The death of Magna Carta has been much exaggerated

Meanwhile, on the 42 days’ detention limit issue itself the vote was won but the argument goes on. The government’s hair’s breadth victory last night, achieved through some epic and unsavoury horse-trading, may have staved off immediate political disaster for Gordon Brown’s premiership, but there is a widespread belief that the House of Lords will vote the measure down. The argument this morning on the Today programme (0810) between Lords Carlile (for) and Goldsmith (against) illustrated what is to come. Goldsmith said in effect that destroying our fundamental values, which he thinks the 42-day limit does, undermines our fight against the Islamists who are attacking those values and that we can only achieve victory against them if we show them that our values are better. Carlile said that the ultimate civil liberty was national security, and that the 42-day limit was necessary to have law in place to cope with ‘entirely predictable and terrible’ future terrorist attacks on this country. The worst thing that could happen, he said was for Parliament to be forced to legislate in panic in the face of a terrorist plot which the police couldn’t crack in time to protect the public from mass murder.

The problem that the Carlile side is up against is that opponents of this measure insist that it will only be when the police are thus thwarted that they will be prepared to admit there is a need to extend the detention time limit. But by definition, by that time we may have had mass carnage on the streets of Britain. This radical distrust is fuelled by a number of things. The first is the lethal and false belief that ‘we were taken to war on a lie’ that this country was under threat from Iraq, and that this lie was sustained by a politicised security community spreading ‘sexed-up’ falsehoods at the behest of government. As a result, people won’t now believe anything that security establishment says about the threat facing this country.

The second is the manifest incompetence of the police and security establishment, and the reluctance to give it any more and draconian laws to play with while it is failing to make proper use of the ones we already have. The third is the fear of ‘surveillance creep’, illustrated by the disturbing fact that local councils are making illegitimate use of anti-terrorist laws to snoop on citizens for a range of trivial or even spurious misdemeanours. I happen to share the last two concerns. But the unhappy fact is that our security and political establishment is the only one we’ve got; and there’s a grave danger that, in our understandable concern over its incompetence or worse, we will leave ourselves unprotected by emasculating its power to protect us.

People also seem to think that, just because they have not yet come to pass, the predictions being made by the Carlile camp are being plucked out of thin air. On the contrary – they are the sober judgment of security professionals, based on the changed nature of the terrorist plots they are tracking, that the current detention limit is inadequate to cope with what their experience tells them will be the inevitable development of what has already happened. That point was made just before the debate by the former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Lord Stevens. He told the Telegraph that detectives had come close to exhausting the 28-day limit on interrogating terror suspects on at least six occasions. The Times meanwhile reported that two former senior MI6 spooks, Baronesses Ramsay and Park, were vehemently in favour of the 42-day limit:

Lady Ramsay, a former member of the Intelligence and Security Committee, said: ‘There is no question there will be more terrorist attacks in future, it’s not a question of if, it’s when. Voting against 42 days increases the odds in favour of the terrorists.’

Lady Park, 86, was one of MI6’s most senior controllers for more than 30 years, with postings in Moscow, Hanoi and the Congo. She said that MPs should recognise that prosecutors needed longer to sift the evidence. ‘These are global inquiries . . . there is an enormous amount of material to go through . . . there is no way of making it go faster.’ Lady Ramsay, 71, was on the MI6 Iraq desk during the Gulf War. She said: ‘People who don’t know the operational realities are being arrogant to think they know better than the people who do.’

I am also struck by the hysteria of those who argue that the 42-day limit sounds the death-knell of ye olde Britishe ryghte never to be locked up without charge. (And well done to Conservativehome, by the way, for having the guts to stand against this hysteria and much conservative opinion by coming out in support of the 42-day limit before yesterday’s vote, which can hardly have endeared it to the Tory party). On that basis, liberty in Britain died when detention of terrorism suspects before charge was extended to 28 days, and it died before that when it was extended to 14 days, and it died before that when it was set at seven days. Moreover, we never heard this hysteria when internment was introduced in Northern Ireland, which unlike the 42 days proposal was without limit of time and not subject to the judicial safeguards involved here. For sure, internment turned into a political (and counter-terrorist) disaster; but that’s a different argument altogether. Neither with internment nor the Diplock courts, which did without juries, were politicians flouncing out of Parliament on the basis that we were turning into some kind of police state. Those who voiced such objections were considered marginal figures.

The air is now thick with cries that we have abolished our ancient liberties of Habeas Corpus and Magna Carta – as if these specifically prohibit detaining a suspect before charge. What nonsense. Habeas Corpus merely means a prisoner has to be brought before a court so that it can examine his detention; it is a procedural device to examine whether that detention is lawful by virtue of being in accordance with an Act of Parliament. As Magna Carta says in Article 39:

No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him nor will we send upon him except upon the lawful judgement of his peers or the law of the land.

So what’s the problem?