It’s 29 Years Since the Battle of the Beanfield, and the World Has Changed Immeasurably

29 years ago, on June 1, 1985, a convoy of around 450 men, women and children — travellers, anarchists, free festival goers and green activists — were ambushed by 1,400 police from six counties and the Ministry of Defence, and decommissioned with a violence that has rarely been paralleled in modern British history.

The convoy was en route to Stonehenge, to set up what would have been the 11th annual free festival in the fields opposite Britain’s most famous ancient monument, but the savage decommissioning of the travellers’ vehicles, their mass arrest, and the raising of a military-style exclusion zone around Stonehenge put paid to that prospect.

The exclusion zone was raised every June for the next 13 years, until the law lords ruled it illegal in 1999, and since then English Heritage have allowed unfettered access to the stones on the summer solstice, with up to 30,000 revellers — everyone from pagan priests to teenage party-goers — availing themselves of the “Managed Open Access” policy.

The irony — not lost on the survivors of the free festival — is that, in the festival years, only a few hundred of the tens of thousands of people who visited the festival every June actually crossed the road from the festival grounds to the stones, whereas now, after the long years of exclusion, all the authorities have managed to achieve is to stage, in the stone circle itself, a far bigger party than the festivals’ organisers could ever have dreamed of.

While there may be some humour in this situation, there is nothing funny about what happened to the travellers’ movement as a whole. In the aftermath of the Beanfield, Margaret Thatcher’s government passed legislation — the Public Order Act of 1986 — which began the criminalisation of large unlicensed public gatherings and the elimination of the travellers’ movement — the new nomadic culture that had arisen in the late 1970s as a response to the mass unemployment of the time and that had grown spectacularly under Margaret Thatcher, as she laid waste to the British state to pursue her malignant dream of a country run solely for profit by the private sector.

The counter-culture wasn’t wiped out immediately. Unexpectedly, rave culture appeared in the late ’80s, creating a mass movement of dissent, and other developments — the road protest movement and Reclaim the Streets, for example — also seized the popular imagination, feeding into the anti-globalisation movement that took off globally at the end of the 1990s.

Nevertheless, the government refused to accept widespread dissent — either as part of a genuinely open society, or, more importantly, as a considered response to the problems of capitalism, especially after the fall of Communism, and the establishment’s mistaken belief that this somehow vindicated capitalism as the world’s only viable economic model.

In response to rave culture, the government of John Major passed the Criminal Justice Act of 1994, which built on the repressive tendencies of the Public Order Act to outlaw unlicensed gatherings of more than a few people, to criminalise trespass and to do away with the requirements to provide sites for gypsies and other travellers.

As the anti-globalisation movement grew, governments responded with ever greater repression. In Genoa, in 2001, Italian police murdered a protestor, and in the UK the police came up with a new response to protest — kettling, the systematic imprisonment of large groups of protestors behind unbreakable police lines, for many hours, with food, drink and access to toilets denied.

Then, whether fortuitously or not, came 9/11 and the “war on terror,” which provided a perfect excuse for the West’s increasingly authoritarian governments to further clamp down on civil liberties and human rights, and to promote permanent war and a permanent climate of fear as a powerful but deeply cynical way of controlling entire populations.

Where once there had been some tolerance, and some give and take from the establishment, now inflexible governments sought to suppress all dissent except the most anodyne kind. In the UK, Tony Blair than went one step further, swatting aside the largest protest in British history — the two million-strong march in February 2003, against the war in Iraq, as though two million of us were nothing more than a single fly.

In doing so, he gained the undying, implacable opposition — even hatred — of many of those two million people, although some, of course, concluded only that all protest is futile. Furthermore, as Blair’s other drive, undertaken with his Chancellor, Gordon Brown — to eradicate socialism from the UK, to further Thatcher’s dream of a corporate state, and to turn the provision of housing into a casino of greed — became entrenched in the first decade of New Labour rule, the dissenting voices of the counter-culture were increasingly silenced.

As materialism, narcissism and self-obsession became the drivers of society, the impulses of the counter-culture — the voices of communality, the iconoclasts, the would-be land reformers and the environmentally conscious — became sidelined.

In 2011 and 2012, the Occupy movement represented a brief reawakening of many of these impulses, but after a brief flurry of mainstream interest in its otherwise marginalised demands — for land reform, socialism, and governments interested in creating employment rather than merely pimping for bankers, the super-rich and corporations — it was eventually suppressed.

Now, of course, with the shameful, embarrassing and, in many ways, profoundly troubling rise of populist, white, right-wing movements of bigots, xenophobes and racists blaming immigrants and the European Union for the crimes committed by and on behalf of the banks, corporations and the super-rich (step forward UKIP in the UK), the revival of a popular left-wing movement — or, probably more pertinently, the creation of a brand-new socialist movement — looks, disturbingly, to be further away than ever.

Echoes of fascism and fears of fascism are never far away when this type of darkness takes hold, and while I and many, many other people wonder when people will wake up in significant numbers, and if there is a way of creating solidarity that we haven’t thought of, I lament today, as I do every year on June 1, for the lost dissent of the counter-culture of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, and the increasingly harried and endangered right to think differently, and to swim against the prevailing cultural tide.

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).