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I'm confused


Millions of words have been written about this terror bill which is making its way through Parliament, and besides the obvious

  • The Police association might well campaign for 90/180/360 days to question suspects without charge.
  • Civil liberties groups can campaign to reduce it to 48/24/2 hours.
  • It is Parliaments job to weigh up competing interests and make a balanced judgement
I'm at a bit of a loss over this whole episode. It doesn't make sense to me.

90 days is an obscene amount of time to hold someone without charge and if it was even to begin to warrant serious discussion then there would have to be a hell of a strong case made by someone. 90 hard drives? 8 Olympic sized swimming pools? 5 gold rings? WTF? 28 days is too long on the kind of argument put forward as far as I can see. What on earth are they and the Security Service spending their money on, Commodore 64's? I don't think so.

So, the Prime Minister isn't a stupid man. I don't buy the he thinks he's invincible line. He knew it wasn't going to be close enough to warrant bringing back Straw & Brown from their travels. Like with Iraq before, I now want to know the alterior motive for this charade. I'm sure it is a good one, they usually are, but I'm cynical.

Specifically,

  • Why the Sun campaign?
  • Why did the PM take control?
  • Why did they call back Brown & Straw?
    Supplemental: Did they?
Up until two days ago much of the analysis was saying failure would bring down Blair. Where are the calls for resignation? (Apart from Clare Short) All I'm hearing are people saying, "We don't want to change the leader, we just want the leader to change." The Sun campaign just built Tony's legitimacy, seperate from the party.
BBC: Chancellor Gordon Brown said Mr Blair had his "full support"

In short, "the public" like Tony and believe he's doing a good job. Labour rebels want Tony to like them, but know full well they don't have "public support". Gordon Brown (& Jack Straw) had to come back to be seen to be supporting Blair and not off on some foreign adventure. TB has renewed his personal mandate to lead.

An amazing thing to watch.

Posted by Paul in UK Politics at November 11, 2005 06:36 AM | 0 Comments