NEWS DESK - MICHAEL WALSH - 18^th February 2001

MANCHESTER POLICE STEWARD PRESCOTT MEETING

The supposedly non-political role of the police is once more being questioned after it was revealed that two Manchester police officers acted as unpaid stewards at a Labour Party meeting attended by Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott.

About three hundred Labour Party supporters attended the £5 per head meeting at the Grange Arts Centre in Oldham, Lancashire. Sitting quietly among the audience were school governess Joanna Sagar, 40 and her husband Paul, 46. A member of the audience identified both as pro-hunting supporters; an activity frowned upon by the Labour Party. .

Fearing the possibility of awkward questions being asked by the middle-aged couple burly ex-ship’s waiter John Prescott MP refused to take the platform until the couple were thrown out. The police were called when the couple having paid for their tickets refused to leave the hall. Two uniformed policemen then frogmarched Mr and Mrs Sagar out of the hall.

THE SAGARS PHYSICALLY ASSAULTED

The physical and painful assault known as ‘the frogmarch’ is a particularly brutal and humiliating method of physical assault in which the victims have their arms forced up their backs causing them to double up. It causes discomfit, even extreme pain and is completely disabling. The school governess and her 46-year old husband suffered the degrading experience of being frogmarched through the mob of Labour Party henchmen and physically ejected from the hall.

The standard practice in Britain is for meeting organisers to engage stewards to manage meetings who can ‘use whatever force (restraint) is necessary short of assault’ to remove violent hecklers, those intending to physically prevent the meeting from proceeding. This practice was never intended nor previously used to remove members of an audience who might merely be regarded as potentially critical of the speaker’s views.

The outspoken campaigner for free speech, Michael Walsh, asks why the notorious Chief Constable of Manchester, David Wilmot, allowed his police officers to be used as stewards at a political meeting. He also questions why physical, distressing and humiliating force was used to eject legitimate members of an audience whose only ‘crime’ was to be considered potentially critical of the speaker’s views.

It also raises the question; can organisers of all political meetings and rallies engage the free use of armed policemen to steward their meetings?

The force’s Chief Constable David Wilmot is on record as behaving bizarrely and was recently quoted as declaring that ‘racists’ (those opposed to the Labour Party’s immigration policy), would be dealt with as severely as would rapists and murderers. Evidently any critics of the Blair regime or its henchmen will be literally stamped upon by Wilmot’s armed and unformed thugs.