A man who threw glitter over Keir Starmer at the start of his Labour conference speech this week in Liverpool has said he is sorry for his actions. Yaz Ashmawi told the Guardian he regretted having touched the Labour leader at the beginning of his speech on Tuesday as part of a protest calling for changes to the UK’s voting system. Starmer jokingly brushed off the incident, in which Ashmawi stormed the stage and tipped green glitter over him before being dragged off by security, telling conference delegates it demonstrated why he wanted “power, not protest”. However, the shadow justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, said she thought questions would be asked about how Ashmawi was able to evade security and get on to the stage.
In an interview with the Guardian, Ashmawi said: “It was an instinctive thing and then he touched my hand, so there was a sort of mutual grip. But politicians are like everyone else and they need to feel safe in any environment. I recognise that I should have been more respectful of it,” he said. “Using glitter I think is fair play but non-violence direct action is all about stopping real harm, and so if even for a second he was worried about his safety then that is horrible. I was thinking about it in the police cell afterwards and every day since. I regret it.” Ashmawi said he had deliberately joined Labour in order to gain access to the event, and received an email from the party within an hour of the protest informing him that he was suspended as a member and was under investigation. “I’m sure I’m going to be chucked out,” he said. Others had also attempted to gain access to the event for what would have been a much larger protest but security arrangements meant their past records prevented them from getting in, he said. People Demand Democracy, the group he is part of and which draws members from a range of backgrounds, was planning future actions to highlight its campaign for a radical “update” of representative democracy over the course of the coming general election, he said. “We really believe that what the suffragettes did more than a hundred years ago is something worth following on from,” he said. “They were unwilling to take ‘no’ for an answer and interrupted political panels when they could. It’s likely we’ll see similar things happening from here.” Asked in Fubar Radio’s Politics Uncensored podcast whether he would like to apologise to the Labour leader, he said: “Yes, absolutely. I’m sorry for doing that.” Separately, Ashmawi told the BBC he was sorry “for putting my hand on him and touching him when he wasn’t expecting it”. He added: “Politicians get a lot of death threats and they have a need to feel safe and I compromised that in that moment by touching him.”
Ashmawi ran on to the stage just as the Labour leader was about to begin his speech, and tipped glitter over Starmer before shouting: “We demand a people’s house!” The impact of the protest was hampered, however, by Starmer using his right arm to keep him away from speaking directly into the microphone. Ashmawi told Fubar that after being dragged out of the conference hall he was arrested and kept in a cell for 22 hours. Police said they had arrested a 28-year-old man on suspicion of assault, breaching the peace and causing a public nuisance, which Ashwami confirmed was him. He has since been put on bail. Starmer said afterwards that Ashmawi had been an “idiot” for disrupting his speech, although he added: “It could have been a lot worse.” Labour, however, has sought to maximise the publicity from the incident, selling T-shirts for £20 with the slogan: “Sparkle with Starmer.”