Question: The government intends to introduce a raft of anti-terror legislation in response to the September 11 attacks. Many fear this will affect their human rights and liberties. What's your response to these views?

Oliver Letwin: That we have to strike a very careful balance. On the one side there is no doubt whatsoever that the present state of our laws is not adequate for the threat we now face. To give you one example, the Home Secretary does not have adequate powers to prevent some people who are known to be a threat to our national safety entering our country or to remove them once they have entered. And that needs to be changed. But on the other side, we have to be constantly vigilant that whatever legislative changes we make are very carefully targeted to achieve the increase in public safety that we require without compromising our fundamental liberties.

Question: Could you see a case for emergency legislation with a temporary timeframe or are at least reviewed on a very regular basis perhaps?

Oliver Letwin: I am very sympathetic indeed to the idea that anything we do which is aimed at addressing the current threat and which might on later reflection be seen to pose risks to our general liberties should be time limited and reviewed by Parliament on a regular basis, yes. Exactly which provisions should be properly subjected to that kind of curtailment and which might be incorporated permanently obviously we can only judge when we see the proposed legislation line by line. But the general principle of time limited legislation for special purposes is one that I think we should certainly bear in mind throughout.

Question: Some people argue that Europe should be working more closely to come up with a united front against terrorism - they call for an EU border police. Is this something you'd support?

Oliver Letwin: What is actually going on is that European governments are coming together to find means more rapidly of extraditing suspected terrorists who are wanted in one European country from another, and we are in favour of those moves. Again here we have to strike a very careful balance because we mustn't allow that right and proper concern with the swift extradition of terrorist suspects at a time like this to be used by anybody as a vehicle for diminishing the extent of national control over a much wider area quite outside the area of terrorism of traditional methods.

Question: People argue that Europol needs to have a beefed up role to become a European style FBI. Is this something you'd like to see?

Oliver Letwin: Europol is an exchange mechanism, it is a clearing house as Interpol is for information between the police and other agencies in different European countries, and that is a very valuable role. We do not anticipate and would not support the turning of Europol into something quite else.

Question: David Blunkett is considering the introduction of ID cards - what's your view on them?

Oliver Letwin: We do not see ID cards as an immediate solution to the problem of the terrorist threat. In the first place there is a wide range of different things that can all be called ID cards which have completely differing significances for our liberties and also completely different potential effect on terrorism, fraud and so on. This is a hugely complex scene and almost all perversions of ID cards require a long time to legislate and a long time to implement. Consequently our view is the government needs to concentrate now on measures that do stand some chance of making a rapid impact on our ability to reduce the risk of terrorist attack on the UK, and ID cards do not fall in to that category.

Question: David Blunkett has said he wants to extend the race hate laws to cover religious hate crimes. But some people argue this will be very difficult to implement and enforce - what do you think?

Oliver Letwin: The devil is in the detail. We want to see very very carefully what it is the Home Secretary introduces, to look at it line by line, word by word, to see whether it can achieve further protection for Muslim groups and others without causing an unenforceable law to be enacted or other problems for civil liberties. Let me say however that the underlying motives of the government in this connection, we wholly share. Whilst we are absolutely with the government in wanting to combat terrorism, we also believe - as does the government - that being anti-terrorist is not the same as being anti-Muslim. We have taken particular steps both to meet Muslim leaders and to urge the Home Secretary to take protective action to protect mosques, and we believe that there have been some very worrying signs of some of the nastiest groups in our society misusing the present situation as a basis for wholly improperly and in some cases utterly despicably making life more difficult and indeed attacking Muslims. So we're fully in support of efforts to try to improve that situation, the question is just in the detail. Can you implement measures that will improve protection for Muslims and others, without compromising civil liberties?

Question: In the UK there are a number of cases where Islamic fundamentalists have been making highly controversial comments - is it a case of freedom of speech or is it incitement?

Oliver Letwin: This entirely depends on the particular comments. There are laws about these matters and they should be enforced case by case and of course not by politicians but by the court. I think the more worrying feature of the scene is not statements but people who, as I say are believed by our security services to be a threat to our safety who remain resident of this country because the powers do not exist to remove them. It's the deeds not words that we're concerned about.

Question: Where should they be removed to?

Oliver Letwin: They couldn't is the problem at the moment. And action is needed in that regard and we are at one with the government in believing that the law does need to be changed and the next question of course is how do you change the law and how can you do it in such a way that you do not face problems engendered by the European Convention of Human Rights, and the Human Rights Act, and the vast tangle of conventions, legislation and jurisprudence that surround.

Question: What do you think will be the asylum and immigration consequences during this uncertain period?

Oliver Letwin: I think we have to distinguish very carefully between two quite different things: innocent people fleeing dreadful persecution - we all want to have a better asylum system for providing people who are in that very unfortunate category with a safe haven quickly, effectively, humanely, in this country. And on the other side, people who may be using the UN Convention on refugees and asylum laws and the rest of our legal structure to enter this country when they are in fact not innocents fleeing persecution, but people who pose a threat to our national safety.

Question: How much more funding do you think the Home Office needs to beef up policing to deal with this terrorist threat?

Oliver Letwin: That's something that the government is in a much better position to tell than we are. We have restricted ourselves to pointing out the nature of the threat, just how grave we believe it is, and urging the government to review, which I believe it is doing, very urgently the extent to which additional resources can sensibly and quickly be deployed. I fear that there are limits on the speed with which changes can be made and more resources can be used. But there's no doubt that the nature of the threat has changed and that some of the things that we had previously imagined to be mere fantasies are now, if not likely, nevertheless are possible. And we certainly need to look again at our whole apparatus that is protecting us against terrorism and ask is it adequate to deal with the current threat.

Question: Do you think this knocks out the talk of tax cuts for all political parties? The issue here will have to be spending more to protect ourselves rather than making room for tax cuts?

Oliver Letwin: The total spending of the UK on these activities is the order of £300 million, which is less than one-thousandth of the total UK government budget. I don't think that the sums of money that we're talking about here have any impact on physical equations, but they may have a huge impact on our security.

Question: And so tax cuts can still be a possibility?

Oliver Letwin: I don't think it is likely that our present government will be moving towards tax cuts- as I understand their policies, it is far more likely that they will be engaging in tax increases. But I do not think that the thoughts of change that may be required - the thoughts of enhancement in resources that may be required to meet the new threat adequately and our intelligence and other security services, will have any impact on the extent of any tax rises we can expect to see under the government.

Question: September 11 has changed people's concept of government. People have looked to government to be there to protect them and to boost the economy. George Bush has been spending a great deal to boost the economy. Have you been reappraising the Conservatives' view of small government?

Oliver Letwin: The prime duty above all others of a government is, has, and always will be, to protect public safety. That is the first reason that governments were formed by our ancestors. And the modern debate about the size and scope of government, the extent of its interference and regulation of industry, the extent to which various public services are entirely in the public sector or have added to them private sector activities, all of these very interesting, very important questions, come after a government, a regime has established its ability to provide for the safety of its citizens and their liberty. That is the prime role. So the debates about small or large government, about socialism versus free marketers are secondary by comparison with what we are now dealing with. And that is one of the reasons why a Conservative opposition and a Labour government come together in defence of our free society. We will scrutinise what the government is up to. We will look at every last detail of what they propose legislatively, but we are fundamentally with them in seeking to promote public safety because that is the agreed need - agreed between people of quite differing views - of how you conduct affairs once you've established public safety.