Sitting in the Conference Hall hoping to be called in the crime debate. You have to put in a speakers’ card with details of who you are, why you should be called and the gist of what you intend to say. That is so the chair of the debate can balance the speakers for and against a motion.

I was called towards the end of the debate and was able to give full vent to my views on Labour’s appalling ‘control orders’ proposals.

We have had 30-plus years of terrorism in London – and we never needed control orders then. Two lessons from those years:

1) internment doesn’t work – it simply creates more terrorists

2) the police, even after bombs in our capital, never asked for these sorts of powers

And as for people being detained without trial because the authorities ‘know’ they are dangerous. The authorities ‘knew’ that the Guildford Four did it, and they ‘knew’ that the Birmingham Six did it and they ‘knew’ there were WMD in Iraq!

It is easy to frighten people – George Bush did and got re-elected. No doubt Blair observed the technique.

And yes – of course there are occasions when civil liberties need to be over-ridden to protect us from extreme danger – but those powers already exist in an emergency and the Home Secretary can, under existing civil contingencies powers, declare an emergency and use those powers to detain etc.