42 days

Frank Pulley

Glad you made up your mind and it is the correct and only conclusion if you value the rights of the individual against the overweening State.

The only way to deal with serious crime and conspiracy (which are what, after all, terrorist plots are) is to organise well resourced pro-active intelligence and analysis, by covert surveillance; technical and painstaking eyeballing by experienced sleuths; timely interdiction when the targets are in flagrante delicto; then by scooping up as many perpetrators as can possibly be netted in one go, ripping their lives apart, getting them on the charge sheet asap and following up investigations for as long as it takes thereafter.

All the above is possible within the current law (despite the complications of the useless legislation passed in the last decade). And the Keepers of the Queen’s Peace, God Bless ‘em, should achieve all this, with minimal interference from politicians.

Gold help 'em too, given the way this rabble that calls itself the Government, has queered their pitch and diluted their traditions, powers and morale. And most of the social problems that now dominate the headlines have at their roots that baneful and derelict policy of the Gramci moles. I for one am certain that there are enough red-blooded Bobbies left to carry out that plan in the old fashioned way, if the current over-socialised and politicised top management of the Job were to be decapitated and their egregious ethos expunged from history. Get on to it you Cameroons and make it a main prop of your manifesto. Away with the pussyfooting!

London Calling

Why have a vote on 42 Days if Labour Ministers are being blackmailed into submission to save the face of Gordon Brown? This in itself should be ringing Big Bens Bells across the country, screaming fail play.

The 42-day decision should be temporarily suspended until such time that there is enough evidence to support it.

Liberty Weeps...

Kevyn Bodman

Mr.Pollard,
It's no bad thing to avoid jumping on to one side of an issue without thinking.
I'm firmly opposed to 42 days detention.
I'm firmly opposed to ID cards too but when I first lived in a country that requires them I didn't mind.
Then I thought about it.

SJH

On this topic, I am reminded of the pithy distinction between liberals and conservatives in Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities”. A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested. And a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged.

patricia

You just keep schtaying schtum.

As Danny Kay onece said, if you put your hand over your mouth you can t put your foot in it.

Jennie

42 days is the thin end of the wedge. There are plenty of regimes around the world that think they need draconian security measures to protect their country against 'enemies'. But would we want to live in them? This government, and much of the general population, are becoming paranoid. We are now living in a culture of anxiety. This means that the terrorists have already won.

Adam McNestrie

This pedants' hunt for the errant politician, driven by the media's love of expose, is destroying what little faith in our political class remains and, in doing so, poisoning the political realm. The disjuncture that now exists between the public perception of politicians as peculators, crooks, Soviet apparatchiks almost, and the banal reality of the cross-section of men and women in Parliament undermines very seriously the smooth functioning of the political system.

Undiscriminating cynicism and mistrust will be the result, and that can only hurt our political culture and do real harm to any ideology which relies on a positive conception of the state.

To read my ideas at greater length, link to my blog at:
http://adammcnestrie.wordpress.com/