MAIL COMMENT: Terror vote is bigger than Brown alone

Indeed, in some ways the question before them is even more important, since it goes right to the heart of our national security and civil liberties: should police chiefs be permitted to lock up terrorist suspects without charge for as long as six weeks?

One thing is certain: there are no easy answers. For Islamist terrorism has brought unprecedented difficulties.

Gordon Brown: The vote over terrorist laws is one of the biggest tests in his leadership

Where most criminals are concerned, the police can afford to watch and wait, delaying an arrest until they have enough evidence to make charges stick.

But with suicide bombers? If they delay an hour too long, they risk seeing half of Birmingham in rubble.

Then there's the time-consuming business of decoding and analysing computer records, which can take weeks.

But what about our precious ancient liberties? Central to those are the principles that you don't lock people up without telling them why - and justice must be transparent.

The Mail remains deeply uneasy about depriving British citizens of their liberty for 42 days, on no better authority than the say-so of the police (whose ability to get the wrong man was demonstrated so horrifically by the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes).

True, ministers assure us that the new powers would be used only at a time of 'grave exceptional terrorist threat'.

But didn't they tell us something very similar when they gave 500 public bodies the right to snoop on our phone calls and emails? And now look.

Local authorities routinely use these powers to spy on citizens suspected of breaking byelaws on rubbish collection.

Meanwhile, the prosecuting authorities themselves remain divided about the need for extending detention - and nobody has identified a single case in which 42 days would have helped convict a terrorist or avoid an atrocity.

With such powerful arguments on both sides, therefore, our MPs have some deep thinking to do.

But isn't it vital, on this matter of grave national importance, that they should concentrate on the issue - and put any considerations of Mr Brown's political fortunes out of their minds?

They should ask themselves only whether the case for 42 days is convincing enough to justify sacrificing our civil liberties and radically altering the relationship between the citizen and the state.

There is no room for dogma here. But the Mail believes, on balance, the answer to that question is No.

Betraying the needy

Crippled by soaring council taxes and below-inflation benefit rises, an extra 300,000 pensioners have joined the 2.5million already classified as living below the poverty line.

Meanwhile 100,000 more children are in poverty - up for the second year running - leaving Labour's pledge to halve child poverty by 2010 in tatters.

Most unfairly of all, many of those children come from traditional families, the bedrock of our society, in which one parent works all hours to provide for them.

Could there be any more crushing evidence of the failure of Mr Brown's hugely expensive, bureaucratic and fraud-prone tax credit system, which was supposed to make poverty history?

Who would have believed that the New Labour era would create more millionaires than ever in our history - while spreading none of the wealth of the 'nice decade' to the millions who needed and deserved it most?