The Week in Westminster, BBC Radio 4’s Saturday look back at what happened in politics this week is on right now and the subject at hand is Gordon Brown’s plan to extend the period a terror suspect can be held without charge. Member of Parliament Frank Fields is asked to comment and he made the following comparison, allegedly something a constitutent said to him, whose husband lost his legs in one of the London bombings. Nobody or nothing can give this man his legs back, but somebody who has spent time in prison as a wrongly accused suspect can be adequately compensated for this, so therefore extending the period somebody can be jailed without trial as a terror suspect is not a big deal.
Even when taking this argument at face value, there’s a huge flaw. The idea is that you can compensate for time spent in jail, but compensation cannot bring back legs lost in a terror bombing. However, no compensation will bring back the time spent in jail while innocent either, nor the accompanying lost of reputation.
Apart from that, Field’s whole atrgument is nothing more than hiding behind the righteous halo of innocent victimhood; he’s taking his constituent’s torn off legs and appropriating them for himself, in order to push through his agenda of extending the period you can be held as a terror suspect, without being charged. The one has nothing to do with the other. Locking up innocent people without charge will not prevent equally innocent people from losing their legs in terrorist bombings and guilty people can be charged. The only thing this extension will do is make for even more lazy police work, as they can just throw everybody who looks suspicious in jail and only then start looking for evidence.
Frank Field’s whole argument is based on a noxious kind of stupidity, one that wants us to believe that the price of combatting terrorism is that sometimes the wrong people will be locked up without a charge, that if we want no more legs blown off we cannotafford to be precious about civil liberties. It’s noxious, because so many people want us to believe it. It’s stupid because it’s just is not true.