9 vote margin
The government have won the House of Commons vote on extending the possible detention of terrorist suspects to 42 days by 315 votes to 306. That’s a margin of just 9 votes. No wonder the DUP were in demand today. I didn’t catch what happened to Bill Cash’s amendment. Adds Relating to Bill Cash’s amendment
Veteran former Labour MP Tony Benn said: “I never thought I would be in the House of Commons on the day Magna Carta was repealed”.
And Michael White notes an uncomfortable comparison for Gordon Brown. Update The DUP deny their votes were bought. But as Mick suggests at Brassneck, nevermind the moolah, there are other considerations in play. Namely threats over the devolution of policing and justice powers.
Hermon voted Yes too
She voted yes the last time, so no surprise. Sylvia is a New Labour hack and useless on civil liberties issues.
The right of my wife and family, and millions like us, safely to use the London underground and British airports is superior to the rights of a few individuals to exploit present law.
And so is Malcolm Redfellow. If a Tory government was bringing this legislation in, you’d be screaming from the rooftops. I use airports too, and I used London Underground daily for many years, and I have no less desire not to be blown up than your wife and children.
As no-one wants to be blown up, and no-one in remotely mainstream political discourse supports Al-Qa’eda and its affiliates, this is a complete straw man of an argument. I do not believe this legislation will make me one jot safer and I do not think it is the role of a mature democracy to accede to every demand of the police and the interior ministry.
Some great speeches from the likes of Dianne Abbott and Mark Durkan today. The DUP sold our liberties for 30 pieces of silver. I am most disappointed at Compass, and Jon Cruddas in particular. A disgraceful state of affairs.
My sequel to 1984 is coming out soon !
So yet again the sparsely populated piece of rock to the West represented by provisional government is the buyable pendulum in UK politics. It’s like the 80′s again. This will get interesting if the the recent outbursts of those associated with the pendulum enter the mainstream media.
nineteensixtyseven
You wont be saying that when you dont have to pay for your water.
The old Orange Card played again? However it wont make a royal flush this time for the dealers.
However this is only prolonging Brown’s unpopularity among the English electorate. He and Labour will be gone in the next election and Cameron and the Tories will take the reigns. A plummy accented English public schoolboy at the helm will not go down too well with the Scottish Nationalists.
truth and justice, having spent a considerble amount of time in Africa, i can tell you this, i have no qualms about paying for water tapped directly into my home and filtered at that.
I think we can safely say the abortion act won’t be extended anytime soon. Thanks for using my body as a pawn in your agenda, Gordon.
You wont be saying that when you dont have to pay for your water.
False dichotomy. If Sinn Fein’s manifesto was to be believed I wouldn’t have had to have had my liberties used as a bargaining chip in order to get free water.
It’s like the 80’s again.
No, it’s like the mid 1990s again. In the ’80s Thatcher had impregnable majorities. Unfortunately.
A plummy accented English public schoolboy at the helm will not go down too well with the Scottish Nationalists.
The plummy Tories are working hand in glove with the SNP government at Holyrood and Salmond and Cameron get on famously. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.
Both Jim Callaghan and John Major cut deals with unionists to stay in power. Maggie signed the Hillsborough Agreement.
Brown likes to see himself as being in the same mould of Thatcher (i.e. the iron man) but we all know that’s ridiculous. New Labour are finished. Might as well bring on the Tories.
“I suspect SBCR is largely correct. More money for the collective Norn Iron begging bowl AND the DUPs sectarian agenda advanced at the expense of nationalists.”
A loaded statement if ever I heard one. Just because something isn’t in Nationalists interests does not make it sectarian.
Comrade Stalin @ 10:50 PM:
Your argument there could be used against any length of arrest, detention and questioning. Where do you draw the line? At 42 seconds? At 42 minutes? At 42 hours? Why is one time-limit a blow against individual liberty and another reasonable? Unless one is arguing for partisan reasons, of course.
Recognise the practicalities:
1. There are so many safeguards built into the proposed legislation that it enhances the constraints, legal and political, on the securocrats.
2. At one stage 28 days was denounced as a creature worthy of Dzerzhinsky or Beria at their worst (remember them?). Overnight, those milquetoast LibDems decided and pronounced it to be “justifiable”. Now it is the norm of political debate. Explain what happened (apart from a couple of uncomfortable experiences and a few casualties among the ordinary citizenry). Discuss, too, what is a reasonable length of time for the intelligence services to be allowed to requisition mobile phone records, to investigate the hundred or more computers in a dozen or more internet cafés that might have been used by a suicide bombing gang (they’re not daft enough to do it conveniently on the home Dell, you know). Or should that degree of investigation be banned as gross intrusion of personal freedoms?
3. If it comes to defending “democratic liberties”, where else does one draw the line? For example, what about my rights to use a litter bin on the London underground? My right to board an aircraft without a body search? My right to enter Green Park via Downing Street? My right to enter museums and other places without opening and depositing my bags? My right to enter a school or college without passing security and, in many cases, electronic screening for weapons? My right to own a gun? Are all those not gross intrusions on my personal liberty? Yet, all of these are “freedoms” that have been surrendered to terrorism and violence: so which could now be rewstored without endangering public and personal safety?
Be honest: there’s a gross amount of froth, fraud and partisan fossicking about 42 days. Oh, and don’t insult by pleading Magna Carta rights: the line about “freemen” was down in number 39 of the 60-odd clauses, almost an afterthought — the document did nothing for the masses of serfs, and specifically disfranchised women.
And, yes, I fully admit to having a personal gripe here. I have shared a life and a bed with the same lady, of good Ulster stock, for over 40 years. I still recall that day I got her home with severe whiplash injuries caused by a terror bomb. Except she didn’t get those injuries in benighted Belfast: she had been in Euston Station at 1.10 pm on 10 September 1973. That changed my unbridled libertarianism a bit. And now the bastards don’t even give a three-minute warning.
Sammy Morse: “As no-one wants to be blown up, and no-one in remotely mainstream political discourse supports Al-Qa’eda and its affiliates, this is a complete straw man of an argument.”
As, historically, at least, what, eight fellows *did* want to blow themselves up, with at least four of these incendiaries succeeding to doing so, as an argument it may be somewhat rarified and limited, but it is hardly a straw-man.
I do find it ironic that when last I commented on the difference between subjects and citizens is that in the UK, one’s rights are defined merely by whatever Parliment happens to say they are.
Told ya so.
Malcolm Redfellow,
I know its somewhat improbable, but it would have been more effective to secure the UK by withdrawing its troops from Iraq, Afghanistan and parts of Africa, and ending foreign policy subservience to the United States. This measure is an illustration of civil liberties paying for foolish and elite-serving foreign policy decisions. And there is no guarantee, to say the least, that it will improve security in light of the alienation it already represents. Your argumentation is rational, but evidence has not been provided to illustrate a specific need.
Also, your representation of police work seems a little unrealistic. It’s not like police arrest a ‘suitable’, open a new file and start asking questions. The intelligence and investigative process is clearly at an advanced stage when arrests are made in relation to any terror plot. And they should be, to safeguard the simple truth of habeus corpus. A value imposed on the police and army in the public interest.
We’re all agreed that more time to question may provide precious information. But 28 days, what you call the “norm”, is a hell of a long time, as those who have experienced it would tell you. Indeed, many of those arrested have spent months, even years, in torture prisons in other countries. Let’s just say the value of the information risks decreasing over time.
Aside, this could be interesting from the Unionist point of view. This vote has the British questioning why their will is being over-ruled by some Irishmen. Surely not what protecting the Union is about? Damaged in the eyes of the population at large, damaged in the eyes of the next government.
Damian O’Loan : ,i>This vote has the British questioning why their will is being over-ruled by some Irishmen.
…or Scotsmen, or Welshmen, or Englishmen. If it’s meant to be a big deal, how did the 4 constituent parts of the UK vote, considered separately? Were the Scots Nats done over by the DUP, were English Tories beaten by Welsh Labour?
Damian O’Loan @ 08:23 AM:
I’m not unsympathetic to your approach, even if it does smack of “If I wanted to get there, I wouldn’t start from here.”
I’m still unclear, from anyone, what is an “acceptable” time-limit for detention. My “norm” of 28 days was plucked out of the air as the apparent consensus of Tories, LibDems and others. In the Tony Benn line (noted in the header to this thread), any period of detention and questioning would be contrary to cap. 39 of Magna Carta:
Any “liberalism” there, of course, was neatly negated by the previous cap. 34, which gave a feudal lord total control over his tenants, a licence to which Benn and co. give little recognition.
As far as the 42 day period is concerned, I for one find the final internment of the maxims of the Magna Carta a little bit sad. Even during the Civil War the right of Habeas Corpus was held dear. Law and justice was never about the “aquisition of evidence”. One can historically bounce the attacks on habeas down the ages and find in the main they were unsucessful simply because they were unjust. There is a very fine line between detention, internment and Guantanamo Bay…… Any student of law knows the purpose of arrest and will be familiar with the concept of detention as an “ongoing arrest”, and within reason detention is an important tool for “the full and proper investigation of an offence”, but when detention becomes preventative of speculative then there is danger. What for instance happens after 41 days when the suspicion of guilt (S110 SOCAP) evaporates into the ether and innocence is left behind. No-one appreciates the “technical reasons” for having a 42 day rule, no-one is as unconvinced either. Having been within the tent pwiddling out, that is what is known as a smoke screen and cop out. Why, oh why do I think the clarion call of this new power will be “round up the usual suspects”. Anyway
“One of the proposals of the ID card is to use it when voting, are you saying if it was introduced to all of the UK, you would not have one and thus miss the chance to maybe one day vote NI out of the UK”
You don’t seriously think it’s going to be introduced to the “whole” of the UK, do you? Why would Gordy and his government suddenly start treating this place like England, Scotland and Wales when he has studiously avoided it in his attempts to create an all-embracing Britishness? Besides, I work in the electoral process during election time and when I can be bothered to vote, I haven’t required any form of ID save for my appointment letter.
“the DUP may have extracted measures from the government that will benefit all sections of NI opinion”
As a catholic, I sorely doubt that. Their history since their creation would tend to make this highly unlikely.
Sorry Bonar but I see nothing to get rankled about unless you’re the sort of person who needs a plastic card with a photo on it to confirm your nationality. I’m quite comfortable without one.
None.
Just one thought.
What do the Unionist population of Northern Ireland owe the Conservative Party exactly? This is the party that prorugued Stormont, that imposed the Anglo-Irish Agreement over our heads and brought in the Downing Street Declaration.
The self-serving cynicism of the Conservatives defies belief. The party of law and order lining up to denounce 10 MPs (DUP + Hermon), everyone of whom has lived under threats against their life from terrorists because they vote for strong law and order measures is frankly unbelievable.
Malcolm Redfellow,
“it does smack of “If I wanted to get there, I wouldn’t start from here.” ”
Given that’s now been well over a century that Britain has had a military and ‘diplomatic’ presence in both Iraq and Afghanistan, that’s long been an argument used to defend, intentionally or otherwise, that illegimitate presence.
What distinguishes this phase, perhaps, is that measures are being put in place to deny the same rights as in those two countries, and others, within and from citizens of the UK. Such measures have been a feature of anti-terrorism legislation since before 9/11. Whether this government uses them is not the question.
As to an acceptable length of detention, my uninformed guess would be less then a week, certainly. But being so uninformed, I’d defer to evidence to the contrary.
Reader,
That wasn’t my view. My view was that comments like these:
“You useless fucking Ulster cunts.
When the Jocks declare independence they can fucking have you lot, you useless wankers.”
“I say we take their british passports off them, the fucking troublemaking turncoats.”
“How can the security from terror, or otherwise, of the United Kingdom, come down to a flat £200M bribe to people who know how to leverage terror to their best advantage”
not mine, all quoted from Guido, show that the DUP, among other things, haven’t done unionism any favours here.
Damian
Depsite the fact that over 60% of the UK Population support the legislation?
Don’t confuse a lot of Tory whinging as representing public opinion.
Let’s see 2 years down the line if Cameron repeals this legislation…..