Bob Spink votes for 42 Days Detention
Posted on June 12th, 2008 by timalmond
So, now that I try and tell people that UKIP’s a party that believes in freedom and liberty, I’ll have “so why did your only MP vote for 42 days detention without charge?”.
The tories are already having a field day over this.
RSS
Freedom and liberty for people like themselves, you mean?
QT,
Not at all.
Wow. 42 days? 42 days just for the hell of it?
From a U.S. point of view, British civil liberties look like a mysterious mishmash of enviable enlightenment and shockingly absent basic protections.
Catherine,
I think there’s a divide between the US and Europe. The US has many more what might be called “hard liberties” which are protected by the US Constitution. You can fly swastikas and say horrendous things about religion and own a gun and it’s all protected.
What Europe has more of is what might be termed “soft liberties”. So, France and Spain are far more relaxed about what gets shown on TV than in the US, you can have a beer at a lower age, and in certain designated areas of certain cities, you can smoke some weed.
Our law on holding people without charge used to be 72 hours, and I haven’t been convinced it should be a lot more than that. There’s an “encrypted data” argument, but most experts say that if it doesn’t break easy (like someone using something dumb like their dog’s name as a password), you’re just not going to get through it.