Liberty

It all started because, as usual when I travel any distance, I read Private Eye on the train to London the other week.  It had an advert for a conference in London arranged by Liberty to celebrate its 75th anniversary. The addresses by the main speakers were to be web-cast to various other locations, including Aston University, Birmingham. There would then be local discussions. The intention behind it all was to promote the idea that we need to oppose further intrusion of the state into our lives and hang on to our human rights generally.  What it would take, I did not know, but I imagined that, at least, there would be demonstrations ahead. Now you may not think me one to flout the law for any reason, but you would be wrong.  By coincidence, I studied for my solicitors final examinations at Aston. Wearing my crash helmet, I went there on my moped every day at a stately 20 miles per hour. The results of our examinations were due to be posted to us, but at midnight on the night before the fateful envelopes were due to arrive, the results could be read in the first edition of the Birmingham Post. So I was at the Birmingham Post and Mail building in the city centre at midnight - and absolutely over the moon to find that I had passed. So delighted was I at my success that on my way along the deserted main road from Birmingham back to Smethwick, I deliberately steered my moped to the right hand side of a keep left bollard - just to celebrate. It isn't just Rock stars who walk on the wild side! And so it was that on the next Saturday morning I went once more to Aston University, in a state of some excitement, for the conference. I had looked on the net and it said to go to the main entrance and follow the signs. At the main entrance, I looked, in vain, for any sign. I asked a security man, who showed me his list of the events for that day. My event was not on it. I went back to my car to check the advert in Private Eye. Yes, I had the right date. I went back to the main entrance and there I spotted an elderly couple dressed in corduroy. I saw at once that they must have dressed for the meeting, and so I followed them through the corridors at a discreet distance. Finally the corduroy couple and I arrived at a lecture hall, where there were about 30 people and a screen showing the scene at the London conference. The event was sponsored by the Guardian and clearly, a lot of the people attending both in London and in Birmingham were Guardian readers and/or sociologists (from Aston University) and of the left generally. A lady from the sociology department had apparently organised it and so introduced the proceedings. Although a keen supporter of human rights, I felt rather like a fish out of water in a world in which it seemed that the Guardian crowd thought that they were the only ones possessed of the 'Truth' and therefore concerned by such matters. It spoke volumes when someone who had the temerity to be a Daily Mail reader had her say in our group. It caused evident shock, even panic, amongst the Guardianisti when it became clear that she too actually thought that the ID scheme was a bad idea. My subsequent revelation that I was only a Times reader was, I felt, greeted with some degree of relief. The question put to us though was how to get the message out. It was only the Daily Mail reader, me and the chap from the organisation 'NO2ID' who made any practical suggestions, the rest of them seeming to content themselves with their various socialist analyses of why the 'new labour' government was not to be trusted. The weight of conspiracy theories hung heavily over the meeting. There was a large lady, wearing an equally large T shirt, which confirmed her proud boast that she belonged to the ‘Troops Out' movement (which is for some reason still going strong). I finally left about a quarter of an hour after she had started what seemed to be an interminable account of her time banging dustbin lids with her fellow demonstrators outside a police station and getting herself arrested somewhere in one of the grottier areas of Birmingham. I don't know what point she was trying to make, but her very presence seemed to excite the sociologists. Presumably they were making a study of her as an example of a Northern Ireland protestor - a sort of living fossil. Unfortunately, the whole thing seemed to be more of a religious convention than a hard-headed attempt to save ourselves from government interference. Whilst it is was rather sad that nothing practical came out of all of this, I suppose I should at least console myself with the fact that those particular left-wing Guardian readers, at least, will never be able to take over the world or indeed, as the Italians genteelly put it, 'find water in the ocean' or, as we Anglo-Saxons more robustly put it, organise a piss-up in a brewery.

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