The 42 day smokescreen

People who represent a clear and present danger to the security of our country should be locked up for 42 days without trial. That is the message that Jacqui Smith has been peddling so assiduously for the last month or so.

Why 42 days ? Who has actually analysed previous security breaches in such detail that they have been able to calculate the precise number of days the authorities would need to be certain of gaining a conviction in the future? 42 is such an exact number. Why not 50; or 60 days? After all they are equally nice, equally rounded numbers.

The answer, of course, is that the number of days is neither here nor there. It could just as easily be 102 or 12.

The only true purpose of the 42 day detention debate has been to create a smoke screen. Think about it. What is currently wending its way through the entrails of the British parliamentary system that will have a far more dramatic and long-term effect on democracy in this country than any 42 day detention policy?

Identity Cards, perhaps?

No, this is even more serious than Nu Labour's plan to turn each of us into a human bar code.

Then it must be the Police database containing the DNA of over a million innocent people, right?Close, but no cigar.
It's the Lisbon Treaty, stupid.

While Jacqui and Gordon - who would surely have been a white crimplene suited Seventies cabaret act in another life - have been insisting on the need to imprison anyone they want for 42 days without trial, the bill to enable the Lisbon Teaty is about to be debated in the House of Lords having been rammed through the Commons by the battering ram of vested interests known as the Europhile tendency.

It is a strange creature, Europe. Poll after poll demonstrates that the British people are heartily sick of being sucked any further into its web. More people than ever are calling not just for the ties to be loosened but severed completely. Yet, our political elite conspires to bind us ever closer, mocking our protests while denying that we have anything to protest about in the first place.

That elite includes not just the current crop of party leaders but all of their predecessors from the Seventies onwards; including Maggie Thatcher. She, like the rest, knew precisely the nature of our relationship with Europe. She and they have accepted for many years that the eventual aim was a United States of Europe in which Great Britain would become a province with slightly fewer powers than, say, Georgia currently does in relation to the federal government of the USA.
Peter Lilley made this plain in the Commons last week. As he said, over 80% of all the laws and regulations to which we now have to adhere start their life inside the EU Commission. Our Government Ministers like to claim these bits of legislation as their own. But only to maintain the fiction that anything they or anyone else at Westminster does, has any real effect on life in modern Britain.

The truth is, of course, that our feeble, mediocre Parliament is an anachronism. Its members are as relevant as a sail in a submarine; as powerless as the Queen has been for the last fifty years. But, still they go on posturing, posing and conniving in dark corners as if it matters a jot which of them ends up as Party leader or deputy leader. Occasionally, in a moment of lucidity or honesty, one of their number spills the beans. This time it is Peter Lilley. In the past, William Hague has come close to admitting the same thing; that the House of Commons is to Brussels what your local Town Hall used to be to Westminster.

Nobody takes very much notice for the simple reason that every effort is made to divert our attention. Every time a major European story is about to grab the headlines, the media are chucked another, more juicy bone to get their collective teeths into. It's been Nu labour's way of manipulating the news since its very first days in office. The lickspittles otherwise known as political journalists play along happily with the charade; willingly recycling rumours and briefings to keep the pot boiling and everyone's attention from the debate that really matters; what is happening to our democracy as the tentacles of Europa wrap themselves ever tighter around us.
This time is no different. We have been told in no uncertain terms that there will be no referendum. The elite has closed ranks. Doubters have, as usual, been branded Eurosceptics and Little Englanders. Meanwhile, Gordon and Jacqui, abetted by their media chums, continue to do their bit; puffing out billows of chaff about 42 days detention to keep the European question firmly off the radar.

Once the Lisbon Treaty passes the Lords, the fog will clear and we will all be sailing full-steam for the sunlit uplands of Europe. (Unless the Irish chuck a large Celtic spanner in the works of course and chuck the whole idea of the Lisbon Treaty out on its ear. ) Either way, with Lisbon resolved, just watch how quickly Gordon caves in to back-bench demands for a fresh debate on the whole question of detention without trial.