UK Can Now Hold People Without Charge For 42 Days

the_leander writes "Prime Minister Gordon Brown has narrowly won a House of Commons vote on extending the maximum time police can hold terror suspects to 42 days. There is talk of compensation packages available for the falsely accused. The chances of you getting that money however are slim to none, lets not forget, this is the same country that charges prisoners who have been falsely accused for bed and boarding costs."

Comments

Re:Jumping the gun a bit....

[jimicus]

However there are still 315 people who really should be held for 28 days without charge. Are there enough truely patriotic police to do this though. You jest, but I don't think your average MP understands the seriousness of the matter. S/he gets wrongly held for 28 days, then at the end of it they go back to whatever it was they were doing and there's no harm done.

You or I get held for 28 days - potentially without communication with the outside world, let's not forget that - and when you get out your employer will have given up on you and sought a replacement. Your personnel record will say "Disappeared off the face of the earth one day" - which I'm sure would look just great if an alternate employer contacted them for a reference.

And if you're asked why you left your job - well, I'd love to see the look on the interviewer's face when you say "I was detained under the Terrorism Act and not allowed to contact anyone, so my employer had to find someone else to do the job" but I don't think it's an answer that would do you any favours.

Compensation? What compensation? They'll base compensation on the 28 (or 42) days you were detained, not the repercussions. If the repercussions include "having to sell the house because you can no longer afford it because you lost a £40,000 per year job and had to take a £25,000 per year job", that's your problem.

Re:Jumping the gun a bit....

[meringuoid]

"have an unelected monarch who is a militaristic nutter pissing around in America largely out of spite and who then descends into mental illness but you can't get rid of him because he claims to be appointed by a god"

We did get rid of him. Shut him quietly away and his son took over. Said son did bugger all because he was a lazy fat drunken gluttonous lecherous oxygen thief, so Parliament ran the country. During this period our Empire in Canada was attacked by the United States; in response we invaded and burned Washington to the ground. We were also at war with Napoleon Bonaparte, whose total defeat ushered in a century of British global hegemony. Not bad going, for a country being run while the king's in the loony bin and the regent's in bed with a hangover.