Robert Buckland Weblog

Its never great to be on the receiving end of modern heckling – I don’t know a speaker or politician who genuinely enjoys it nowadays. In times long gone by, Lloyd George and Aneurin Bevan were expert at rebutting hecklers by using wit, but they operated when public meetings attracted large numbers of what would now be termed “real people”. Nowadays, most such affairs attract only the terminally committed – some would say the terminally mad – or those with the aim of disrupting proceedings. Old-fashioned hecklers often took advantage of a speaker’s pause, or sought to answer a rhetorical question. Very often, they were cruel but funny. Heckling was part of the “sport” of politics. Mr. Walter Wolfgang, now on Labour’s NEC but evicted from Labour’s conference last year for shouting “rubbish” at Jack Straw (entirely justifiably, in my humble opinion) is a representative of that ancient and honourable tradition.

Most modern hecklers only seek to make a statement or chant a slogan that is a complete non sequitur to the words of the speaker. They do not want a dialogue with the speaker, merely an opportunity to get their cause before the cameras. Visual displays or physical attacks are part of their weaponry. This is why the modern politician should justifiably dread the heckler. Some of them are downright dangerous.

I am no friend of this Home Secretary, but when I say that I am glad he was heckled by these individuals, I do not mean it in the sense that I revel in his discomfiture. I mean that it is better that we see the face of intolerant, extremist muslim activism, and hear its voice directly. Those names and faces that we heard about today aren’t just mad hecklers, however. These people are, to coin a phrase, the enemy within. They do not want dialogue with us. They do not want to co-exist peacefully with us. They want nothing less than the end of Western liberal society. Those of us who try to follow the Christian faith are as much threatened as those with no such allegiance. Smilarly, those of us who follow the true path of Islam, namely a peaceful and civilised adherence to the tenets of the Koran, are as much in danger as the rest of us.
Note their names and faces, and remember that they are not alone. Our intelligence services will, I hope, be working night and day to frustrate their schemes. Whilst Dr. Reid and I may differ greatly about some of the means used to deal with this threat, I do not think that these people can be ignored. They already seek to intimidate us with bombs and threats. They will find that we of the West are made of sterner stuff than they can possibly imagine and that when they heckle and talk in the way they did today, they reveal themselves as enemies of the entire civilised world.