| Submit your comments on this article |
| Britain |
| MP rebellion may kill Brown's terror bill |
| 2008-04-20 |
| A secret blacklist of Labour MPs suspected of plotting to defeat Gordon Brown’s flagship terror reforms has been drawn up by the party’s whips. The rebel group redoubles the threat to Brown, who is already facing a revolt over his scrapping of the 10p tax rate for the low-paid. The nine-page dossier, compiled earlier this year and seen by The Sunday Times, reveals bitter differences within Labour over plans to detain suspected terrorists for up to 42 days without trial. It shows that Labour’s whips fear at least 50 of the party’s MPs - including 10 former ministers - will vote against the government. A further 44 are undecided. At least one government minister and six government aides are also revealed to have grave doubts about the draconian extension of police powers. One minister, Joan Ruddock, is said to feel that the 42-day limit has been “plucked from thin air”. Nonetheless she is expected to back it. Another MP is recorded as thinking the measure is “barmy” even though he, too, will vote for it. With both the Tories and the Liberal Democrats promising to vote against the terror bill, the list indicates that Brown is facing defeat by at least 20 votes. His government has a majority of 66. Whips of all parties prefer to operate in the shadows, and the leak exposes their contempt for some MPs and their cynical efforts to muster a majority for Brown. One MP, John Cummings, is described as “usually persuadable”; Fiona Mactaggart is described as “volatile” and the whips claim Tony Wright, the MP for Great Yarmouth, “will do what security services want”. They claim that one rebel, Bill Etherington, “could be persuaded to stay away”. Another one of those who is said in the document to be “not happy” with the bill is Angela Smith, the previously loyal government aide who threatened to quit last week over the government’s decision to double the rate of income tax for the low-paid from 10p to 20p. Smith, a parliamentary private secretary to Yvette Cooper, the treasury chief secretary, triggered panic in the prime minister’s office by her threat to resign. She was only talked out of it by Brown himself, who interrupted his trip to Washington to beg her to stay. The whips put a question mark over Smith’s voting intentions on the issue of detention for 42 days. They note that she “wants clear evidence and [is] not happy with parliamentary oversight” - a reference to plans in the bill to give MPs a vote on individual cases where suspects are to be held for longer than the current 28-day limit. Austin Mitchell, a former Labour whip and a now self-confessed terror bill rebel, has been on the receiving end of some of the whips’ tactics. “There is an air of panic among the whips about the terror bill,” he said. “The bill is Gordon Brown trying to show he is going to be as tough as Tony Blair. He has got to show he can get the legislation through. The whips are getting edgy, partly because their heart isn’t in it. They know the bill is going to be defeated.” |
| Posted by:ryuge |