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28 days without charge is still too long but 90 would have been obscene.
Apparently the police need this time to "deal with complex computer data" etc. They had an American security specialist on the channel 4 news last night saying that he thought the real problem was lack of specialist police computer people and resources which is why it took so long... I can believe that.
Anyway, you can't lock people up for 3 months (equivalent of a 6 month jail term which is a relatively severe punishment) when you don't even have enough evidence against them to charge them with a crime. It's wrong. The Lords wouldn't have passed 90 days anyway but well done the House of Commons.
We might be facing a unique and new security problem with these new terror attacks, as Mr Blair suggested, but we shouldn't let them erode our freedom, not even by allowing measures designed to prevent the terrorists.
So far they've arrested something like 900+ suspects under the new terror laws and only about 1/4 have been charged. The best point I saw made last night was by someone (might have even been Michael Howard actually...) saying that if you lock up innoccent people for 90 days from problem communities they themselves will become embittered and provoke even more bad feeling amongst the communities they come from, at a time we need to be building bridges with those communities.
Our proposed system has loads of biometrics stuff and associated database costs that push the price per person to about £100 (which we have to pay to get the card) and that makes the total cost about 50 billion or something.
Apparently the police need this time to "deal with complex computer data" etc. They had an American security specialist on the channel 4 news last night saying that he thought the real problem was lack of specialist police computer people and resources which is why it took so long... I can believe that.
Anyway, you can't lock people up for 3 months (equivalent of a 6 month jail term which is a relatively severe punishment) when you don't even have enough evidence against them to charge them with a crime. It's wrong. The Lords wouldn't have passed 90 days anyway but well done the House of Commons.
We might be facing a unique and new security problem with these new terror attacks, as Mr Blair suggested, but we shouldn't let them erode our freedom, not even by allowing measures designed to prevent the terrorists.
So far they've arrested something like 900+ suspects under the new terror laws and only about 1/4 have been charged. The best point I saw made last night was by someone (might have even been Michael Howard actually...) saying that if you lock up innoccent people for 90 days from problem communities they themselves will become embittered and provoke even more bad feeling amongst the communities they come from, at a time we need to be building bridges with those communities.
Originally posted by alva
Hmm, imo it saves quite a lot of money.
shall we bash Bush errr Blair from here on, we did the ID thing a couple of times already. 
Hmm, imo it saves quite a lot of money.
shall we bash
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