Theresa May vows to beef up police powers on jihadis with a Human Rights Act shake-up and 28 days to question suspects

SCHOOLS, hospitals and universities must all do more to “call out” extremism, Theresa May has declared – as she revealed she is ready to extend police detention powers to 28 days.

The PM spelt out how she will drive twisted Islamist terror from Britain’s streets in an eve of polling day interview with The Sun.

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If she wins the General Election, the Tory leader pledged to “sit down with the police and security services” to ask what new powers they need as one of her first acts back inside No10.

All state-run bodies will also be expected to do much more to stamp out extremism before it warps into violence, the PM added.

To address the spiralling threat of copycat DIY attacks, Mrs May declared: “I’m clear we will look at more powers for the police and the security service”.

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Top of police chiefs’ list is bringing back their ability to hold terror suspects for questioning for 28 days, The Sun revealed yesterday.

The time frame was halved by the Coalition in 2011, but security bosses have since argued an extra two weeks is vital to break down suspects and disrupt their plotting.

Revealing she was ready to look again at the power, Mrs May told The Sun: “When we reduced it to 14 days, we actually allowed for legislation to enable it to be at 28 days.

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“We said there may be circumstances where it is necessary to do this.

“I will listen to what they think is necessary for us to do.”

On top of longer questioning periods, Mrs May also last night revealed she will;

• RESTRICT the movements of terror suspects more, when it is known they are a threat but there is not enough evidence to prosecute.
• TOUGHEN UP deportation rules to make it easier for judges to throw out foreign terror suspects.
• RIP UP elements of the Human Rights Act if it impedes the new counter-terror effort.

The PM insisted: “If human rights laws get in the way of doing these things, we will change those laws to make sure we can do them”.

New terror powers alone won’t be enough, Mrs May said.

Only a cross-society assault on extremism will end the scourge — which has seen a significant spike of eight attacks in the last 77 days alone.

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Before the Westminster attack in March, there had been 13 plots in four years.

Launching her most withering assault yet on state bodies that still turn a blind eye, the PM said: “We’ve already had some fairly sharp conversations with some parts of the public sector – universities, for example.

“I’m very clear that universities have a duty of care to their students.

“If a student is being radicalised on campus, I think a university ought to be worried about that, and not just say this is freedom of speech.

“Of course we value freedom of speech in this country, it underpins our democracy.

“But radicalisation that can lead to somebody blowing themselves and other innocent people up, or attacking innocent people as we saw on Saturday night, we have to worry about this radicalisation and confront it.”

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Mrs May went on: “Universities have started. We’ve made the Prevent duty statutory, which was important.

“I think Sun readers would expect people in the public sector who come into contact with people — be it across schools, the health service, universities – and suspect they’re being radicalized, they should be willing to say something about that.

“Overall, the problem we have is we’ve been too tolerant of extremism. We need to go further.”

Mrs May said a new Extremism Commissioner will go into the public bodies to help better identify extremism, along with communities and businesses too.

She added: “I want communities to have the confidence to be able to say, this is wrong.

“I think sometimes people don’t think about the consequences of extremism – the hateful propaganda that is promoted on the internet and in other ways.

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“People don’t think that will lead to violence and terrorism – but it does.”

The Tory boss also had fresh hard words for the internet companies, dubbing it “very clear we need to look at regulation for cyber space”.

Mrs May accused firms such as Facebook, Google and Twitter of stopping the government from making more progress in stamping out extremism by giving extremists “a safe place” to preach hate.

But she stopped short of slapping huge fines on sinning tech giants, as Germany already does.

The PM added: “One of the areas where I want to see us taking really firm action is in relation to the internet companies – to work with them to access information, but also to get them to be much more active in terms of stopping extremist propaganda.

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“I think the companies should accept their responsibility in relation to what is being put on their platforms, because frankly we see hateful ideology being spewed across their platforms by the extremists.

“That can lead to terrorism, and we don’t want to see a safe space online for terrorists to plan their attacks.

“So we will continue to put pressure with others on those companies.”

On whether the nation’s spooks have enough resources to tackle the spiralling problem, the PM insisted MI5, MI6 and GCHQ are already hiring 1,900 more officers after a major cash uplift last year.

More resources are “not just something you can switch on overnight”, she argued, because of the time it takes to recruit and then train the right people.