The press today have written Tony Blair’s political obituary. After last night’s defeat over the Terrorism Bill’s proposal to detain terror suspects for up to 90 days without charge, the universal view is that Blair now has no chance of getting through his proposals to open up health provision to the private sector and usher in education reforms involving (modest) independence for state schools, both of which are anathema to his party’s left wing. Maybe so. Blair’s famed political brilliance is equally widely said to have deserted him, and his bullish insistence on sticking to 90 days and avoiding the compromise being urged on him by other in his party is being held up as evidence that he has lost the political plot, destroyed his authority over his party and is now so weakened he will have to stand down.

The fact remains, however, that Blair was correct. Blair was right to say that the police had made a compelling case of 90 days. And he was right to say, after the defeat, that the vote had been grossly irresponsible. As I said on last night’s BBC Radio Four Moral Maze it was an act of moral imbecility which revealed that the British political class is still in a state of deep denial over the changed nature and full extent of the threat we now face.

Those who say the problem is that the police show a high level of incompetence in using – or not using – laws that currently exist undoubtedly make an important point. But true as that may be, it does not address the argument the police have made that current provisions under terror law do not enable them to protect the public against a changed and unprecedented terrorist risk. They may be – indeed have been – faced with situations where they have good reason to suspect someone of being part of a human bomb plot but cannot assemble in time the evidence to sustain any charge because of the time it takes to collect and decipher encrypted information or computer programmes in many languages for which they have to find translators. To take a hypothetical example, if they arrested someone on suspicion of plotting such an atrocity and discovered he had shaved all his body hair – a common rite of preparation for a human bomb – but could find no information within two weeks (or even 28 days) to pin on him because that would require communicating with foreign governments, tracking down computers, cracking their encryption codes and all the rest of it, they would have to let him go.

The counter-argument put up last night by Michael Mansfield QC that in such circumstances a suspect could be held under a control order at home is inadequate. Home detention a) is not totally secure; b) requires resources which the police and security service do not necessarily possess; c) is itself a denial of liberty which the likes of Mansfield would undoubtedly be the first to challenge as yet another breach of human rights.

Personally, I think Lord Carlile got it right. He’s the independent watchdog who produced a report recently which said that he had been persuaded that the police did need a 90-day maximum for interrogating suspects but that the safeguard of a judge to whom the police would have to report every week was inadequate. Instead he thought that a judge should supervise the interrogation. This continental-style idea, although foreign to English legal tradition, seems to me to be a good way of reconciling the demands of security with the need to preserve judicial safeguards appropriate to a democracy.

The government missed a trick by refusing to adopt the Carlile proposal and has paid a stiff penalty. To be more precise, the country has paid a penalty because it has now been left patently undefended in the face of a lethal threat as a result of an utterly irresponsible spasm by MPs. The politics of this were sickening, and none more so than on the Conservative benches. The Tory leader Michael Howard showed he was prepared to sacrifice the security of the country for crass political opportunism in leading his party to oppose the 90-day proposal and then call for the Prime Minister’s resignation.

We now have the astonishing political situation in Britain where a Labour Prime Minister represents the country’s overwhelming desire for appropriate laws to protect itself -- and as a result loses his authority in Parliament as a result of an alliance between the left of the Labour party and the Conservatives on the basis that such necessary security measures to prevent massive loss of life represent a 'police state'!

What on earth are the Conservatives for any more if they can’t even defend the country’s security because they now line up with the left in assuming that the police are a conspiracy against personal freedom, and refuse to acknowledge the implications of the changed nature of the terrorist threat? The Tories have now lined up with those claiming fatuously that the 90-day provision would have introduced ‘internment ’or a ‘police state’ -- once the deluded shriek of those confined to the far-left. Thus does Britain now depict sensible provisions to defend itself.

The importance of this defeat cannot be over-estimated. Its significance can be gauged by the reaction of Britain’s enemies. Carol Gould, who subjected herself to the grim experience of watching the BBC’s coverage, captures the shocking depths of this country’s lethal drive to self-destruction:

Even more significantly, those outside Britain will not know how the BBC handled today's tragic vote. The barely-disguised glee amongst television anchors and commentators was breathtaking even by West-bashing BBC standards. After the vote, the BBC wheeled in an endless stream of Muslim leaders, mosque activists, human rights activists and ultra-Left-wing MPs (in the UK, ultra-Left means to the Left of Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky), but not one ordinary Briton was interviewed. Not one MP who voted for the Bill was interviewed.

The dreaded "Sir" Iqbal Sacranie – who was an activist years ago in the Fatwa against Rushdie and publicly refuses to criticize suicide bombers and who wants Holocaust Memorial Day removed – was on air for what seemed an eternity and his joy could barely be contained. The BBC set up a mobile studio outside the main mosque in Bradford and kept repeatedly interviewing two young men who were clearly ecstatic that the anti-Terror Bill had been defeated. On various street corners, microphones were thrust in front of Muslims who were numb with happiness that the Bill – and "Bush's puppy dog Blair" – had been quashed.

Despite my ability to change minds and inform the public as a journalist, I feel powerless and helpless as a British voter. Seventy percent of us – registered British voters – wanted the House of Commons to approve the Bill and lock up suspected terrorists in our midst for a minimum of ninety days, but our elected representatives chose to cave in to the relentless browbeating we receive every day from Islamic radicals who are given endless media exposure, not to mention my fellow journalists who write daily diatribes against the United States, Israel and Blair’s attachment to the American war on terror.

One BBC reporter breathlessly expressed her view that this vote "will be a supreme embarrassment" for Prime Minister Blair. How is it embarrassing, if the majority of British voters, watching a bloody Intifada exploding in the rest of Europe and having seen fifty-two of our own blown up on July 7th, want the 90 day rule adopted? The BBC and the Left-wing media, who now dominate Great Britain, inform us that Blair is ‘embarrassed’ when in fact the general public is dismayed and alarmed that he could be defeated on such a pragmatic position. The fact that every Muslim activist interviewed on television tonight is filled with happiness indicates that the United Kingdom is headed for a sorry future.

The pathological and irrational hatred of Blair’s support for America and the war in Iraq appears to have driven this country literally mad.

Posted by melanie at October 11, 2005