MI5 is the first and obvious winner in the sweeping reforms announced last week. For most of the past century it and the now-to-be-scrapped Special Branch have been more rivals than partners in guarding Britain from terrorists and spies.

Traditionally,. Special Branch officers recruited from the ranks of the regular police despised and distrusted MI5 security service agents as devious tricksters and intriguers. MI5 senior agents routinely looked down their noses at Special Branch officers as being dim "flatfoots," good only for making arrests after they had done all the hard intelligence work.

Relations between the two services hit historic lows in the 1940s and '50s. There have been widespread suspicions since that in those decades MI5 was systematically penetrated at the highest levels by Soviet communist moles - deep cover, deep penetration spies.

However, over the past quarter century, since the premiership of Margaret Thatcher, relations between the two services have improved greatly, and they formed a highly effective partnership in neutralizing and blocking the terrorist operations of the Irish Republican Army during its 1969-1994 quarter-century terror campaign.

However, the July 7 suicide bombings that killed 52 innocent people along with the four bombers and injured 700 more served notice to British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his security chiefs that radical expanded and changed security structures were needed to fight the new menace of terrorists often recruited from within Britain's 1.6 million to 2 million Muslim minority.

As a result, Special Branch has been scrapped and MI5 has finally won its long battle to be the undisputed and centralized premier domestic security service of Britain. Even before Special Branch was scrapped, the Blair government had approved the recruitment of at least 500 more full time agents to MI5 and a major increase in its funding.

Now, even though an expanded Counter Terror Command is going to be made out of the London Metropolitan Police, or Met's, old Anti-Terrorism Squad, the crucial intelligence gathering and surveillance functions will be centered more than ever in MI5.

One of the reasons the old MI5-Special branch dichotomy and rivalry was tolerated for so long was that it was seen as essential to preserve Britain's civil liberties by preventing either agency from centralizing power too much into itself.

But the threat of the security bombers is now so severe that this potential threat to civil liberties, along with other curtailments of them, are being seen as necessary prices to pay for securing increased protection for the British public.

Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, the high-profile head of MI5 made this clear in a speech delivered in The Hague, capital of the Netherlands on Sept. 1. Clearly vetted and approved by Blair and his senior colleagues first, the speech was seen as so important that it was given maximum publicity this week by being published on MI5's own web-site.

And in it Manningham-Buller, without directly referring to the scrapping of Special Branch and the sweeping restructuring of Britain's domestic services that it has launched, made very clear the reasons for the changes.

"The world has changed and there needs to be a debate on whether some erosion of what we all value may be necessary to improve the chances of our citizens not being blown apart as they go about their daily lives. Another dilemma," she said.

The centralization of domestic intelligence-gathering in Manningham-Buller's own -- now to be expanded - MI5 will be an inevitable consequence of the scrapping of Special Branch, even though, as she acknowledged, it may erode civil liberties.

The new Counter-Terror Command, will work very closely with MI5 but looks more likely to be at its beck and call rather than overlap with it and act as a rival or restraint upon it, as Special Branch did for so long.

Also, the CTC looks certain to accelerate a process that has been slowly but relentlessly continuing for decades - the subordination of Britain's many local police forces to the London Met's elite units in major cases.

It has been routine procedure over the past century and more for local British police forces, or constabularies, to request the help of ace detectives from Scotland Yard, the Met's legendary elite detective branch, on major cases, especially murders. But Britain has always taken great pains to avoid setting up a national police structure such as has been routine in many continental nations.

Most Americans do not realize that Britain has never had any equivalent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a national police or detective force directed from the capital that automatically takes over the investigation and the gathering of evidence to assure prosecution in major crimes.

But the creation of the CTC looks certain to change that. Britain's security chiefs know that al-Qaida and other international terrorist groups could strike at "soft" targets around the country far from London.

After the July 7 bombings, there was, for example, a major security alert on airports and other transportation centers across Scotland. But Britain's many local police forces simply lack the resources, as well as the training, experience and equipment, to run precautionary alerts or major investigations by themselves.

And, ironically it was two high-profile bungles by London's own police - the stabbing of a policeman some years ago by an Islamist suspect after he had been apprehended in an apartment, and the shooting dead of an innocent Brazilian after the July bombings when he was wrongly thought to be a possible terrorist - that brought home to British planners the urgent need to have elite, highly trained counter-terror police squads that could react rapidly to crises anywhere in Britain. The CTC is designed to fill that gap.

The growth of MI5, the scrapping of Special Branch and the creation of the CTC are also consistent with the huge growth in the power of Britain's central government that has taken place under Prime Ministers Blair and Thatcher.

The concern of British civil libertarians at these developments is understandable. But for almost 940 years, since the Norman Conquest of 1066, Britain has been remarkable for the way it combined an efficient centralized state with a greater respect for civil liberties than almost any other society on earth.

The new police reforms and consolidation of powers needs to be seen within the restraining context of that "Great Tradition."

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