Aled's thoughts on David Davis.

I must admit I have quite impressed by Davis' crazy but principled move and I chatted to him once about Islam was quite surprised by his knowledge of and sympathy with the sufi strain...however!

Here is Aled's first post dealing with DD.


This morning, I saw an interview of David Davis given by Andrew Marr. For the BBC’s standards, this was a pretty good interview in terms of testing his reasons for the shock resignation, and it seemed at some points that Davis was genuinely being twisted by Marr’s questions. Though Davis took the politician’s slick route out of most of the questions (and repeated the same tired lines on Sky News later on), his ambiguity was telling on the course of the whole affair.

Who is the real David Davis? He is a member of the Tory hard right-wing, and holds some pretty atrocious political views, which makes me feel uneasy whenever I see him praised by genuine civil libertarians.

David Davis is, amongst other things:

* For the death penalty;
* Very strongly for the Iraq War;
* Against equal rights for LGBT people;
* Against the ban on hunting.

Interestingly, he has apparently “never voted” on parliamentary transparency – strange, given that Davis repeatedly made the point that he felt the ’sanctity’ of parliament had been defiled by Labour’s dodgy dealings with various groups to buy the 42 days vote. Marr countered by noting that parliament has always been the scene of dodgy dealing, which begs the question of why this particular issue at this particular time has led to this particular reaction from this particular Tory frontbencher.

Most significantly, Davis backed 28 days detention, and even admitted that and stood by it in the interview today. Apparently, banging people up without charge for 4 weeks is fine; 6 weeks, and its time for a principled resignation on the issue of, erm, banging people up without trial for too long.