Take blessings where they come, Davis making this issue one that lasted past the vote is a great thing, and he deserves support on this issue. He is not making it any other kind of issue, no matter how anyone wants to interpret his strategies in the by-election. No-one’s forcing you to sign a contract to forever more vote Tories and lend them your support, so why are you and so many others being so anal?

If you don’t want to support a Tory just say that, no-one will feel ill about that, but don’t talk about this bollocks of “right man for the job”, you either agree with his cause or not, and the cause is what you support not the man highlighting it.

I take your point. People who jump up and down, campaign, send cheques to campaigns, respond to blogs etc seem to have come out in favour of civil liberties but whether they or the opinion polls the more accurate barometer of public opinion remains to be seen. Right now, the most important test of this principle is the turnout and result at H&H.

My own view is that the polls do not capture how people think (nor do focus groups). If you ask someone what they think about ID cards they may be in favour. If you ask how they feel about the implications of ID cards (which they may never have found the time to figure out for themselves), they may be less so.

I have sufficient faith in the public that once this matter is properly on the agenda and people are thinking about these issues for themselves a bit they will get genuinely angry and want a lot of this shitty legislation repealed.

Thus far the Government has egregiously misrepresented a good deal of the legislation it has passed – ID cards being a prime example as well as overlooking the scope for mis-use provided by other legislation (remember the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill?) The fact that the Prime Minister continues to stick to his “mother knows best” rhetoric about taking the right decisions for the country is, in the circumstances, nothing short of insulting.

If the cost of getting our Government to respect our civil liberties again is cosying up to one Tory on one time-limited occasion then we will be buying those freedoms a damn sight more cheaply than most political movements have been able to obtain them. It seems to me that anyone who can’t bring themselves to pay that price really doesn’t care all that much about freedom.

I suspect the polls were accurate enough – but most people do not have good reason to support any policy in particular.

So if it turns out that the Shadow Home Secretary cares so much about the issue, many might well feel more confidence in his judgement than in their own.

After all, the media has done a good job of demonstrating that this act is unlikely to advance his own career.

But why did Davis do it since he is not against the stated position of his own party? And if things were changing and Cameron wanted to change the line why wont this ‘great man of principle’ say so publically, resign from his party and stand on a genuinely single-issue platform?? If it had been a Labour MP that had done it for example then that would be clearly different from Davis doing so because they would have been publically opposing the stated position of their own Party….as far as we can tell Davis is campaigning on what is Conservative Party policy so there was no need for this hoopla…unless of course like me you suspect that this is a crusade of vanity, a crusade for power within his own Party…how else can you explain the public mouthing of support but lack of financial support from the Tories??

People dont like it because they smell a rat…and backing him will blow up in our faces….and all this is to leave aside totally what I have said before and hold to be true that there are too many differences in principle between our perspective and Davis’s …..

- If Davis wins then it will *not* necessarily be because they support him on 42 days. It will be because people think ‘wow here is a politician that seems principled and appears to be an all-round good egg’. To back that up I refer people to the recent poll polls which have shown very contradictory data – most agree that a majority view his resignation as ‘principled’ but some show, like the one for the Sunday Times, a clear majority still in favour of 42 days by a considerable margin.

-Nobody has mentioned the Labour PPC in the area who according to some reports is against 42 days and would be a far more potent symbol of rebellion since he would be actively rebelling against his own parties line, something that is not true of Davis well not on the stated facts at least.

We really need to be asking ourselves is this man a suitable leader for the ‘fight for freedom’ and my answer has to be no I am afraid….

Like him or loathe him David Davis has put this issue up for debate. It is all very well to say that he will no doubt be returned to Westminster but he has given up the chance of being Home Secretary for a cause you believe in. When he made that sacrifice everyone in Westminster thought that the general public backed the 42 day detention period, the ID card databases, CCTV cameras wherever you could put them and all the rest of it. Inasmuch as he made his stand in the teeth of perceived public opinion, that makes his resignation at least as brave as Robin Cook’s.

And already, the public reaction to Davis’ resignation has already given the lie to the idea that a bunch of stupid opinion polls reflect the population’s genuine thoughts on these matters.

You might prefer it if Bob Marshall Andrews had been the one to resign and seek re-election. I might too. But it was David that did it, not Bob and, until someone you like the look of a whole lot more actually puts up a deposit, I strongly suggest that, while you can continue to pressure him on the areas where you think him insufficiently liberal, you do absolutely all you can to make sure that he comes home on a landslide and with the largest turnout possible. I think that we all owe him that and it would certainly appear that Bob Marshall Andrews thinks something similar.

Make a noise where you live by all means – do whatever you can but surely, the most important thing is to get the civil liberties vote out in H&H. Anything else is self-destructive tribalism of the worst kind.

No?

Your response illustrates precisely why people should get behind Davis and ignore the fact that others have proxy agendas or different priorities. Success for Davis can’t have any material effect on any of those others issues so they shouldn’t register in any mature decision about whether or not to support him.

Tribalism is at the heart of this subject because every party is catering to what they consider their own best interests.

David Davis may be concerned about the principles of his party policy and the ability to influence legislation from opposition, but Cameron is primarily interested in his party unity and prospects for getting into government.
Murdoch & Co are interested in the long-term health of his companies and wants to position them close to the people and to government while the New Statesman wants to position itself as influential with the ‘intellectual’ elite.
KMK wants to inflate his sense of self-worth, while Brown is just happy to try to outlast his opponents and the LibDems seem to have something more important to be getting on with where they have some power (getting press coverage for replacing the bollards in my local park…rollseyes…).

I’d hestitate before calling such tribalism ill-concieved or childish, as it depends entirely on the combination effect, which can only be judged in hindsight.

Regardless of any of this he’s made it perfectly clear what issues he’s basing his candidacy on – and it’s a platform most people here support. When he wins he’ll return to the Tory backbenches anyway so the victory won’t impact government policy directly – there will still be a Labour government for the next couple of years at least. Nobody, not least David himself, is pretending his victory (which is inevitable) is an endorsement of every position he’s ever held or even holds now, not least because of those inconsistencies which I’m sure he accepts.

The man’s made a fairly straightforward statement about something that concerns him and taken a stand on it. In political terms it’s rash and a little egotistical but those must be second order issue for supporters and opponents alike. He’s campaigning for something this website and most people on the liberal / left passionately believes in and so there’s simply no good excuse not to lend him your support on this occasion. Looking at the reaction over the last week or so it’s hard to conclude it’s borne of anything other than a very childish and ill-conceived tribalism.

Shock and Awe, so to speak.

The message is much broader than 42 days – however its come about, the by-election is in effect a referendum. Treat it as that.

It will be a message to the Tories too, especially to the likes of Michael Gove.

Consider this, Labour will lose because they have screwed us all – they continually relied on us not to desert them because of the fear of letting the Tories in again. And in the process what have we achieved? Far worse than if it had been the Tories marching to war.

So if Davis gets a boost in his internal wrangling. he presumably gets to trounce the really sick wing of his party – and locks them into their policy statements beyond electoral advantage.

As for New Labour, it needs to be bludgeoned out of our misery.

So come the general election, we need a No-Vote campaign. Voter turn-out is probably the only thing left career-politicians might acknowledge.

Scotland and Wales excepted for obvious reasons.

What contradiction is there? It is a comparison of apples with oranges.

I’m for the cause over the party. So instinctively I veer towards finding some way of supporting the cause while not backing David Davis entirely.

Though, I think I may have found a way through this dilemma. Am going to talk to a few people over the coming ways to see if it’ll work.

There is a good progressive defence of civil liberties which is totally different from the Conservative defence of what is which is the core of their defence of civil liberties….one of the reasons I am so opposed to the descision not to stand is that I believe there is a fundemental difference between our perspectives on this and his; evidenced by the fact that he sees no contradiction between being against 42 days but pro-capital punishment….yes we episodically agree with his stance on this question but does that mean total agreement and rather slavish support?

It really should not…..

Shami Chakrabarti was awesome on Guardian’s Politics Weekly podcast. Mind you Tony McNulty made it easy for her, he was a complete dick-wad. He basically called Liberty a partisan organisation (a Tory one, presumably), and said that the vote represented democracy at work (as opposed the whips, threats and bribes).

This government has utterly lost any connection it had with Liberal reason.

I do hope the Lords ram this law up his and Brown’s arse. The problem is, thanks to legislation many of us supported, the Lords are not the check they once were…

No matter what we do, the Right (at least the Right that we really shouldn’t be caring about) will misrepresent us and undermine us. That’s their job. Those on the right that are a little bit more objective and willing to respect other’s view points will see it for what it truly is. Eve if we never commented on David Davis there would be people criticising our stance, that’s life.

At the moment, there is essentially no chance that Davis will lose, the question is whether the election gets seen as an irrelevant stunt or as a sign that this is an issue that lots of people care about. In fact, it doesn’t really matter whether people go along to campaign for Davis or against him, if in doing so they help to increase the number of people who go and vote.

If Davis wins with 95% of the vote on a turnout of less than the last set of local elections, say 25%, then the Lesson will be ‘this is not an issue which many people care about’.

In contrast if he wins with 60% of the vote, but on a turnout similar to the last general election or even higher, then that really will shake things up and reinforce the idea that the people think this is a big deal, and that journalists and politicans who thought it was a stunt are the ones who are out of touch.