We have won the argument against extending the period in which suspects can be detained without charge. The only question now is whether we win today’s vote.

My guess is that it will be close, but that we will win thanks to some courageous Labour rebel MPs who are resisting the 21st century equivalent of the thumbscrew, an early morning call from Gordon Brown. A key factor will be whether the Democratic Unionist party succumb to bribes or not, but their opposition to internment in the past shows that they are more principled than some suggest.

Let’s take the Government’s case at face value. It argues that it needs to extend the period of detention for terrorist suspects from 28 to 42 days because of the increased complexity of terror cases, citing the recent increase in the number of computer files comparing the recent alleged airline bombing case in 2006 with Dhiren Bharot in 2004.

However, the period of detention would have to increase to nearly 90 days just to keep pace with this increase alone. But this point is a boomerang for the Government, because an extension of a mere two weeks would be entirely useless if each bit of evidence had to waded through and assessed as the Prime Minister implies.

Indeed, if it were necessary to read material equivalent to a third of the US Library of Congress within the proposed legal limit of 42 days, I calculate that that would require 238,095 police officers working eight-hour shifts. That is all the police officers in this country, plus 100,000 on loan from a friendly neighbour.

In fact, the tools available to the police have also increased in power so that sense can be made of large amounts of data. Yes, the police use search engines too. Nor does the Government seem in reality to take this too seriously. The Government legislated to make withholding encryption keys to data an offence in 2000, but the offence did not enter into force until 2007.

No other common law country has seen the need to do such violence to our freedoms. Canada retains a traditional 24 hour period of detention without charge. In the United States, it is two days. In Australia, it has extended to 12 days in part because of special cooling off periods between interrogations. We are already more than double the time of the highest elsewhere in common law countries even though we all face the same threats and the same technologies.

The alternatives are far preferable to a Kafkaesque extension of detention without charge. The bill allows questioning to continue after charge, and we should also allow intercept evidence as occurs in Australia and the United States.

Most important of all, the Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Ken Macdonald, has considerable flexibility to bring charges even if he feels at the time that the chances of a successful conviction are less than 50 per cent – the normal test. In fact, Sir Ken has had a 92 per cent success rate with terrorist convictions over the last two years, and is on the record as saying the new powers are unnecessary.

Detention without charge for terrorist suspects has already risen from 7 days, to 14 days, to 28 days just since 1997. The sad truth is that ministers are using this simple number as a proxy to persuade the public that they are tough on terror. In fact, such blunt instruments runs the substantial risk of alienating the communities that we need on board to fight terror.

After all, the police need intelligence and witnesses prepared to give evidence. Britain’s most senior Muslim police officer, Assistant Commissioner Tarique Ghaffour, has warned that these arbitary powers could have a counter-productive effect in the Muslim community, exactly as internment did in Northern Ireland in the seventies.

The fight against terrorism is far too important to be reduced to populist symbols which would substantially curb our hard-won freedoms. This cause is central to our party’s belief in the rule of law and in checks and balances to arbitrary power.

* Chris Huhne is the Liberal Democrats’ shadow home secretary.

Jack Straw is now in real trouble, as it is very difficult to reconcile what he told the House of Commons on 4th February in a statement on the bugging of Saddiq Khan MP at Woodhill prison with the statement of his department in reaction to the Daily Telegraph’s breathtaking scoop on Saturday. The bugging issue is going to be an enormous political story this coming week.

The Telegraph’s Saturday story said:

The full scale of a nationwide policy to bug British jails can be disclosed today after a whistleblower revealed that hundreds of lawyers and prison visitors had been secretly recorded….Lawyers, including human rights solicitors Gareth Peirce and Mudassar Arani, were allegedly “routinely bugged” by police during visits to see clients at Woodhill prison.

Why is this so important? Simply because the right of a defendant to talk in private to his or her lawyer is basic to the fairness of our adversarial courts system. If the prosecution can find out what the defence’s strategy and tactics are, the trial itself will be prejudiced and unfair.

Indeed, there is now a serious risk that any convicted person who can prove that their conversations with legal advisers were overheard may be able to overturn their convictions, which would be an enormous embarrassment to the Government in cases like that of Ian Huntley, the Soham murderer. Read more »

Please find below a video I’ve recorded explaining my vision for our public services.

Thanks for watching!

Yours sincerely,

Chris

Lib Dem Voice has asked both leadership candidates to set out their views on what should be the party’s approach to Britain’s policy on nuclear weapons. Nick Clegg’s article was published earlier today. Here’s Chris Huhne’s take…

In Britain today we face a multitude of threats to our security. We need strong defences to protect us from rogue states as well as terrorist organisations both within and outside of our borders. But these threats are fundamentally different from those which the Trident nuclear deterrent was designed to protect us from, and that is why it simply does not justify its astronomical expense.

A great deal has changed since Trident was created in 1982. This was a time when we lived under the permanent threat of a Soviet nuclear first strike. But since then we have witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. The time when we had to defend against the deployment of the enormous nuclear arsenal of the former Soviet Union has long since passed.

So where is the sense in spending an estimated £20 billion replacing a system that was built for an entirely different international climate? This enormous sum of money is bound to drain other military resources at a time when our forces are short of some of the most basic equipment such as body armour and armoured personnel carriers, not to mention housing for the families of service people.

And renewal would tie us irreversibly to dependence on the United States for the maintenance of the system for decades. We need to be less servile and more frank towards the US. In military matters in particular we need to be less tied and more free.

Faced with these facts it is clear that delaying a decision over Trident’s future is not the right policy. We need to be bold and reject a new generation of inappropriate and expensive Trident submarines.

I hope that the years leading up to 2010 will see a genuine improvement in the international environment so that we do not need a renewal of a nuclear deterrent at all. But I accept that this may well not be the case and in these circumstances I think we need to be clear about our preference for a minimum nuclear deterrent as an alternative. This deterrent should still perform the fundamental role of posing the risk of unacceptable consequences for any potential aggressor, but at a much smaller cost. And although it may be that the alternative is more vulnerable than Trident, which built to defend against an aggressive global superpower, its scale would be appropriate to the type of threat we face today.

And so rejecting Trident is not a rejection of Britain’s need to defend itself. It is a recognition that the approach to our defence that we took 25 years ago is outdated, expensive and based on an inaccurate analysis of the threats that we face today. The last five years have shown just how far our defence spending has to stretch nowadays. We have a responsibility to spend that money where it really matters.

* Chris Huhne is Lib Dem MP for Eastleigh, and a candidate to succeed Ming Campbell as the party’s leader.

Yesterday the Liberal Democrats launched radical proposals to create a zero-carbon Britain by 2050. Our paper ‘Zero Carbon Britain - Taking a Global Lead’ is the most far-reaching set of proposals on climate change ever championed by a British political party.

This is the first time any party has set out a plan to tackle carbon emissions from every part of the economy: transport, energy, housing, offices and factories.

The green tax switch is a vital part of our programme. We want to reverse the decline in green taxation under Labour. We will use the revenue from higher taxes on gas-guzzling cars and planes to cut income tax.

Our transport plans would see the development of new high-speed rail links. We would double investment in the railways over the next 5 years, paid for by tolling lorries on motorways. We would radically reduce vehicle emissions by introducing a binding - and realistic - target of zero-carbon for all new cars by 2040.

We are committed to 100 per cent carbon free renewable electricity by 2050 by providing new incentives. We will toughen up the EU emissions trading scheme, support clean energy in developing countries and back a fair global carbon treaty.

The full policy paper will be debated at Conference next month. You can read it here.

The Liberal Democrats have a track-record of leading the way on the environment. Across the country Liberal Democrats councils are delivering, pushing up recycling rates and supporting greener, cleaner communities. Our councils are four times as likely to be “green leaders” than Conservative councils, and twice as likely as Labour.

This paper is our ambitious and comprehensive programme to create a fair and low carbon economy. While the other parties may talk green, we mean green.