Conference Handling - People not Policies!

If ever there was a day of bad publicity for the New Labour fantasy project, then this was one of them! The family of Jean Charles de Menezes, the young Brazilian gunned down in London as a "suspected terrorist", arrive to turn up the heat on the shoot-to-kill policy of the Met. Then there is news of the slowest UK GDP growth in 12 years! Takes the shine off Gordon Brown's future, maybe? And Labour lose vital conference motions on health and pensions! It's all going a bit pear-shaped.

Great Grimsby MP Austin Mitchell is furious at what he believes is the unnecessarily tough security at the Brighton conference centre. He has attacked as "mad and over the top" the way he was treated after his camera was seized and pictures deleted. Mr Mitchell, a keen amateur photographer, was taking photographs of the queues when stewards demanded to know what he was doing. He said: "The police were called over and asked if they could look at my pictures. I said of course they could but I did not want the pictures deleted. I kept repeating that I did not want the shots deleted and the police officer said it was alright because he didn't know how to use the camera. After he handed it back to me I found he had deleted every picture. This is security gone mad. And what's the point. The party has given the security staff absolute carte blanche and they have gone mad. It's completely over the top."

And over the top it certainly was for the pensioner, Walter Wolfgang, who is 82, and who was grabbed by two security officers and removed from the main hall. As a follow-on from the post below, it is now known that Walter fled Nazi Germany, has been a Labour parliamentary candidate, and is well-known as a dissenter of the Iraq war. No way to treat him, though, by getting these goons to man-handle him. One security officer seemed to take pleasure in hauling the old guy up from his seat. When confronted by the BBC this "security man" was stuffing cake into his mouth "Nice piece of cake" he spluttered with a certain sarcasm, as he walked briskly into some ante-chamber!

Mr. Wolfgang tried to re-enter the hall but was detained by the police under the new Terrorism laws! Is this New Labour gone control-freak crazy? If ever we get ID cards, watch out for the police and the Terrorism laws! The police now seem well locked into the New Labour fantasy project. Democracy! And Tony Blair is selling himself to the Iraqis as the democrat-in-chief? What a hypocrite!

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