AHEAD of MPs considering the Second Reading of the new Counter-Terrorism Bill in Parliament yesterday afternoon, Prime Minister Gordon Brown called for extension of pre-charge detention from 28 days to 42, at his monthly press conference.
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith was telling the media she was determined to push through Parliament the police-state measure to hold people for up to 42 days before charging them and bringing them to court.
Sir Ian Blair, the unpopular Metropolitan Police Commissioner, is the main proponent from within the state forces calling for a longer period of detention without charge. He told the parliamentary Home Affairs Select Committee that it was ‘sensible’ to extend detention to between 50 and 90 days.
Brown and Smith came out fighting yesterday to force the Counter-Terrorism Bill through the Commons, because they are encountering substantial opposition to the measure, even within the narrow confines of Parliament and the judiciary. Both the Tory and Liberal Democrat leaders say their MPs will vote with Labour dissidents against the provision for 42 days detention.
Artists like Colin Firth, Ken Loach and John le Carre signed an Amnesty International letter declaring: ‘Habeas corpus, which safeguards people from arbitrary detention by the state, is the bedrock of British justice. A convincing case that it should be eroded has not been made by the government. The case that it should remain has been made for nearly 800 years.’
Alongside this there is widespread opposition from the labour movement to this attack on democratic rights. Britain’s largest union, Unite (Amicus-T&G), a group of Labour MPs and Respect’s George Galloway are opposed to the Bill.
This is not the beginning of the Labour government’s attack on democratic rights. There has been a host of Criminal Justice and Terrorism acts put on the statute book over the past 11 years.
At the beginning of the decade, a person detained under terrorism legislation could only be held for seven days pre-charge. This was extended to 14 days by the Criminal Justice Act in 2003 and to 28 days in the Terrorism Act (2006).
In 2000, the government brought in a new Terrorism Act that re-defined ‘terrorism’ as any action that ‘creates a serious risk to the health and safety of the public, or a section of the public’. Such a broad definition could include outlawing strikes in the public sector.
Later Terrorism laws have also created new ‘crimes’ of ‘inciting’ or ‘glorifying’ terrorism. This could catch anyone supporting national liberation fighters in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, or anywhere else.
The so-called ‘war on terrorism’ does not stand up to scrutiny. Scores of people were killed by the Irish Republican campaign in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s, yet the government did not demand the historically unprecedented draconian police powers that Brown is demanding.
This has nothing to do with the personal security of citizens. More people die each year, as a result of workplace accidents caused by negligent employers, on the roads, and as elderly people who die of neglect, than die as a result of ‘terrorism’.
Bush and Brown’s ‘war on terror’ is a terror war against former colonial peoples, like the Iraqis, and the working-class in the US and Britain. The Counter-Terrorism Bill is part of the Brown regime’s ‘shock and awe’ offensive to intimidate trade unionists fighting to defend jobs, against wage cuts and against privatisation.
These police state measures are designed to terrorise opponents into submission as the Labour government drives forward its counter-revolutionary agenda on behalf of bankrupt British imperialism, which is being decimated by the world capitalist crisis.
All those within the Labour movement who say they are opposed to this latest attack on democratic rights, particularly the leaders of the seven-million-strong trade union movement organised in the Trades Union Congress, must be forced to take mass industrial and political action to stop these attacks. Leaders who refuse to fight for workers’ rights must be replaced.
If the Brown government does not scrap the Counter-Terrorism Bill it must be brought down and replaced with a workers government that will restore basic democratic rights, as part of a socialist programme.
