The 'logic' of locking up terror suspects for months
Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday
Every so often, some Chief Constable or other appears in a silly hat, to tell us that terrorism is now so complicated that the police need to lock people up without charge or trial for months.
I am unlikely to get the chance myself, but the next time this happens, could those journalists present stop being overawed by uniform, remember that these characters head the most ineffectual and useless police forces in British history, and please ask them, in detail, exactly how this logic works?
I don't see it myself. It doesn't appear to me to follow. We arrest people on suspicion of wrongdoing. If they have done something wrong, it won't take 90 days to produce enough evidence to lay a charge. It's the preparation of the arrest that takes time, during which you can in any case keep suspects under such surveillance that they will not be any risk.
And, seriously, is a person who has been arrested and then released much use as a terrorist after that anyway? Is he just going to wander off back to his bomb-making cell and resume stirring the chemicals?
What does follow is this, as it has since the beginning of human freedom. If you give the state the power to lock people up without having to prove a case, the state will use that power - often in ways that were never predicted when it was given. That means that all off us are significantly less free, to speak, or write or think. Most modern tyrannies have come to power using such laws, which were drawn up for quite different purposes. Article 48 of the Weimar constitution was never supposed to help Hitler. But it did.
Which is why every serious Bill of Rights contains a clause banning this sort of arbitrary power and why the great Habeas Corpus Act was passed (in that case, to stop the Stuarts using the Channel Islands as a sort of Guantanamo Bay) .
There is no 'delicate balance' between liberty and security. You can be quite free and reasonably secure. You can be quite unfree and hopelessly unsafe. Liberty always comes first. If the police are too incompetent to find and formulate charges against real terrorists in 24 or at most 48 hours (and that, in my view, is stretching a point) then sack the officers involved and find new ones who can do the job.
If we were at war, what would we be fighting for? Why, for liberty, and one of the best safeguards of liberty is a set of stern, unalterable laws banning the government from locking us up when it feels like it.