Gordon Brown looked suitably serious as he delivered his first Prime Ministerial statement on security to the House of Commons.

He peppered his remarks with words like robust and resilient, vigilance and courage.

He sprinkled some frightening statistics: 30 terrorists convicted this year, 900 large venues assessed for security, 15 deadly plots foiled since 9/11 and 52 preachers of hate banned from entering the country.

Liberty, he said, was “the first and founding value of our country” and security was “the first duty of government”. Then Mr Brown came down very firmly on the side of security.

Strip away the phrases about “the British way” being to consult widely and build in additional safeguards and protections, and this was a distinctly authoritarian statement.

The key features were the cementing in place of a powerful overarching security apparatus (most visible in the form of a uniformed border force at all ports), an expansion of the state’s powers to monitor the activities of citizens and visitors and an increase in the powers of the police to detain citizens without charge.

By next year Britain’s secret intelligence agencies and counter-terrorist police forces will be twice the size they were in 2001. They will have a single security budget (currently £2 billion) and will be supervised by the National Security Committee which will publish a national security strategy annually.

At ground level, Mr Brown is enhancing the capability of the state to place people under some form of surveillance and monitoring.

“The way forward,” he said, “is electronic screening of all passengers as they check in and out of our country at ports and airports.”

The aim is to detect terrorist suspects, criminals and illegal immigrants. But the means of achieving that aim requires collection of profiling data on every person travelling in and out of the country.

The PM spoke of “electronic exit control”, the use of “passenger information” and the wonders of biometric visas and iris recognition machinery.

He also spoke of “maximum co-operation internationally”, the linking up of international databases and watchlists to prevent terrorist suspects using false or stolen identities from slipping through the net.

In practice, that appears to mean that every passenger flying from Britain to the United States will be subjected to anti-terrorist screening and that information will be shared with US homeland security officials. Such information has long been sought by US officials, especially since 7/7 when London was bombed by British citizens.

On the constantly contentious issue of pre-charge detention periods for terror suspects Mr Brown made it plain there would have to be an increase in the current limit of 28 days.

The police have quietly outlined a powerful case for what are far-reaching powers to arrest, detain and interview suspects. Terrorist investigations are desperately complex, involving encrypted computers, multiple mobile phones and myriad international links.

After being widely criticised when they lobbied publicly for 90 days, the police have gone about their task more subtly this time.

“We’re not asking for any specific amount of days - but we have made it clear that we’re pushing up to the limit, we need more time and we’ll need it soon,” said one police source.

Mr Brown said he would seek to achieve consensus on extending the detention limit up to 56 days but it seems pretty clear that the enhanced powers will be agreed.

Some of the safeguards he proposed, however, seemed fraught with future difficulties. The Prime Minister spoke of reviews and debates in parliament when a request was received to detain a suspect beyond 28 days.

But a high-profile Commons debate on a live investigation ahead of criminal charges would surely drive a coach and horses through the contempt of court and subjudice rules.

Defence lawyers say those rules are essential for a fair trial. Critics maintain, however, that they are outdated and stifle the debate on the terror threat.

Does Mr Brown envisages a radical overhaul of those rules or is he raising the the spectre of a future security statement in which a Prime Minister might call for consultation on abolishing jury trial in terror cases?

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