Senior peers to mount attack on 42-days plan.

I've often said that I didn't understand Gordon Brown's wish to push through the 42 day terrorist detention plan as I don't know what he gains by being more Blairite than even Blair was. Brown was supposed to be the antithesis of all that went before and, instead, has found himself pushing even more of this civil liberty bashing nonsense down our throats.

Well, it appears that even former Blairites have had enough and that his bill's passage through the Lords is not going to be an easy one.

Lord Goldsmith, the former attorney general, made it clear yesterday that he was prepared to defy the Government and vote down the measure. Lord Falconer, the former Lord Chancellor, is also expected to attack the plans in the Lords when peers open debate on the Counter-Terrorism Bill this afternoon.

Lord Goldsmith insisted the measure was "wrong in practice and wrong in principle".

The two men, who occupied pivotal positions in Mr Blair's government after the terror attacks on London and in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, are among nearly 50 peers due to speak during today's debate amid growing anger at the plans, which only scraped through the Commons last month by the nine votes of the Democratic Unionist Party. The intervention of two such senior Labour figures will pile pressure on Gordon Brown, who already faces months of pitched parliamentary battles over the Bill.

Mr Brown faces a drubbing in the Lords when peers vote on the Bill later this year, with critics predicting that plans to extend the current 28-day limit on holding terror suspects without charge could be defeated by more than 200 votes.

He only managed to get this legislation through the Commons by coming to some backroom deal with the Unionists, which might all come to naught if the Lords behave as I expect them to and kick the thing into touch.

By tradition, peers will not vote on the Bill after today's second reading debate. But peers say the 42-day plans will be overwhelmingly defeated when the Bill reaches its detailed stages after the Parliamentary break.

Yesterday both Conservatives and Liberal Democrats said that they stood firm against the measure. Lord Thomas of Gresford, who will speak for the Liberal Democrats, said: "On the eve of the vote our position remains as hard as it always has been. We cannot be bribed by knighthoods, peerages or larger rooms. On the Labour benches there is significant opposition. On the cross benches there will also be some very powerful speeches made against it by people with genuine experience of terrorist cases."

Here's how Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, the former Joint Intelligence Committee chairman and the Conservative spokesman for homeland security, has described the Tory party in the Lord's attitude to the measure:

"But it (the Tory party) will continue to oppose the Government's obnoxious proposal to extend maximum pre-charge detention from 28 to 42 days when it comes to the Lords on 8 July and where it risks heavy defeat. The Government has utterly failed to demonstrate the need for this further extension of police power and, as the former home secretary Charles Clarke has pointed out, the Government's ostensible safeguards against possible abuse are almost certainly unworkable and therefore worthless."

I am honestly left utterly puzzled as to what Brown hopes to gain by pushing for legislation which is so right wing that it brings about this kind of revulsion from the Tory party. Did he hope for this kind of backlash so that he could label the Tories soft on terrorism? If he did then he has badly miscalculated as Lord Goldsmith was Blair's poster child for the Iraq war, and Lord Falconer was Blair's former flatmate; and if Goldsmith and Falconer both say it's unnecessary, then there are only a very few (and they are to the right of Genghis Khan) who would disagree.

It makes me almost physically ill to watch the Labour party push these reactionary policies. At this rate we deserve to lose the next election. Unless we can offer an alternative vision for where Britain should go next then we don't deserve to lead.

Blair's original plan was to mimic Clinton's policy of triangulation, where one stuck rigidly to the middle ground, driving your opponent further towards extremism.

But when Brown finds the Tory party calling his policies "obnoxious", and Goldsmith and Falconer are both in agreement, then it is safe to say that this particular ship is way off course.

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Tags: 42 day detention plan, Lord Goldsmith, Lord Falconer, House of Lords, Brown, Labour party, Conservatives, Liberals