Security Guards and the Political meeting
It is difficult to believe with my current working lifestyle of working for 8 hours a day, that I was once working a security guard. I have to stress that the job was temporary whilst I was studying, but none-the-less it was a real job, in many real situations.
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. Most of the current policies on security have been in place since 1984 and the IRA bombing of the Grand Hotel. This naturally caused widespread destruction within the hotel, and nearly succeeded in assassinating the prime minister and members of the cabinet. The political scene may change, terrorists networks rise up and then dissolve, but some policies are set in stone until the next major event.
Security guards work with the police force, who find it hard not to look down upon their ‘inferiors’ from the private sector. There is a certain irony in the fact that many member of private security companies have at some point been in the police force themselves.
My day as a security guard at a major national event, was one that I will certainly remember for many years. For some reason I thought that my duties would involve asking people not to drop litter, or moving on people who were not allowed to leave their cars nearby. Usually there is a small number of people who drive to the conference entrance, just to ask the officials where they might be able to park their vehicles! 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.
Just prior to the start of the conference, a big riotous mob assembled outside the building, and they were not too friendly. 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!
