Yesterday an idiot made it worse for many other people, and without any gain for anyone but “security” officials. The “pie” gesture was not even funny on its own terms; and an attack on any eighty-year old man is that of either an imbecile or a bully. The immediate consequence was that all the public, many of whom had waited up to eight hours, were cleared from the committee room.
But there will perhaps be another longer-lasting effect. Those charged with security at the Houses of Parliament hardly need any more excuse to add to their grand theatre of anti-terrorism. When I first visited the Palace of Westminster in the late 1980s, there was relatively little security, even though there was the clear and present danger of Irish republican attacks. And once you were in, you could walk around reasonably freely.
Now, there is as much ceremony getting into Parliament as when the Queen actually opens it. There are queues, photographs, machine guns, elaborate bag-searches, and very serious faces. The uniformed officials seem to revel in taking even trivial items from frightened visitors and exercising their moment of power. By the time you get through all this you are highly conscious of the power of Parliament’s officials, and also the lack of your own.
And thanks to the idiot Jonathan May-Bowles this will undoubtedly get worse. It may well be that the public will be excluded from certain hearings, or partitioned off. Those seeking to legitimately lobby their Members of Parliament will be subjected to more intense searches and, indeed, humiliations by “security” officials.
One has no idea what he was hoping to achieve with his stunt; but we can be fairly certain what “security” officials will try to achieve off the back of it.
Addendum
Jonathan May-Bowles has now set out his account of the incident here.
David Allen Green is legal correspondent of the New Statesman. He is the author of the Jack of Kent blog and can be followed on Twitter and on Facebook.
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