December 04, 2008	Thursday	Zilhaj 5, 1429

LONDON, Dec 3: British police raided an opposition lawmaker’s parliamentary office without a search warrant, the House of Commons speaker said on Wednesday, fuelling angry claims that ministers were behind the move.

The revelation was the latest twist to a row over last Thursday’s arrest of Damian Green, the main opposition Conservatives’ immigration spokesman, by police probing embarrassing leaks to newspapers from the Home Office.

It came as Speaker Michael Martin made an extraordinary statement to an angry, raucous House of Commons on the first day of the new parliamentary session.

Several lawmakers have publicly questioned Martin’s authority in recent days by saying the speaker — a member of Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s ruling Labour Party whose office requires him to be politically impartial — should have prevented Green’s office being searched.

“I did not personally authorise the search,” Martin said. “I was not told that the police did not have a warrant...

“I have been told that the police did not explain as they are required to do that the Serjeant (At Arms, a senior parliamentary official) was not obliged to consent or that a warrant could have been insisted upon.”

Martin said he was appointing a committee of seven senior members of parliament to report on the issue and that lawmakers would debate it on Monday. A senior police officer is also drawing up a report.

The speaker’s statement prompted a debate about whether the search of Green’s parliamentary offices was legal. Some lawmakers say it is a breach of the confidential relationship between them and voters.

Although police did not have a search warrant, they did have written consent from Serjeant At Arms Jill Pay. Paul Stephenson, the acting head of the Metropolitan Police, insisted they had played by parliamentary rules.

But leading constitutional lawyer Geoffrey Robertson said officers needed permission from Martin himself to carry out a search in the House of Commons.

“If the police acted as the speaker alleges, then Mr Green... should sue for unlawful search and seizure and recover heavy damages,” he said.

Green was arrested during a probe into Home Office leaks which led to newspaper stories including that an illegal immigrant worked as a cleaner in parliament and that illegal immigrants were working as security guards.

The move has prompted furious Conservative claims that Brown’s Labour Party, which has been trailing the Conservatives in opinion polls for months, may have been behind the “Stalinist” move.

But Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, who is in charge of the police, has declined to apologise, saying she was unaware Green would be arrested until after it happened.

She is due to make a statement to lawmakers on Thursday.

Speaking in response to Martin’s comments, Green suggested the government had been trying to silence him following a series of embarrassing leaks to newspapers from the Home Office.

“An MP (member of parliament) endangering national security would be a disgrace — an MP exposing embarrassing facts about Home Office policy which ministers are hiding is doing a job in the public interest,” he said, to loud cheers from fellow Conservatives.

“The day when exposing facts which ministers would prefer to keep hidden becomes a crime would be a bad day for democracy in this country.”

But Brown told lawmakers in a later debate that the police had been investigating “a substantial series of leaks from

the Home Office, potentially involving national security.” “I want to defend the operational independence of the police,” he said.

“You cannot pick and choose whether you support the operational independence of the police. You either support it or you don’t support it.”—AFP