So that's what they mean by 'respect' - that grotesque manhandling of an elderly man out into the streets because he dared mutter a word of protest against the Iraq war.

This is the Government that's supposed to represent the poor, the old, the disadvantaged - all those people who would otherwise have no voice. It's a long time since it has, of course. We all know that. We've all heard the reassuring words aimed at the comfortably middle class, at big business, at right-wing America, at millionaire newspaper owners.

And now, last week, there are those echoes of Nazi Germany, as that old man, who fled from it, must have known only too well.

All right, I know security's a big problem these days, especially at party conferences. Every government at one of these seaside jaunts must have the spectre of the Brighton bomb before its eyes. And then there've been those terrible more recent bombs. And if there aren't bombs to fear, then there's this Government's other big fear - that it might lose elections by appealing only to its obvious constituents, those same people at the bottom of the heap who are in any case staying away from the polling stations in droves.

But fear makes for very bad government. I'm a historian, as well as a novelist. I once wrote a novel set in 1818, in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and not so very long after the French Revolution.

Unless they've had reason to do so, not many people know much about the British government of those days. There are no great names to remember, like Churchill or Attlee or Pitt the Younger. Who's heard of the then Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool? He was a well-intentioned man, with a certain amount of vision. But he and his Cabinet were governing in fear. They were terrified that the ideas of the French Revolution had spread throughout England and that the poor would rise to demand liberty, equality and the heads of the aristocrats. So his government, which might otherwise have brought in real reforms, brought in savage laws against trades unions and political meetings, and brutally repressed any opposition.

They're remembered now, if at all, for imprisoning radicals and for the Peterloo massacre, when troops fired on a throng of peaceful protestors in Manchester.

You could say the Labour Party too, growing from the trades unions, had its roots in those frightened times. But if those things are remembered, the government that tried to strangle them at birth is not - or only for the wrong reasons.

Is that how Tony Blair wants to be remembered by history- as the leader of a Government so paralysed by fear that the good things it tries to do are overwhelmed in the panic to avoid the things it fears?

So instead of a revived health service, good local schools, the freedom to dissent, we have an old man bundled out of conference just as Mosley's henchman might have done to a Labour Party member in the Thirties. And then, to make things worse, he finds himself handed over to police for questioning under the anti-terrorism act. All this, for opposing a war that by now a majority of people in this country think was - at the very least - a terrible mistake.

It does make you wonder what the Labour Party stands for nowadays.

Published: 06/10/2005