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The Public Value of Security

The Public Value of Security Picture
A review of the UK's security architecture.

Lord West's abrupt ‘about turn’

Posted by Charlie Edwards at 10:37am on Thursday, 15th November 2007

Yesterday Lord West was asked whether he thought the police needed more than 28 days to question terrorist suspects.

08:20 (on the Today Programme): 'I'm not convinced we need to hold terror suspects longer than 28 days'
09:05 (having had breakfast with Gordon Brown): 'Actually, I am convinced'

Not even the PM’s spokesperson could manage a decent explanation as to why Lord West had changed his mind – so Lord West was asked to. As the Guardian reported he claimed that :

"Being a simple sailor not a politician maybe I didn't choose my words well ... Maybe my choice of words wasn't very clever,"

As the Guardian noted this was from the man who had been chief of defence intelligence, commanded three frigates, and is the holder of a distinguished service cross.

Liberty have created a useful graph to illustrate how long the UK already hold terror suspects in comparison to other countries.

On Newsnight last night Patrick Mercer (Conservative MP advising Lord West) also claimed that there was a lack of evidence.

The government suffered an embarrassing defeat in 2005 when it tried to increase the number of days in detention to 90. Why the government is choosing to go down this path, when there is no clear evidence for doing so raises numerous questions – not least - who is giving them this advice in the first place?

Comments

1
I'm not sure that it comes down to a question of 'evidence'. Evidence isn't even quite sufficient to determine policy-formation in areas that go by the name of 'evidence-based policy', and this isn't one of those anyway. This is a clash of rival modes of authority - you might even say it's a clash between different moral worlds. The whole point of legal rights is that they reduce the arbitrariness of state action; the whole point of a police infrastructure is that it extends the possibility for arbitrary state action. Effectively what New Labour is saying on this issue is "don't listen to the judges; they want to reduce the executive power of the state", to which the answer is "of course they do!".

Something has obviously got very warped in Britain if the wishes of the police and the wishes of the government have become quite so closely aligned. This isn't about evidence for-or-against extending the period, but about how legal-liberal arguments came to be quite so marginalised in the first place, in a way that they don't seem to be in the other countries in that chart.
Posted by Will Davies  at 4:17pm on Thursday, 15th November 2007
2

I guess there are three positions on this:

1.  Liberty matters most whatever the evidence

2. Liberty matters a lot but has to be balanced with security from non-state actors, and if the evidence suggests more days will make us safer then maybe we should go with that

3. Security from non-state actors is the absolute priority and if more days might be useful sometime in the future then let’s go with that

I agree with Will that it’s interesting that Liberty as a trump card barely receives a hearing on this issue.

The other interesting thing about this episode is how it reflects on how we do politics. I thought Jonathan Freedland was good, as usual, on that yesterday.

Posted by Duncan O'Leary  at 6:42pm on Thursday, 15th November 2007
3
Of course evidence is important. We must ask of those who propose reducing our liberties questions like: in how many previous cases have prosecutions been impossible because of the current time limit? Too often, people making decisions in the name of 'security' are allowed to expect us to take their word for it, give them the benefit of the doubt. In some cases, we do need to do that. But this isn't one of them. It is possible to answer these kind of questions.

But evidence always has to be balanced against the potential unintended consequences. For example, our research shows that such an increase (especially without the kind of qualifying evidence I suggest) would further damage relations between the State and British Muslim communities. Given how committed the Government says it is to engagement and building bridges with communities (because it knows that getting them on board is critical for our success in defeating terrorism), this seems like a risk not worth taking.

I share Charlie's confusion as to why the government is going for this one again. Not because of the political reality that passing this through Parliament will be difficult. But because there is no evidence that it will make any difference, apart from a negative one in further alienating precisely the people the government needs to get on board.
Posted by Rachel Briggs  at 10:37am on Monday, 19th November 2007

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