LONDON, 11 November 2005 — A defiant British Prime Minister Tony Blair, still smarting from his humiliating defeat in the House of Commons on Wednesday when MPs defeated proposals to allow police to hold terror suspects without charge for up to 90 days, warned rebel MPs in his own Labour Party that there was no possibility of a u-turn or compromise on his program which would see fundamental reforms in health, education and social welfare policies.
Forty-nine Labour MPs joined with the opposition parties to inflict Blair’s first Commons defeat since he took office in 1997.
The Prime Minister saw his majority of 66 overturned as the proposal tumbled to a 31-vote defeat.
Instead, the MPs backed an amendment by MP David Winnick to extend the time suspects can be held without charge from 14 to 28 days — less than a third of the time the government and the police had been asking for.
Home Secretary Charles Clarke admitted that this was a setback for the government, but only on this issue.
Blair met his Cabinet yesterday and told ministers there was a “worrying gap between parts of Parliament and the reality of the terrorist threat and public opinion”.
He accused some MPs of being out of touch with the public and of failing to face the terror threat. Their actions were “deeply irresponsible,” he added.
Later yesterday, Blair and Clarke met senior officers from the Metropolitan Police and the security services to assess alternatives over quashed plans to detain terrorist suspects for up to 90 days without charge.
Home Secretary Charles Clarke denied Tony Blair has lost control of the party, insisting that the vote defeat was a one-off.
The defeat, he told GMTV, “was a combination of serial rebels, the opposition voting without respect for the issues, and a number of individuals profoundly worried about civil liberty issues.”
Clarke clearly took the rap for the defeat. He told the BBC that he accepted personal responsibility for failing to persuade the House of Commons to endorse the proposal.
Asked whether his own authority had been damaged, Clarke said: “Anybody’s authority is damaged, and certainly in my case mine, in the sense that I failed to get the majority in the Commons to vote for the position that I thought was right. I obviously regret that.”
Meanwhile, the taskforce of prominent Muslim organizations and individuals set up by the Home Office to advise on engagement with the Muslim community in the UK, attacked every key aspect of the Terrorism Bill, stressing that it would damage community relations and would drive young people into the hands of the extremists.
In a report published yesterday, the taskforce blamed the war in Iraq as a “key contributory factor” to the July 7 bombings.
