The Sketch: Peers make short work of demolishing 42 days

In the Commons, just to remind us how these things work, they were rushing through a Bill to commonly allow anonymous evidence in court. The practice had been introduced as an exception, a rarity; now it's to be routine. Inch by inch they go, in the great game of Grandmother's Footsteps to get by stealth what they'd never achieve in one foul sweep.

In the Lords, just to remind us of the virtue of our most valuable anachronism, they were resisting the passage of the Bill to extend to 42 days the power of detention without charge.

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Everything's so much clearer in that rarefied atmosphere. Maybe it's the courtesy, and the brevity. Not to mention the intellectual resources of a vast and venerable institution. But when Lord West talked about "precautionary legislation" he was in trouble. He couldn't get away with that under their lordships' chilly, objective stare. They may well need 42 days at some point, but the precautionary principle equally powerfully needs 420 days.

And when Baroness Manningham-Buller mentioned the need to rise above party politics, we remembered the origin of this Bill. It's the cornerstone of Gordon Brown's communication strategy to make the Tories seem "weak on terror". Yesterday, that all collapsed like a multistorey marquee.

Pauline Neville-Jones held up various specimen arguments from the Government; none survived inspection. "Imagine five simultaneous 9/11s," the Government had asked us. But, she said, the Civil Contingencies Act already provided for that. Would this Bill foster trust between Britons, and help a united society with "a free, responsible citizenry"? The very opposite, she said. And worse, it "would cut off vital local intelligence". That's the crucial argument in all this.

The Liberal peer Lord Thomas put it in a way we hadn't heard before. Despite numerous new crimes of "acts preparatory to terrorism" and "associating with terrorists" and "supporting" them AND the fact that the police were allowed to charge on a lower threshold of evidence . . . All this meant that suspects could be held in jail for SIX WEEKS without even REASONABLE SUSPICION (you can tell he got me going).

And dear old Charlie Falconer found an ingenious reason to repudiate what he once proposed, I forget exactly how he did it. But to great satirical effect he laid out the safeguards procedures – a police chief, a judge, a director of public prosecutions, a home secretary, Parliament itself – and the "complex Home Office flow chart" that had to be navigated. British justice, he said, used to rely on trust in judges. Now people would be kept in jail "on the basis of a deal done with another political party" (intake of breath throughout the chamber).

One clarion message comes out of all this: the House of Lords must not be reformed!

simoncarr@sketch.sc

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