Back in Print: The Battle of the Beanfield, Marking Margaret Thatcher’s Destruction of Britain’s Travellers

Abandoned in Guantánamo: Mohammed Tah... Meet the Cleared Algerian Prisoners i...

Back in Print: The Battle of the Beanfield, Marking Margaret Thatcher’s Destruction of Britain’s Travellers

[image error] Buy The Battle of the Beanfield here.

Yesterday, December 1, 2013, was a cheerless anniversary of sorts — 28 and a half years since the Battle of the Beanfield, on June 1, 1985, when 1,300 police from six counties and the MoD trapped and violently decommissioned a convoy of several hundred travellers — men, women and children, the new nomads of the UK, including free festival goers, anarchists, and anti-nuclear activists — en route to Stonehenge to establish what would have been the 12th annual Stonehenge Free Festival. From humble origins in 1974, the festival had grown, by 1984, into a month-long counter-cultural extravaganza attended by tens of thousands of people, and in 1985, fresh from her success in suppressing the miners, Margaret Thatcher turned her attention to the festival and its loose network of organisers, planning to destroy it as ruthlessly as she was destroying British industry.

in 2005, to mark the 20th anniversary of this key event in the modern state’s clampdown on dissent, I compiled and edited a book about the Battle of the Beanfield, drawing on transcripts I made of interviews with travellers and witnesses to the events of the day and the months building up to it that were recorded for a 1991 TV documentary, “Operation Solstice” (screened on Channel 4 and available to buy here); the police log, liberated from a court case brought by some of the victims of the Beanfield; and other relevant information, book-ended with essays putting the Beanfield in context, written by myself and Alan Dearling, whose publishing company, Enabler Publications, launched the book in June 2005.

Eight and a half years later, The Battle of the Beanfield is still in print, and, to slightly contradict the heading of this article, it has never actually been out of print, although in summer, when Alan and I reprinted it, I was down to my last few copies. You can buy it here, in time for Christmas, if you, or anyone you’re hoping to buy a present for, was there, was affected by it, or is simply interested in knowing more about one of the key events that shaped the relationship between the state and those perceived as difficult. I should note that my previous book, “Stonehenge: Celebration & Subversion,” is also still available, as is my third book, “The Guantánamo Files.”

After years of exclusion from Stonehenge on the solstice, revellers secured a court victory in 1999 that allowed their return to the great stones on the solstice in 2000, for a programme of “Managed Open Access” that takes place every year, attended by tens of thousands of people.

Elsewhere, though, the assault on the traveller community and the laws that followed it paved the way not only for the permanent oppression of travellers and gypsies, but also the rolling back of the British people’s ability to gather freely and to collectively challenge the status quo. Although the Beanfield was followed by unexpected movements of dissent — acid house and warehouse raves, the road protest movement, Reclaim the Streets, the massive anti-globalisation movement of the late 1990s — it seems to me that the 21st century has brought to an end the kind of dissent that played such a prominent part in post-war Britain, and, particularly, from the 1960s to the 1990s.

Following on from the laws enacted from the Beanfield to the 1990s, the 9/11 attacks allowed the government of Tony Blair to further curtail civil liberties, to an alarming degree, and to enshrine the erosion of human rights as a key element of modern government. And of course, Blair also drove the illegal invasion of Iraq, and the state of permanent war and jingoistic nationalism that we now seem to be stuck with. In addition, housing — a basic necessity for all — has become, instead, the key driver of the economy, manifested through a bubble that is artificially maintained by the government and the banks, working to further enrich the rich, and to make sure that what would be best for people and the economy as a whole — a massive programme of social homebuilding, to create genuinely affordable homes for rent — is not going to happen.

Making a property bubble into the main focus of the economy is a dangerous and disgustingly greedy distortion of a well-functioning economy, but it is not surprising given that it is part of the overall criminal behaviour of the financial markets, unregulated and still out of control, even though they crashed the global economy in 2008 — and, it must be noted, their largely unquestioning and complicit backers in government.

Since the time of the Beanfield, when the status quo was permanently challenged, experimentation and iconoclasm were rife, money was not the only arbiter of existence, and, for various reasons, the doors of perception were wide open, it seems to me that life has shrunk, and has had its spirit crushed. It is impossible now to imagine tens of thousands of people responding to massive unemployment by taking to the road in old coaches and buses and former military vehicles, although for many people today — and especially young people, plagued with massive unemployment — it would make even more sense than it did in the 1970s and 1980s.

That, however, looks extremely unlikely. 28 years ago, it was unimaginable that the present would look like it does now, but what we are currently living through has no room for nomadic romanticism and iconoclasm on a shoestring. Instead, the world now demonstrates the triumph of excessive materialism, in which everything has been commodified, and far too many of my fellow human beings seem to have become nothing more than dead-eyed, gym-pumped machines. In this world, driven by shark-toothed, insatiable greed on an unthinkable scale, in institutions that like to pretend they are lawful and appropriate when they are no such thing, I long for the return of the kind of dissent that I experienced at Stonehenge in 1983 and 1984, or in 1995 at the first “Reclaim the Streets” event in Camden High Street, when dissenters crashed two old cars and took over Camden High Street for the day, taking back “our” spaces from the cars that dominated us then and that dominate us even more completely now — or any of the events that followed, including the takeover of the M41 in Shepherd’s Bush in July 1996, the massive J18 Carnival Against Capital in the City of London in June 1999, and the other anti-globalisation protests that took place around the world at the end of the 20th century and the start of the 21st.

Ditch the car, stop being greedy, unplug yourselves from your i-Pods and your smart phones and interact with the world around you: these are messages that could have been beamed to the present from 1985, from the world I commemorated in The Battle of the Beanfield, and the spirit whose absence pains me as Britain, my home, descends into hard, harsh, tiny-minded xenophobia and racism and flag-waving pea-brained nationalism, and the only perceived virtues are greed, exploitation, worship of the rich and hatred of the poor.

Below is an excellent 50-minute “Reclaim the Streets” documentary, via YouTube, chronicling the protest movement of the 1990s:

For further information, see my articles “Stonehenge and the summer solstice: past and present” (2008), “In the Guardian: Remembering the Battle of the Beanfield” (linking to my 2009 Guardian article, “Remember the Battle of the Beanfield”), “It’s 25 Years Since The Last Stonehenge Free Festival” (2010), “New Photo Book on the 1994 Solsbury Hill Road Protest,” “The Battle of the Beanfield 25th Anniversary: An Interview with Phil Shakesby” (featuring one of the chapters from the book), “Stonehenge Summer Solstice 2010: Remembering the Battle of the Beanfield,” “RIP Sid Rawle, Land Reformer, Free Festival Pioneer, Stonehenge Stalwart,” “Happy Summer Solstice to the Revellers at Stonehenge — Is it Really 27 Years Since the Last Free Festival?” (2011), “Remember the Battle of the Beanfield: It’s the 27th Anniversary Today of Thatcher’s Brutal Suppression of Traveller Society” (2012), “Radio: On Eve of Summer Solstice at Stonehenge, Andy Worthington Discusses the Battle of the Beanfield and Dissent in the UK,” “It’s 28 Years Since Margaret Thatcher Crushed Travellers at the Battle of the Beanfield” and “Memories of Youth and the Need for Dissent on the 29th Anniversary of the last Stonehenge Free Festival” (both 2013).

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here – or here for the US).