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Counter-Terrorism Bill

That is absolutely right. There are further problems with the Bill. I accept that the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary have been looking for consensus, and I accept that that should not be a party political matter. The trouble is that the moment the Government realised that they had to start making concessions, they did not make the Bill better—they made it rather worse. In order to try and buy off some of the usual suspects, if I may use that phrase about some of my friends on the Government Benches, the Government introduced the concession of consulting Parliament. Parliament, of all people, should have no role to play in the matter. I shall not rehearse the arguments that others have expressed much more eloquently than I have about what would happen if a particular case—because it must be a particular case—came in front of Parliament to decide, after someone had been in the slammer for more than 28 days. That concession makes the Bill worse rather than better and the one thing that I can say is that that measure has not got a chance of surviving scrutiny at the other end of the Palace because it is not our business to second-guess judicial or Executive decisions of a judicial nature. If the Government, when they finally come back with what will be a much reformed Bill, are prepared to say—I am prepared to concede that there may be an event that is so cataclysmic, or it may be necessary to prevent a serious event from happening— that, because of the complicated nature of inquires, there must be detention for longer than 28 days, let that decision be taken independent of the Executive by a senior High Court judge. I believe that would be acceptable and if the Government proposed it, I would support it.