The first in a new occassional series... Labour MP's who have threatened to have me arrested: Number 1 - Tony McNulty
Tony McNulty is the Home Office Immigration Minister and MP for Harrow East. This means that he is the minister currently responsible for the government's racist laws that target immigrants and asylum seekers. Recently, his proposals include threatening to withhold the wages of low skilled migrant workers and kidnapping the children of failed asylum seekers (the dreaded section 9, now put on hold owing to large-scale campaigning by refugee groups). He is the man charged with deporting failed asylum seekers, including to countries such as Iraq and Zimbabwe.
I met Tony McNulty on the afternoon of the Brent East bye-election in September 2003. He was with Labour candidate Robert Evans, who was being interviewed by ITN outside a primary school in the constituency, and did not seem very happy when we pulled up in our Socialist Alliance Campaign car and repeatedly attempted to conduct our own interview over our tannoy, asking him where Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were (at that time the government was still insisting they existed).
McNulty's exact words to me have been lost over time, but are something along the lines of "We're doing an interview, you'd better move... I've called the police, you're going to get arrested".
He didn't seem very pleased when, half an hour later, we were still disrupting the interview and there was no old bill in sight.
Labour lost that election to the Liberals that night - a seat they had held for decades. It was their first major defeat following the Iraq war. In 2 and a half weeks we can look forward to many more defeats for them, this time at the hands of Respect, and the end of Blair.
