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Brown survives close vote on terror Bill

LONDON: British Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Wednesday survived a close vote on his government’s hugely controversial Bill that seeks to raise the number of days for which alleged terror suspects can be held without charge from 28 days to 42 days.

The government scraped through with the support of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party all of whose nine MPs voted for the government in return for an undisclosed deal. But for the DUP’s support, the government would have been defeated as a large number of its own MPs (enough to reduce its majority) joined with the Opposition to vote against the Bill.

Mr. Brown, who is already facing a challenge to his leadership after a series of embarrassing policy bloomers and the party’s defeat in a crucial parliamentary bye-election, went ahead with the Bill despite a backbench rebellion.

The fact that he had to rely on an Opposition group to win the vote made his position in his own party more vulnerable and Labour rebels were likely to step up their efforts to get rid of him. In recent weeks, his popularity both in the party and among the voters has plummeted to a new low.

The government claims that it is necessary to increase the pre-trial detention period as the police need more time to collect evidence because of the increasingly sophisticated methods used by terrorists.

But MPs and peers — cutting across party lines — as well as civil rights groups accused the government of trying to appropriate more and more authoritarian powers in the name of fighting terror.

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