opinion - The Independent

Thoughts on Detention - Bob Marshall Andrews

Shockingly I listened to almost all of the speeches yesterday by Jack Straw and David Davis on the second day of the debate on the Queen's Speech.

DD was on tremendous form and laid into a number of Labour MP’s, who tried some off the cuff comments, with tremendous effect.

What was also very interesting was the performance of Bob Marshall-Andrews who laid into his own party not only on the detention limit but also on the number of law changes Labour has introduced.

On the 28 day detention limit he asked

Will the Home Secretary return to the vexed question of the number of days for which a suspect may be detained? We heard her being tested a great deal about that on the radio this morning. She is not naming a figure, but it is widely known that something like 56 days will be the Government’s preferred option. If that is right, and if the consultations that she has undertaken suggest that would be sufficient, will she say why, two years ago, Labour Members were whipped to approve a limit of 90 days? That appears to be about twice the amount that is required.
While I am on my feet, may I tell the Home Secretary that I said earlier that she was the human and attractive face of the Home Office? She was not here at the time, so I must add that I was making a comparison with her predecessors. [Laughter.]

and then

It is a pleasure and a privilege, as always, to follow the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard). The sentiments and views that he expressed I agree with entirely, and, indeed, it has meant that I can expunge totally from my speech the long passage that I had on intercept evidence, so he has done the House a considerable service.
I want to start with, and to spend some time on, the issue of imprisonment without charge or trial, and I shall begin by dealing with zealotry—not “their” zealotry but mine. I am zealous on the subject of civil liberty, which is the reason why I joined the Labour party and one of the reasons why I am still in it. I believe that civil liberty is the most important part of our political agenda, and it is our defining characteristic as a nation. It is worth repeating what the shadow Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (David Davis), said in his speech, in a slightly different way. My parents’ generation did not fight—and in some cases die—in the last war for the national health service, the repeal of section 28 or many of the other entirely laudable and worthy things mentioned during the Lord Chancellor’s speech. Indeed, if we had given in to the blandishments of Herr Hess at the beginning of the war, we would probably now have a perfectly acceptable national health service—providing, of course, that one is not Jewish, black, gay, Serbian or any of the other persecuted minorities who came to this country and received here the security and freedom for which we are famous. I echo what the right hon. Gentleman said: that this House should give up the smallest part of those liberties through our collective gritted teeth.

and then

I say to the Minister, in one simple, compendious sentence, that we do not need any more legislation to reform the criminal justice system. To put a slight gloss on that, I can say that what would be desirable would be a large and compendious Bill that had as its purpose scrapping most of the legislation that has been passed in the last 10 years in the cause of so-called reform of the criminal justice system. In the last 10 years, the Government have suffered from legislative hyperactivity syndrome in respect of criminal justice matters. I have been to the Home Office only once. I went there briefly to see a Minister who subsequently fell from grace: these things happen. I did not explore the building, but in my mind’s eye I can see a vast, probably subterranean, room—similar to that immortalised by Roald Dahl in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”—out of which are churned ever more impenetrable subsections, deliberately designed to cause dismay and chaos in the criminal justice system. The figures are interesting. In the whole of the 19th century, 34 Acts were passed that affected criminal justice. In the first half of the 20th century, there were 15. In the second half of the 20th century and up to this date, there have been 48, of which 35 have been passed by this Government. It is something of a feat to pass, in 10 years, more criminal justice Acts than were passed in the whole of the 19th century. Some 400 new offences have been created and 500 new sentences. Some of the figures that are kited are far higher, but I have removed from the count old offences that have been retreaded as new offences.

It is well worth reading the whole exchange here.

Do read the response after the speech by David Davis and Bob's answer.