Do the professionals want 42-day detention?

Adam McNestrie

I wish that the 42 day controversy had lasted only 42 days. This issue, and the wider complex of civil liberty issues like 42 day pre-charge detention and ID cards of which it is a part, acts as a sort of aesthetically enticing political sideshow for the guilty affluent middle-classes who need a cause with which to placate their consciences. The battle to keep the state free from Orwellian tentacular intrusion, and to keep citizens free from the state, distracts the attention of too many people from marginalised social questions. If the intelligentsia satisfies the ache of conscience by fighting the would-be totalitarian state, then they absolve themselves of the need to look at the part which they play in constituting a society in which the life chances of children are overwhelmingly determined by the socioeconomic status of parents. This more serious, more complex, more intractable, (and therefore) less appetizing set of issues should be the primary concern of all serious-minded progressives.

I have written at greater length on this in my blog at:
http://adammcnestrie.wordpress.com/

Nicholas

But in your article you are just moving away from one aspect of New Labour's Britain to focus on another. For you one is a diversion/distraction the other more concerning. In fact these issues are part of a troubling matrix.

One of the greatest empowerments for New Labour is that opposition (with a small 'o") is so fractured and diverse, as well as frequently squabbling. As with your analysis which is scornful of the concerns about Labour's increasing authoritarianism and which stereotypes those who are concerned in a most dismissive way. I am concerned, but I do not fit any of your stereotypes and I am equally concerned about your other focus point too.

Btw it's Magna Carta rather than Magna Charta.

Smiley

Daft point about MI5. We don't arrest anyone - that's all done by the police. We have no powers of detention, and never have had. So obv we have no view on 42 days - it simply doesnt apply to us. And even if we did, the Service has a strict ethos of not interfering in party political debates. Blair used this formula "security services" to hint that we were on board. But he referred to the police and the military. MI5 has been careful never to express a view on this, in public or private.

Frank Pulley

Just imagine Richard Brunstrom armed with the power to detain suspects without charge for 42 days. I can see him now in the major operations briefing room, dressed in his Druid robes (embellished by his gorilla mask) ordering the mass arrest of every motorist in North Wales (and adjoining Counties), and their internment for 42 days, until sufficient evidence is obtained, from his speed cameras, to prove that each one of them has exceeded the 30mph speed limit during the past five years.

Sorry folks but I had to share that thought with you. :-)

http://www.abd.org.uk/brunstrom.htm

As it seems that Care in the Community cases are appointed as Chief Constables these days, then care should be taken by the Government not to entrust them with any more powers than they already have.

Frank Pulley

And another thing ... there was a time when if a police officer turned up in a magistrate's office or to a Judge in Chambers with a request to arrest or detain somebody so that they could go look for some evidence to charge him, they were inevitably ejected with the judicial boot up their jacksey and the words "fishing expedition" ringing in their ears. I assume that expression has now been expunged from the lexicons of law and the precedents of procedure?