The Implementation Plan would weaken police capability and contained "a further raft of concessions" to nationalists and republicans, the Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary, Mr Andrew Mackay, said yesterday.
The British government wanted to "take the politics out of policing,"he said, but this plan would do the reverse. Mr Mackay said the Conservative Party was alarmed by plans for the Policing Board that would undermine the operational independence of the Chief Constable, changes to the Special Branch, phasing out the full-time reserve and the plan to give greater powers of investigation to the Police Ombudsman.
"Conservatives believe that it is fundamentally wrong to allow the political mouthpieces of fully-armed terrorist organisations to sit in judgment on the police through the new Policing Board or the District Policing Partnerships," he said. "Yet rather than strengthening the safeguards against convicted terrorists sitting on these bodies, the plan offers the prospect of weakening them."
Without lasting peace and actual decommissioning it would be "dangerous folly" for London to proceed with any scaling down of police numbers and with plans to make the police accountable "to people who have yet to demonstrate a commitment to peaceful and democratic means".
He added: "All of this comes at a time when the security situation in Northern Ireland remains serious, when terrorist organisations have failed to decommission a single bullet or ounce of Semtex, and when the police face greater public disorder than at any time since the 1981 hungerstrikes."