The ex-head of Britain’s domestic spy agency MI5 says British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s plans for tougher new terrorism laws are unnecessary.
Making her first speech at the House of Lords since being appointed to Britain’s upper legislative chamber last month, Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller said on Tuesday she did not support the government’s plans.
Manningham-Buller was the head of the domestic security service from 2002 to last year and spent more than 30 years working in British intelligence.
Brown wants to increase from 28 days to 42 days the time police have to hold suspected terrorists without charging them. He says police officers increasingly need more time to charge suspects because of the complexity of scouring computers, sifting through phone records and chasing down leads across the globe.
Lawmakers in the House of Commons narrowly approved the plans last month, voting in favor of the proposed terrorism laws by nine votes.
Several of Brown’s Labour Party rebelled, leaving him to rely on the votes of nine minor party legislators from Northern Ireland.
Peers in the House of Lords, who are considered more likely to reject Brown’s draft laws, will vote later this year.
“I have weighed up the balance between the right to life — the most important civil liberty — the fact that there is no such thing as complete security and the importance of our hard-won civil liberties,” Manningham-Buller said. “On a matter of principle, I cannot support 42 days pre-charge detention.”
If lawmakers in the House of Lords reject Brown’s proposals, the British leader must decide whether to deploy rarely used powers to pass the plans into law without the consent of the upper chamber.
“The Government is putting at risk, in a reactionary way, rights and freedoms that we have defended for centuries,” said opposition Conservative peer Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, an ex-chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee.
Since the current 28-day limit came into force in 2006, police have held six suspects for the maximum time allowed; three were released without charge and three were prosecuted.
Kehinde Sanni spends his days smoothing out dents and repainting scratched bumpers in a modest autobody shop in Lagos. He has never left Nigeria, yet he speaks glowingly of Burkina Faso military leader Ibrahim Traore. “Nigeria needs someone like Ibrahim Traore of Burkina Faso. He is doing well for his country,” Sanni said. His admiration is shaped by a steady stream of viral videos, memes and social media posts — many misleading or outright false — portraying Traore as a fearless reformer who defied Western powers and reclaimed his country’s dignity. The Burkinabe strongman swept into power following a coup in September 2022
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
‘FRAGMENTING’: British politics have for a long time been dominated by the Labor Party and the Tories, but polls suggest that Reform now poses a significant challenge Hard-right upstarts Reform UK snatched a parliamentary seat from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labor Party yesterday in local elections that dealt a blow to the UK’s two establishment parties. Reform, led by anti-immigrant firebrand Nigel Farage, won the by-election in Runcorn and Helsby in northwest England by just six votes, as it picked up gains in other localities, including one mayoralty. The group’s strong showing continues momentum it built up at last year’s general election and appears to confirm a trend that the UK is entering an era of multi-party politics. “For the movement, for the party it’s a very, very big
‘BODIES EVERYWHERE’: The incident occurred at a Filipino festival celebrating an anti-colonial leader, with the driver described as a ‘lone suspect’ known to police Canadian police arrested a man on Saturday after a car plowed into a street party in the western Canadian city of Vancouver, killing a number of people. Authorities said the incident happened shortly after 8pm in Vancouver’s Sunset on Fraser neighborhood as members of the Filipino community gathered to celebrate Lapu Lapu Day. The festival, which commemorates a Filipino anti-colonial leader from the 16th century, falls this year on the weekend before Canada’s election. A 30-year-old local man was arrested at the scene, Vancouver police wrote on X. The driver was a “lone suspect” known to police, a police spokesperson told journalists at the
RSS