Dear MP of Burnley

In response to last night’s anti-terror vote, I decided to write to my MP, via TheyWorkForYou.com.

I typed in my postcode & it came up with my MP’s details, Kitty Usher.

Looking at her details, I noticed that she voted in favour of having a 90-day detention period, so I wrote the following to her:

Dear Ms Ussher,

Thank you for voting in favour of increasing the maximum detention period of "terror suspects" to 90 days.

It is so re-assuring to know that I do not need to worry about Al-Qaeda wanting to take away my freedom when MPs such as yourself are more than willing to do it for them.

Yours sincerely,

Wonder if I’ll get a reply?

UPDATE: I got a reply on Friday via email (it wasn't addressed to me though... Is this a form reply?):

Like Tony Blair, Kitty believed that the police and security services asked for these powers and the responsible thing to do was listen to them. The clear fact is that this was not a policy of simply locking someone up for 90 days. There would have been a requirement that a judge reviewed the situation every week and decide whether it was appropriate for a suspect to remain in custody. I think the question on a terrorist act must now fall back onto those who voted against the legislation, what if a suspect commits and act of terror that could have been stopped had the police had 90 days to investigate?

Why stop at 90 days? How do you know whether that's a sufficient length of time? What if the incident happens after 91 days? Would we have to extend the period even longer?

Freedom is also relative. Given in France, Spain and Italy a suspect can be charged then basically imprisoned indefinitely so long as an investigating magistrate continues to work on the case, are they less free? I would argue not and this law would come no-where near that.

I have to point out that these countries are not using fear of terrorism to try and force through these sort of laws, only our government is...

I will finally say Kitty is your elected representative and will try to represent your views whenever she can. However given poll after poll after poll showed the public overwhelmingly supported the measure, which side of the argument would you have her take other than the one supported by the police, the public and the party under which she was elected? It is also a fact that today we have had at least 10 to 1 people ring or contact us irate that the measure did not pass.

I guess the astroturf are being activated.

Issues like this always divide people, but as Charles Clarke pointed out this is not a matter of a liberal view against a reactionary view it is a matter of security and if you actually look at what was finally put forward the 90 days was only a small but important part of a wider issue that continued the proper checks and balances. I sincerely hope you are right and 90 days was not needed, but only time will tell.

Kind regards,
Peter Marland
The Office of Kitty Ussher MP
"Working Hard for Burnley and Padiham"

The annotated bits are what I've sent in reply. Wonder what they'll say next time?