LONDON, England — Paula Newton writes below on the British Government shelving plans to extend pre-charge detention limits for terrorism suspects from 28 to 42 days.

UK Security Minister Alan West.

As a follow-up, it’s worth noting comments today from the the country’s security minister, Alan West, about the nature of the threat facing Britain.

Now, West has “misspoken” in the past. He had to be rapped on the knuckles last year after he appeared to express a certain ambivalence towards the very counterterrorism legislation he was about to pilot through the House of Lords. (Something he clearly failed to do with the loss of the vote in the upper chamber yesterday.) But his latest comments are stark and give pause for thought.

“The threat is huge,” he said.

Yes, we’ve heard that sort of thing before. But it’s the next bit, albeit awkwardly worded, that’s more interesting.

“The threat dipped slightly and is now rising again with the context of severe, large complex plots, because we unraveled one the damage it caused to Al Qaeda actually faded slightly.

“They are now building up again. There is another great plot building up again and we are monitoring this.”

It’s the last bit that grabs my attention. Rather than the numbers game that MI5 has played in recent years, we have a reference, it seems, to one, great, specific plot.

The analysis about the ebb and flow of the threat is interesting as well and it tallies with something I heard from a senior figure in the UK counterterrorism firmament earlier this year.

His analysis at that time (May) was that there had been a pause in centrally directed Al Qaeda operations in the UK. There was still a huge amount of activity being monitored by police and the intelligence agencies, he said, but no big plots.

His assessment was that Al Qaeda had taken a bit of a beating in the UK with more than sixty terrorism convictions. He characterized it thus: “Somewhere someone [in Al Qaeda] has been saying, ‘we’ve taken losses in the UK, what do we do now?’”

That was then, this is now. And things really do appear to have changed.

Lord West’s comments follow hot on the heels of a security briefing from a “senior Whitehall source” that the current threat level is almost as high as it was immediately after 7/7. It’s not critical yet (the highest level), according to the “source,” but it is at “the severe end of severe.”