Irrespective of your political leanings, you have to admit that David Davis, who resigned from his post as Shadow Home Secretary to protest the 42-day detention rule, has a point:

Yesterday this house decided to allow the state to lock up potentially innocent British citizens for up to six weeks without charge.

… And because the generic security arguments relied on will never go away—technology, development and complexity and so on, we’ll next see 56 days, 70 days, 90 days.

But in truth, 42 days is just one—perhaps the most salient example—of the insidious, surreptitious and relentless erosion of fundamental British freedoms.

And we will have shortly, the most intrusive identity card system in the world.

A CCTV camera for every 14 citiziens, a DNA database bigger than any dictatorship has, with 1000s of innocent children and a million innocent citizens on it.

We have witnessed an assault on jury trials—that balwark against bad law and its arbitrary use by the state. Short cuts with our justice system that make our system neither firm not fair.

And the creation of a database state opening up our private lives to the prying eyes of official snoopers and exposing our personal data to careless civil servants and criminal hackers.

The state has security powers to clamp down on peaceful protest and so-called hate laws that stifle legitimate debate – while those who incite violence get off Scot free.

This cannot go on, it must be stopped.