Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former head of MI5, today dealt a huge blow to Gordon Brown’s plans to extend the detention of terrorist suspects to 42 days.
Making her first speech as a member of the House of Lords, the former security chief said the Government’s plans were wrong in principle and in practice.
She spoke as the Government’s controversial Counter-Terrorism Bill, narrowly approved by the Commons last month, reached the House of Lords.
The Bill would extend the period of time the police can hold terror suspects without charge to six weeks, up from the current limit of 28 days.
Ministers and some police chiefs say the new powers are needed to keep Britain safe from terrorist attack.
But Baroness Manningham-Buller, who retired last year as director-general of the Security Service after a 35-year career in British intelligence, forcefully rejected that argument.
“In deciding what I believe on these matters, I have weighed up the balance between the right to life, the most import civil liberty, the fact that there is no such thing as complete security and the importance of our hard won civil liberties,” she said. "And therefore on a matter of principle, I cannot support the 42-days pre-charge detention in this bill."
She went on to say that measures in the bill giving MPs oversight of long detention cases would be likely to prejudice any trial of a suspect that followed.
She said: "I don't see on a practical basis, as well as a principled one, that these proposals are in any way workable."
David Davis, the former Tory shadow home secretary who resigned to campaign on civil liberties issues, seized on Baroness Mannnigham-Buller's comments.
He said: "This new law would actually harm the counter-terrorism effort rather than assisting it, and this demonstrates only too clearly that it is an action motivated by politics rather than the nation's security."
Lady Manningham-Buller is the latest in a string of high-profile figures from the security and legal establishment to come out against the 42-day plan, following former lord chancellor Lord Falconer, former attorney general Lord Goldsmith and Director of Public Prosecutions Sir Ken Macdonald.
But senior police chiefs including Sir Ian Blair, the Met Commissioner, and Peter Clarke, the former head of counter-terrorism at Scotland Yard, have said the new powers are needed.
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