Why 42 days?

Kevyn Bodman

Jacqui Smith still can't give reasons for 42 days,35 days or any other number. This is a seedy attempt to get something else into the news, an attempt to look strong in the face of the 'terror' threat and to get away from focus on Labour party incompetence and sleaze. 42 days is less than 56/58 days so maybe the Home Secretary thinks that there are some dunderheads in the Parliamentary Labour Party who think that it is a sensible compromise or an indication that Ms. Smith has listened to reasoned arguments. She hasn't listened to such arguments, of course. She's just trying to see how much she can get away with. I hope thoughtful MPs will reject this proposal. Extending the detention-without-charge limit will not make us safer.

Simon

We await Matt's comments given his previous enthusiasm for turning the country into a police state!

Tiberius

Why 42 days? Well, it's somewhere in that comfortable middle bit between 28 and that really scary number 90, which is nearly a 100!

Henry Rogers

Why 42? See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Answer_to_Life,_the_Universe,_and_Everything

Max Kaye

Why 42 days? Douglas Adams gave the answer.

MTK

It is also the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything.

Travis Bickle

Don't bother asking Gordon, they never tell him anything.

David Lindsay

The deplorable proposal to hold people for six weeks without so much as charging them with anything probably won't get through, but then it isn't really supposed to. The point of it is to make the Tories vote against it, so that they can be presented all over the Sun and the Daily Mail as "soft on terrorism". There won't now be a General Election until June 2010, so expect a very great deal more of this sort of thing. David Cameron is no longer up against Tony Blair, like him barely a politician at all but with a sense of class duty to govern the lower orders. He is up against a political fighter of the other old school. He'll never last, and David Davis or whoever will be facing a real fight when the Election comes.

Cogito Ergosum

The claim is that longer detention is necessary to allow encrypted computer material to be deciphered. (Obviously the terrorists believe in security, unlike the Treasury and HMRC.)

But there is computer legislation that allows people to be arrested, found guilty, and tried for failing to disclose encryption keys. So they can be incarcerated without any new laws.

Henry Rogers

Poor old (or young) David Linday, he just doesn't get it. The idea of Brown as 'a political fighter of the old school' has to be slightly comic. Unstable thuggish buffoon is beginning to seem more like it, and not much 'moral compass' either. Cameron is safe unless Brown gets pushed out by Labour, which might be quite a smart move. They could do worse than choose Benn. The Tories could easily cock things up over the next two years though, that's what human beings are pretty good at.

David Lindsay

Just wait and see, Henry. Just wait and see. An old friend who moves in the very highest Labour circles told me only today that, what with no prospect of an Election before June 2010, there are plans afoot to introduce PR "experimentally" in certain parts of the country. Guess which ones.

Henry Rogers

David, Doubtless the organization of that will be by the gifted team who cocked up the last Scottish elections! Could be quite funny to watch it all unravel.