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 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. Many of the secu­rity ideas and rules have been there since the bomb­ing of the Grand hotel by the IRA in 1984. This nat­u­rally caused wide­spread dev­as­ta­tion 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 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.

The day I had at the Party con­fer­ence was one that will take some beat­ing, and stay in my mind for ever. I had the impres­sion that I would be stand­ing out­side the Brighton Cen­tre ask­ing peo­ple not to drop lit­ter, or mov­ing sus­pi­cious look­ing cars along. 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. My col­leagues told me they were an organ­ises group, deter­mined to protest about the fox­hunt­ing bill that was to be debated in par­lia­ment. 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 fenc­ing and sur­round the lot of them!

Tagged with: concrete barriers • security fencing • Security guards • security screens

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