Robin Wilton's esoterica

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28 Sep · Wed 2005

An Ugly Incident

These days, one would expect a certain amount of stage-management at a political party conference, but this episode today reveals an ugly side of this year's Labour event. 82-year-old Walter Wolfgang, a Labour party member since 1948, heckled Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and was then bustled physically out of the conference by five stewards. Steve Forrest, sitting next to Mr Wolfgang, complained at the stewards' conduct and was promptly manhandled out of the centre himself. This being a party conference, it's not that improbable that Mr Forrest is actually the chairman of a Labour constituency party... so he started trying to phone his MP, John Austin, who (naturally) was also at the conference. Mr Forrest made three attempts to call, and was then threatened by the stewards with confiscation of his phone. Mr Forrest and Mr Wolfgang subsequently had their conference passes taken away; when Mr Wolfgang tried to get back into the conference, a policeman detained him, citing Section 44 of the Terrorism Act. Section 44 provides a blanket authority for a police officer to stop and search a person and their belongings "in an area or at a place specified in the authorisation". In other words, like one of the "10 most secret cases" (the suffragette petition) I mentioned in my previous blog entry, it is not based on the conduct of the person involved, and there is no burden on the police officer to produce evidence of reasonable suspicion: it can be invoked purely on the basis of where you are. That might sound like a law ripe for abuse, and indeed instances have been reported where the police have made deliberate use of Section 44 to inhibit and obstruct protests, where there was no reason to connect the protest to terrorism. Whatever the intent of the Act, a shameful episode like this reveals the danger of framing legislation in ways which make such abuses possible. The Terrorism Act is five years old, but there's plenty of new legislation (both actual and proposed) which is equally open to abuse. Laws on exclusion, deportation, identification, prevention of 'anti-social behaviour', 90-day detention without trial, laws which outlaw incitement to terrorism and incitement to hatred. The list is extensive and growing. The politicians assure us that these laws are well-intentioned, and that they won't be abusively enforced. I am not inclined to take their word for it.

Posted by racingsnake @ 09:33 PM GMT+00:00 [ Comments [2] ]

Comments:

[Trackback] Many critics had always feared that the Terrorism Act would be used for other purposes besides terrorism. Here we see the Act apparently being used to suppress heckling. If there was a covert purpose to the legislation, surely it has been exposed by th...

Posted by POSIWID on September 29, 2005 at 11:08 AM GMT+00:00 #

Thanks Richard. Yes, interesting theory about the possibility of a 'false positive' against Mr Wolfgang.

Posted by Robin Wilton on September 29, 2005 at 02:02 PM GMT+00:00 #

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