Security Guards and the Political meeting
It is difficult to believe with my current working lifestyle of working for eight hour a day, that I was once working a security guard. I need to point out that the job was only temporary whilst I was at night school, but it was still a very real experience.
Possibly my main claim to fame is being on duty at the Labour Conference during a vociferous demonstration on animal rights in 2006. It wasn’t enough for the party to rely solely upon the police as their only source of security, they also needed to hire a specialist service provider to bring in extra support. Much of this thinking was in place as a result of the IRA bomb on the Grand Hotel in 1984. This naturally caused widespread destruction within the hotel, and nearly succeeded in assassinating Mrs Thatcher and members of the cabinet. The landscape of politics change over time, terrorist come and go, but policies stay active until another catastrophic event comes along to change it.
Security guards work in tandem with the police force, who find it hard not to look down upon their ‘inferiors’ from the private sector. It is ironic that many of the private security specialist were themselves once on the police force.
As a security guard at the Party Conference, I have memories that will stay with me for many years to come. For some unknown reason I thought my duties would not be any more stressful than stopping people from dropping litter, or moving on motorists. Sometimes a small number of people try to drive up to the entrance of the conference, just to ask directions to the clearly signposted carparks! It takes quite a bit of driving to successfully negotiate the concrete barriers specially erected for the conference, but there are the few that succeed.
Within an hour of the beginning of the conference, a boisterous crowd was beginning to arrive and they didn’t seem like friendly protesters. The security company told us that they were a committed group hell bent on disruption in advance of the parliamentary debate on foxhunting. The thoughts that were going through my mind as I was being sworn at and spat upon, was all the site clearance work that would be needed after they had all gone home!
