Part of Points of Order – in the House of Commons at 8:30 pm on 13 October 2008.
The Home Secretary would do better to recognise that the reason why she has faced the biggest defeat in the Lords in living memory is not that two Lord Chancellors, Attorneys-General, chief constables and heads of MI5 take security lightly, but that they find her proposals unnecessary and intolerable. When she was offered a year ago the option of the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, she turned it down in the first instance because she said that declaring a state of emergency would give a propaganda coup—a publicity coup—to the terrorists. Can she explain to the House how having a full debate on a whole new Bill will give any less of a propaganda coup to the terrorists?