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It will bite them in the bum in the end.
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How? Since it's hard to explain the intricacies of poor legislation to people who think Big Brother is 10 weeks of sofa-bound vegetative behaviour in the summer, the only way Labour will lose is when people get bored with them, which will probably be at the next election.
What will bite them in the mean time is the new unofficial opposition of the judiciary (the point about Straw and Irvine is that they *increased* the power of the judiciary with things like the Human Rights Act which allows all other legislation to be struck down if incompatible, as happened with Blunkett's original anti-terror rubbish).
Judges and the executive are therefore having a lot of tussles at the moment (if there's a judge who likes Clarke and Blunkett I haven't met him, my contacts tell me that most judges would speed up if either man were observed crossing the road ahead of them, confident that the beak in the subsequent murder trial would look very favourably on it).
Now, ideally you don't have to rely on unelected legal experts to hold the Government to account, because in Parliament you have a proper, functioning opposition. We have Michael's Muppet Squad, which really isn't good enough, hence it's important to watch what the Government does to the judges and vice versa - including the Inquiries Act, which is a definite land-grab from the judiciary.