LONDON, 1 October 2005 — In the heart of the court of Saint Tony in the southern seaside town of Brighton on Tuesday, an 82-year-old ex-Labour candidate committed a heresy so heinous that he was physically ejected from the building and detained by the police under anti-terrorism laws.
His crime? He disagreed with Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and called in a voice weakened by years but not silenced by the stage show, “nonsense” while Straw defended the government’s refusal to withdraw troops from Iraq. “That’s a lie and you know it,” he followed up when Straw claimed that Britain was in Iraq only for the reason of helping the elected Iraqi government.
The conference session at the point where Wolfgang, who has been in the party longer than Blair has been alive, disagreed was thinly attended, though the cameras only revealed this when the scuffle at the back of the hall began.
A younger companion, 35-year-old Steve Forrest who is a devoted party worker and constituency party chairman from Erith in southeast London was thrown out of the building as well when he told the stewards to leave Wolfgang alone as he was an old man.
Forrest had earlier shouted, “hear hear” — that most parliamentary expression and short for “hear the man” — after a previous speaker had called for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Immediately after that, several stewards sat down very close to him.
Wolfgang is a small frail old man and told the huge stewards — of the stature seen in bouncers outside some of the more boisterous nightclubs in Soho — that he would follow them out. Instead of respecting his age, health and perfect right to disagree during the conference of the democratically elected party, they physically picked him up and dragged him out.
When he tried to re-enter the conference, he was detained under the anti-terrorist laws and escorted — the police term, not mine — from the premises by two of the constabulary’s finest.
Those laws were designed to protect solid citizens like Wolfgang, not arrest him. Maybe he was lucky he was infirm enough not to be able to run for a subway train; otherwise he might have been shot under the same Anti-Terrorism Act, as was Brazilian Jean Charles de Menzes on July 22, rather than detained.
The whole episode was shocking to anyone who thought that the UK was being governed by election and consensus. It was riveting television and a window on the heavily orchestrated machinations of the real Labour Party in conclave and a revealing glimpse of the rigorous removal of dissent — by force if necessary — that the Labour government allows. It was a scene more reminiscent of the fringes of the 1930s Nuremberg rallies or a political jamboree in North Korea rather than suburban Britain.
And it was sickening.
However, we live in a country that imprisoned 71-year-old Alfred Ridley, a retired vicar and 73-year-old Sylvia Hardy for a debt of 53.71 pounds in community tax. The tax has been rising each year faster than pensions and for those on fixed income, poverty can easily be the choice between prison for nonpayment or food and warmth. In the fourth richest economy in the world that can find millions of pounds a day to maintain troops and equipment in Iraq and pay for heavyweight minders at the convocation of the party faithful, peaceful protest from people such as Wolfgang and Ms. Hardy will only increase as Tony and his cronies slide the UK toward elected dictatorship.
The whole institution of democracy is defined by criticism and debate; the Labour Party was founded on protest and disagreement.
“New Labour” fabricated a new set of clothes for the emperor, playing up Saint Tony’s charisma — a chimerical quality if there ever was one — and the policy of justice and a better life for all. New “New” Labour seems to be taking on the characteristics of Orwell’s “Animal Farm”: All men are equal (unless they disagree with the leader,) but some (most especially the leaders) are more equal than others.
Before party security is issued with neat brown shirts and polished leather boots, perhaps it is time for a reversion to the principles of old “Old” Labour.
