Guarding the political conference

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.

My main claim to fame was being an official security guard during the Party Political conference of the Labour Party in 2006. It was not enough for the Labour lot to need the police force to protect them, they also needed private force of security guard specialists to give extra help. Most of the current policies on security have been in place since 1984 and the IRA bombing of the Grand Hotel. Obviously this caused massive damage inside the hotel, and almost wiped out the prime minister of the day and most of her 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 alongside 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. Often you will see some people try to drive up to the conference entrance just so they can ask for the whereabouts of the car park! 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 that I would like to get a large quantity of security screens and surround the lot of them!

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