Mark Rowe, editor of Professional Security magazine, recalls 1986.
The Security Institute conference in September heard from one speaker of how people may be radicalised to become terrorists within days. I was sitting next to a UK big city university head of security, and out of the corner of my eye noticed he made a note of that. As soon as the event took a break I asked him about it. He agreed it was possible; if someone, maybe with mental health problems, was at the stage where they were making an internet search for terrorism, they could be radicalised very quickly. What a contrast to the beginning of my university days, almost exactly 30 years before. I went to the Bristol Students Union to hear the politician Enoch Powell speak, one Friday lunchtime. Instead some anarchists marched down the aisle and shouted intimidatingly and rocked the stage. Powell understandably left.
It made the newspapers, and indeed Simon Heffer’s biography of Powell. I only vaguely assumed then that I would become a journalist, but did note that one respected broadsheet quoted a student official that the intruders did not use student IDs to get in the building. Another respected newspaper quoted the same man, saying he thought the intruders did use student ID. Only now has it struck me that perhaps both newspapers were accurate; perhaps the official said opposite things to the two papers.
Another meeting was set for the Friday after, even more popular than the one with Powell; such is human nature. It sparked weeks of debate about ‘no platform’ – to give its full title, ‘no platform for fascists’. In passing let me say that whatever you thought or think of Powell, he was no fascist. His meeting evidently had had no security; the meeting about him did, courtesy of rugby club types, who enforced a ban on bottles at the door. I fell foul of that – not through meaning to lob one, but because as a thrifty student I carried a bottle of squash with me. In 1986, no-one dreamed that you could make a liquid bomb, let alone that you might set a bomb off and kill yourself, besides others.
In truth Islamist hate speakers (the shifting, uncomfortable and unresolved labels for ‘extremists’ and ‘terrorists’ is telling) have been around universities (and where else?) since at least the mid-1990s. Few have wanted to face the facts. Now universities have a duty under ‘Prevent’ law to watch for radicalisation, including guest speakers, and that tricky task (because how do you police social media, and the young generally, in a free society?) often drops on the desk of security managers.
At the time like everyone else I saw those lawless people breaking-up Powell’s meeting as sinister – like the poll tax rioters that I saw pass Cambridge Circus in London in 1990 (again, I just happened to be there, I wasn’t one of them, honestly). While not denying the crime against Powell, I’m struck now by how those anarchists restrained themselves, as protesters so often do. They could easily have hurt Powell, an old man. They only sought to spoil the meeting, and they succeeded. Thirty years on, how innocent that seems.
Photo by Mark Rowe; graffiti, south Bristol, September 2016. Security Institute conference
