Wait Till Your Father Gets Home

It's a tense day in parliament today. Despite needing 34 Labour MPs to rebel if every single non-Labour politician votes against the government for it to happen, Tony is SO afraid he might lose the 90 day vote that he's had to get the Prime Minister to come home early from Israel. Backbenchers please note: Arm twisting will be actual.
And so it should be. It appears the government are prepared to deal with terrorism by either
a) Going to war with someone because someone there once met a guy who bombed something, or
b) Beefing up the power of the police.
So give the police anything they want. Guns, money, surveillance equipment, and if they say they need a maximum of ninety days with weekly judicial review, give it to them.
You could also give them the opportunity to use phone tap evidence in court. I tried to look up what the objections to phone tap evidence are and who objects. All I could find was Sir Swinton Thomas, Interception of Communications Commissioner (Tap Czar) saying that using such evidence in open court would risk revealing surveillance techniques, and that the level or errors in warrant applications (such as getting a warrant for the wrong number) was "unacceptably high".
Now, I know that someone who thinks he'll change the world by blowing himself up can't be that bright, but I'd say it was fairly obvious that phone tap evidence is gained by either tapping the line, intercepting calls if it's a mobile, and by occasional use of bugs. I don't think we'd be giving much away. I can't imagine why you'd even mention in court which of the above methods you used to get the evidence, especially as it could all be referred to as 'intercepted telecommunications'. If there was any cause for that to be known, it needn't be in "open court". Once a judge had looked at whatever parts constituted technical information about how the police/security services obtained the evidence, and ruled it fair to admit it, the content of the taps could be presented to the jury. We'd need a new set of rules to make tap evidence admissible at all, so any necessary safeguards could be written into those rules. You also need only make it admissible for terror cases. As to the level of errors, as I read that sometimes the mistakes are down to people copying the correct number incorrectly on to the warrant application, I say to thee: just saying we're not good enough isn't good enough. You need better staff? We should make the government pay for better staff for you.
Meanwhile, in Belgium, a big terror trial has just opened, and the court has heard one of the suspects "talking by phone with the suspected architect of the Madrid attacks, rabei Osman Sayed Ahmed, discussing "friends" who planted the bombs". Alex Salmond, writing in The Scotsman, suggests the government objects to the use of phone tap evidence "because it opens them up to judicial scrutiny". In other words, we'd find out how extreme you have to be before you're considered a threat, and just how many degrees of separation there'd have to be between you and a supposed extremist for your phone to get tapped too. To my mind, it wouldn't be a bad thing to see a dozen of some would-be bomber's mates get busted for incitement to or glorification of terrorism, pour discourager les autres, as it were.
Now, I know it goes against the grain to hope for an outcome that doesn't see Tony with egg on his face, so consider this: Tony has so little sway with his own party any more that Gordon's had to come home to play Phil&Grant to his Billy.
All he has to do know is get that tape of Sadie confessing all off Johnny Howard, and sister David will be free!