In Basildon today, riot police have been leading the eviction of 86 Gypsy and traveller families from land they own at Dale Farm, but for which they do not have planning permission, hospitalising several residents, tasering others, and generally creating a situation that is reminiscent of the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher regularly used the police as her own private army. See here for more photos.

After a ten-year struggle between Basildon Council and the residents of Dale Farm, the last legal appeal was exhausted last week, when, in the High Court, Mr. Justice Ouseley ruled that the removal of the 86 families was necessary to avoid “the criminal law and the planning system being brought into serious disrepute.”

I don’t deny that the residents of Dale Farm who erected permanent structures on their land, without planning permission, have broken the law, but what seems to be generally ignored, in the haze of self-righteousness from settled people, is the blunt truth that Gypsies and travellers are rarely given planning permission for land they buy.

As Jake Bowers, a Romani journalist, explained in an informative booklet, “Gypsies and Travellers: Their lifestyle, history and culture” (PDF), Gypsy families that attempt to live on their own land are often denied planning permission … The government’s own studies state that over 80% of planning applications from settled people are granted consent, while more than 90% of applications from Gypsies are refused.”

In addition, it needs to be remembered that Gypsies and travellers were only forced into a position where buying land seemed to be a sound idea because the Tory government of John Major repealed the 1968 Caravans Act, which required councils to provide Gypsies and travellers with sites, and, instead, explicitly encouraged them to buy the land which they are then prohibited from using for any kind of permanent structure, as the Dale farm residents have discovered.

Three weeks ago, in my article, The Dale Farm Eviction: How Racism Against Gypsies and Travellers Grips Modern-Day Britain, I ran throughout he whole sad history of how, frost under Margaret Thacher, and then under John major, the stae’s obligationto provide for Gypsies and travellers was eroded, leading to the repeal of the Caravans Act, and I also pointed out how the Labour government did nothing to improve the situation, and the Tory-led coalition government’s localism bill will only make matter worse for Gypsies and travellers.

What also dismays me about this situation, as I also explained three weeks ago, is how racism is so obviously prevalent in settled people’s response to the Dale Farm story, despite the constant bluster that it is about “principles,” and this is apparent not only in the disgraceful outpouring of racist comments online following any article regarding Gypsies, travellers and the residents of Dale Farm, but also in the work of some so-called journalists like Amanda Platell, the Australian-born former press secretary to William Hague, who wrote a disgraceful article in today’s Daily Mail, in which she implied that all the men at Dale Farm were criminals. “[O]ne must wonder why the male travellers are so shy of the cameras,” she wrote. “What do they have to hide? I think we can all imagine the answer to that one.”

I also remain disappointed that the people of Basildon haven’t insisted that their council found another use for £18 million of their money, which could surely have been put to a better purpose than removing Gypsies and travellers from their homes at the cost of £45,000 a head, and I remain disturbed that, despite protestations to the contrary, the council did not seek to create a new site for the travellers, who need about 80 pitches. Although Tony Ball, the head of the council, pointed out that there were “a number of pitches available on the legal site next to Dale Farm,” there were not enough, and his major contribution to the discussion about where the evicted residents were supposed to go was to tell the BBC, “We have made the travellers aware of what is available, for example there is room at St. Helens but they have told us they do not wish to move to the North West.” What, I wonder, was he thinking when he made that comment?

As I explained in my previous article:

[T]he residents of Dale Farm were, essentially, driven into a trap by a society that, fundamentally, doesn’t want to make any provision for Gypsies and Travellers, and wants them to give up their way of life. When they refuse, as the erosion of their rights over the last 25 years reveals, settled society has no answer as to what it expects them to do. Basically, if Gypsies and Travellers won’t give up their way of life, settled people want them to disappear. It is the triumph of NIMBYism [Not In My Back Yard] — a deeply unpleasant manifestation of collective intolerance — and it fails to create a solution to a long-standing problem that settled people and their elected representatives have contributed to over many years.

As the events of this grim day continue, with the Guardian‘s coverage here, I’m cross-posting below two articles that also deal effectively with the issues raised. The first, from Comment is free in today’s Guardian online, is by the Dale Farm Solidarity group, whose website is here, which explains more about the problems facing Gypsies and travellers, and the second is by the journalist and science writer  Francis Sedgemore, from his blog, in which he highlights the hypocrisy of the government, comparing and contrasting its plans to ease planning laws for the rich, while still criminalising Gypsies and travellers, and, in a sober analysis of the situation, recognises where the Dale Farm residents have crossed a legal line, but also points out that today’s eviction smacks of what he describes as “the last form of acceptable racism in Britain.”

Dale Farm’s legacy goes beyond the 82 families who are homeless tonight
Dale Farm Solidarity group, The Guardian, October 19, 2011

The shadows of police and bailiffs loom large for Traveller families across the UK. Forced evictions cannot be peaceful — the violence comes from the brutal act of ripping someone from their home.

Dale Farm is the largest community of its kind, and its eviction is among the biggest in recorded history. Eighty-two families are facing the fact that they have nowhere to sleep tonight. The operation to do this has cost the taxpayer at least £18m.

Dale Farm’s size has also awakened many in Britain to the criminalisation of Travellers. Today’s operation has been harrowing for all the families and supporters involved. We have seen the police enter the site by smashing through a legal plot that was assumed to be safe by elderly residents seeking refuge. As police sledgehammered a wall on this plot, these elderly residents were seriously injured. A Dale Farm mother is in hospital and can’t move her legs after being beaten by police; tasers have been used, despite being declared inappropriate for public order situations; and seven people have been taken away in ambulances. But how did it get to this?

The police brutality seen at Dale Farm today is not a one-off, but part of a long-running criminalisation of Traveller communities and culture. Until 1994, all local councils had been required to offer a designated amount of Traveller pitches in their area. The Conservative government repealed this, leaving at least 5,000 families without a legal home.

Today, councils are 20,000 pitches short of their legal duties, and even these unenforced responsibilities will be removed by the Localism Bill. These guidelines, like the Travellers they’re designed for, have simply been ignored, the result being 18% of Gypsies and Travellers were homeless in 2003 compared with 0.6% of the UK population. This is why Dale Farm residents are engaging in civil disobedience to resist the eviction — the alternative is homelessness.

There is however something else that’s unprecedented about the situation at Dale Farm: the growth of a solidarity movement to promote the civil rights of Travelllers. At the eviction today, protesters and residents occupied the tops of towers and caravans together, resisting the brutal eviction for as long as possible.

The ideas that have coalesced around the Dale Farm community are simple. Travellers are simply asking for the right to exist legally. Despite the grim and brutal scenes we’ve seen today at Dale Farm, the least we can hope is that these messages will be heard.

Dale Farm – the final battle
By Francis Sedgemore, October 19, 2011

Now let me see if I’ve got this straight. The UK state, in the hands of its rightful proprietors, the Conservative and Unionist Party, is intent on overhauling planning laws so as to boost economic growth and facilitate housing development on non-urban land. As part of the government’s so-called ‘localism’ agenda, which is made possible through some typically Tory centralisation, housing development companies, among whom are some notable Conservative Party doners, will only be prevented from carrying out their plans if there is is an overwhelming case against (read: one that cannot be kept under the radar of community and media scrutiny). Government policy includes measures to fast-track the usual planning and consultation process, which is music to the ears of the ‘entrepreneurial’ class.

On the other hand, another group of entrepreneurs, this time in the form of a traveller community living in one of the grottier bits of Essex, is being met with all the obstructive powers that the state can muster. As I type, Dale Farm is being trashed by police and local government agents, and residents’ blood mopped up in advance of the arrival of the world’s television news crews and human rights inspectors. In addition to truncheons, fists and boots, police tasers were used at dawn against defenders the site. This, in contravention of Home Office guidelines which clearly state that the ostensibly non-lethal firearms are not to be employed in crowd control situations.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not defending the Dale Farm community’s building of housing structures on land they own, but for which there is no legal planning consent. There is a good argument for granting consent, but there is also due process, and travellers are not known for respecting such niceties. I can admire and respect the travellers for their creative contempt for authority, but the consequences are clear enough. If you pick a fight with the state, then for goodness sake ensure that you possess superior firepower, both physical and rhetorical. Fail to do so, and you will at the very least get a severe kicking from the state’s uniformed enforcers.

The Dale Farm community may not have a legal leg to stand on, but their moral case, while a little frayed in places, is sound, even if they are taking liberties with it for PR effect. This case has even attracted the attention of a senior UN adviser who accused Basildon Council of having broken human rights laws, and drew parallels with China and Nigeria.

Basildon Council offered alternative, bricks-and-mortar accommodation to the travellers, displaying a typically bourgeois British racism against gypsies and travellers. “We will socially engineer you out of existence,” the ruling class are saying in effect.

After lengthy legal toing and froing, the travellers lost their final appeal against eviction, and were left to await the inevitable. They and their crusty supporters then hunkered down for a final battle, but the writing was on the wall, and more than figuratively speaking. Before dawn this morning, the Essex police tooled up, beat their chests and shields, and steamed in through a back gate while a few suits and senior plods distracted residents with discussions at the front. Further proof, if proof be needed, that the state has no sense of honour or decency.

Is hatred of gypsies the last form of acceptable racism in Britain?

Andy Worthington is 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. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Many of those who support the eviction claim to believe that spending £18 million that surely could be spent more usefully elsewhere in the Basildon area is appropriate, because the site the Dale Farm residents own in on green belt land (albeit on the site of a former scrap yard) and it is a necessary principle.

There is some truth in this, to the extent that British people across the political spectrum are obsessed with protecting green belt land from anyone developing it — and not just Gypsies and Travellers — but I find it impossible not to detect the stench of hypocrisy emanating from those taking time out of their otherwise busy lives to obsess about the Dale Farm residents, as I cannot conceive of this happening if the men, women and children to be evicted — at £45,000 a head –  were not Travellers and Gypsies.

Racism towards Gypsies is something that settled communities like to pretend doesn’t exist, but it remains virulent  and disgraceful, and is clearly at the heart of the conflict over Dale Farm.

The state’s war against Gypsies and Travellers: The 1980s

Disliking one’s neighbours ought not to be sufficient to establish policies in council offices and in central government, but around the country it is and has been for decades — and historically, of course, there is a much longer record of conflict between settled and nomadic people.

Relentlessly persecuted by settled communities, Gypsies in the UK supposedly gained support and protection in 1968, with the passage of the Caravan Sites Act, which required local authorities to provide sites for Gypsies — defined as “persons of nomadic habit of life, whatever their race or origin” — and which empowered the Secretary of State for the Environment to force them to do so.

Despite the lofty aims, however, providing support for Gypsies and Travellers is never politically popular, because of racism — more generally recognised as NIMBYism, from the phrase “Not in My Back Yard” — and in 1986, there was bleak news when the Thatcher government came to review the legislation.

The context for the 1986 changes, as I explained in my books Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield, both of which deal with the state’s antipathy towards nomadic people in the UK, was the rise of the New Age Traveller movement which Margaret Thatcher had declared war on in 1985.

To deal with the New Age Travellers, Thatcher first — in February 1985 — evicted a community of 150 travellers and protestors from RAF Molesworth in Cambridgeshire, where they were protesting at its planned use as the second cruise missile base in the UK after Greenham Common (where, of course, there was a celebrated and long-established women’s peace camp), in what was the largest ever peacetime mobilisation of troops and police (1,500 Royal Engineers, 600 MoD police and a thousand regular police).

Thatcher’s forces then hounded the travellers across the country until, on June 1, 1985, 1,300 police from six counties and the MoD rounded up and destroyed a convoy of 420 travellers en route to Stonehenge, in an attempt to establish what would have been the 12th Stonehenge Free Festival.

When legislation was passed in the wake of the Beanfield, the victors attempted to secure the advantage they had gained through violence in a legislative manner. As I explained in Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion, Clause 39 of the Public Order Act of 1986 “edged closer to the criminalisation of trespass.” Applied to scheduled monuments (i.e. Stonehenge), “land forming part of a highway,” and agricultural buildings (and, by extension, the land around them), the clause “enabled the police to arrest two or more people for trespass, provided that ‘reasonable steps have been taken by or on behalf of the occupier to ask them to leave.’ In addition, the previous requirement for arrest under these circumstances — damage to property — was amended to include the use of ‘threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour’ and/or the presence of twelve or more vehicles.’”

When the Act was passed, the National Council for Civil Liberties (now Liberty) noted that, in January 1986, “less than 40 percent of ‘official’ Gypsies had been housed, that the Secretary of State had failed to enforce a single omission and that the ‘new’ travellers were not cared for, despite fulfilling the criteria outlined in the 1968 Act.” the NCCL “proposed immediate action to quell the traditional conflict between travelling people and settled people and to bring to an end the situation whereby ‘both central and local government sat back and waited for the police to use their public order powers to deal with the inevitable conflict.’”

The government, however, ignored the NCCL, and when the Public Order Act became law, not only were some of the worst fears of both the travellers and the NCCL confirmed, but more “traditional” Gypsies also suffered. As I explained, “despite assurances that traditional Gypsies, the long-suffering victims of the state’s aversion to a nomadic way of life, would not be targeted, a group of Gypsies in Somerset were evicted as soon as the Act became law.”

The state’s war against Gypsies and Travellers: The 1990s

With the 1986 Act, the government had stepped up its assault on nomadic people, and a further opportunity to attack Gypsies and Travellers came in 1992, after an unexpected new youth movement — acid house — had erupted in 1987 and 1988, leading to huge raves across the country and, eventually, a cross-over with travellers that led to a gigantic free party — of at least 50,000 people — on Castlemorton Common in Gloucestershire in May 1992. In response, the Criminal Justice Act of 1994, notorious for its attempt to criminalise music consisting of “a succession of repetitive beats,” largely completed what Thatcher had set out to achieve in 1985 and 1986.

As I explained in The Battle of the Beanfield, the 1994 Act, as well as attempting to criminalise dance music, reduced the number of vehicles that could come together in one place from twelve to six before their occupants could be arrested, and criminalised any unauthorised gatherings of 20 people or more to which the state took exception. Identified as “trespassory assemblies,” they could be broken up by the police if they feared “serious disruption to the life of the community,” even if the meeting was non-obstructive and non-violent. The Act also created the crime of “aggravated trespass,” which, as I explained, “fulfilled the right-wing dream of transforming trespass from a civil to a criminal concern.”

As I also explained, the creation of “trespassory assemblies” and “aggravated trespass” had “disturbing ramifications for almost al kinds of protests and alternative gatherings, and clearly had its origins in the problems encountered by the authorities both before and during the Beanfield, when there remained a quaint assumption in British law of a right of assembly without prior state permission.” In legal action taken by travellers after the Battle of the Beanfield, the state had been humiliated in its attempts to make an ancient charge of “unlawful assembly” stick, so the new legislation finally sealed that loophole.

However, although all of the above was bad news for those on the road, and for anyone perceived to be dissenting in any way against an authoritarian government, the Act’s impact on Gypsies and Travellers seeking the right to live on an officially sanctioned site was also a disaster, as it “repealed the 1968 Caravan Sites Act, removing the obligation on local authorities to provide sites for Gypsies,” as I explained in The Battle of the Beanfield, and “finally criminalised the entire way of life of Gypsies and travellers, with baleful effects that are still being felt to this day.”

New Labour’s failures revealed, and the coalition’s refusal to address the problems

I wrote that back in 2005, but the situation it described has existed for the last 17 years, and the Labour government did little to improve the living conditions of the nomadic communities in the UK (estimated to be between 120,000 and 300,000 people in total).

In 2003, in a report for the Deputy Prime Minister, Pat Niner of the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies at the University of Birmingham established that there was “an accommodation crisis” within the Gypsy and Traveller community. The report “estimated that between 3,000 and 4,500 pitches were required to provide secure accommodation for Gypsies and Travellers.” As Pat Niner explained, “We estimate that between 1,000 and 2,000 additional residential pitches will be needed over the next five years. Between 2,000 and 2,500 additional pitches on transit sites or stopping places will also be needed to accommodate nomadism. The latter need to form a national network.”

As was revealed in the Guardian yesterday, the Labour government’s belated response was The Gypsy and Traveller Sites Grant, launched in 2008, which claimed to have £97m available to “reduce the number of unauthorised sites” and “reduce the need for costly enforcement action.” However, in “a move described as shocking by the Equality and Human Rights Commission,” it was revealed that only £16.9m has been spent, and that “millions of pounds intended for new Gypsy and Traveller sites have been diverted to other projects,” because a “lack of ring-fencing” allowed millions of pounds to be “channelled into affordable homes not intended for Gypsies.”

The government’s Homes and Communities Agency attempted to brush the scandal aside, although their sums didn’t even add up. They told the Guardian that “£15m from the grant was allotted to ‘unfunded commitments in other programmes’ within the National Affordable Homes Programme.”

In light of the revelations, Simon Woolley, a commissioner with responsibility for Travellers, at the EHRC, told the Guardian, “Given that the lack of Traveller sites is central to the Dale Farm problem, it is shocking that millions have been taken away that should have been used for site provision and other projects.” In addition, Lord Avebury, who chairs the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Gypsy, Roma and Travellers, summed up the government’s contributions to travellers in recent  years as ”pretty measly”.

Lord Avebury added, “The government’s policy on Gypsies and Travellers is a shambles — if you are going to put a four-year programme in place then local authorities have to be aware of it and ready to use it. It is indicative of the total lack of willingness of successive governments to address the needs of Gypsies and Travellers.”

As the Guardian explained, “The grant programme, which had a stated aim of creating new, permanent, sites, to ‘tackle the inequalities experienced by Travellers … one of the most disadvantaged [groups] in the country,’ has led to building of just four new sites, with a total of 37 pitches; 62 new pitches were created on existing sites and 178 pitches were refurbished.”

Andrew Slaughter MP, who is a member of the APPG for Gypsy, Roma and Travellers, described a “lack of political will” as being “responsible for the failure to provide” the 3,000 sites required, according to the government’s annual caravan count,” which also echoes the findings of the report for John Prescott in 2003.

Touching on the heart of the racist problem that no one want to acknowledge officially, Andrew Slaughter told the Guardian, “Local authorities are unwilling to take the grant often because of pressure from electors who say they do not want a site near them even it will solve local problems and cost nothing.”

He also explained that the situation facing Gypsies and Travellers “will be worsened by the localism bill, which scraps the requirement for local authorities to use a common method for assessing the needs of Gypsies and Travellers,” and which also maintains the lack of an obligation on councils to allocate sites to Gypsies and Travellers.

The Guardian noted that, under the cover of its purportedly essential austerity cuts (which, in fact, mask a purely ideological assault on public spending), the coalition government had initially “scrapped the Gypsy and Traveller sites grant in 2010-11,” but had “reinstated a sum of £60m for 2011-15,” which is only “about half of the yearly total previously available.” Well primed, the Department for Communities and Local Government told the Guardian that the savage budget cut was part of its “contribution to reducing the national deficit”, and added that “targets had been abolished” because, according to the coalition, “they did not work, alienated communities and did not always accurately reflect the need on the ground.”

The Department also tried to claim that councils are being given “more powers to address local housing and planning issues with ‘incentives’ to provide appropriate sites,” including “the new homes bonus, whereby the government matches additional council tax raised by new homes,” but as Andrew Slaughter pointed out, shooting down another “big society” myth, that bonus is “a perverse incentive,” because councils can “draw significantly more council tax from luxury developments than Traveller sites.”

He added that the situation “was likely to create more Dale Farms,” explaining, “The government has given in to pressure from backbenchers to give local authorities a device to veto construction of new sites. That will mean few if any new sites built even if money’s available, more expensive evictions, more conflict and the continuation of appalling life-indicators for Gypsies and Travellers.”

A no-win situation for Gypsies and Travellers

At the end of this tour through the racism of Little England, no answer is provided to address the no-win situation position in which Gypsies and Travellers have found themselves. Deprived of a statutory requirement to be provided with sites, nomadic people have also found it harder to live on the road than ever before, as settled people’s intolerance of them has grown.

And yet, when travellers respond by buying land, as happened at Dale Farm, they are then prohibited from building on that land. As Jake Bowers, a Romani journalist, explained in an informative booklet, “Gypsies and Travellers: Their lifestyle, history and culture” (PDF), Gypsy families that attempt to live on their own land are often denied planning permission … The government’s own studies state that over 80% of planning applications from settled people are granted consent, while more than 90% of applications from Gypsies are refused.”

The bottom line is that, if land had been provided for the Dale Farm residents, there would have been no need for them to buy the land in the first place from which, on a point of principle, Basildon Council is seeking to remove them at a cost of £18 million. If that was my council, I’d be up in arms about the waste of money and the hypocrisy towards Gypsies and Travellers, but in modern Britain, where racism and xenophobia have been permanently stoked over the last two decades, only a third of British people seem able to look beyond their disgraceful prejudices to see that the residents of Dale Farm were, essentially, driven into a trap by a society that, fundamentally, doesn’t want to make any provision for Gypsies and Travellers, and wants them to give up their way of life.

When they refuse, as the erosion of their rights over the last 25 years reveals, settled society has no answer as to what it expects them to do. Basically, if Gypsies and Travellers won’t give up their way of life, settled people want them to disappear. It is the triumph of NIMBYism — a deeply unpleasant manifestation of collective intolerance — and it fails to create a solution to a long-standing problem that settled people and their elected representatives have contributed to over many years.

Andy Worthington is 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. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

I haven’t been to the solstice for six years, having visited every year from 2001 to 2005 — after the wilderness years, from 1985 to 1999, when a military-style exclusion zone was declared, to keep out those who had not learned that they were unwelcome after the dreadful events of what is known as the Battle of the Beanfield — but every year I think about those converging on the ancient stones, and wait for the first reports and photos, to find out whether the sun shone at dawn, and to hear from those who were there.

My interest, as some of you will know, stems from the visits I made to the Stonehenge Free Festival, an annual riot of anarchy and alternative lifestyles that occupied the fields around Stonehenge for 11 years, from 1974 to 1984, until it was suppressed with unprecedented violence in 1985, when an advance convoy, heading to the stones to set up the festival, was ambushed by the massed forces of Margaret Thatcher’s militarized police, and decommissioned with savage violence at the Battle of the Beanfield.

I chronicled those events in my book The Battle of the Beanfield, published in 2005 and still available, but the bigger picture of the travelling festival scene, and the central importance of Stonehenge, was based on my visits to the free festival as a student in 1983 and 1984, and the research I undertook between 2002 and 2004 that led to the first detailed alternative history of Stonehenge, entitled, Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion, my first book, published exactly seven years ago, which is also still available.

As the years pass, those who were significant figures in the countercultural story of Stonehenge pass away — John Michell in 2009, and Sid Rawle last year. They are not the only ones. Roger Hutchinson, who designed the iconic Stonehenge poster reproduced below, also died on September 3 last year. 57 years old, he had fought a long battle with lung disease, and was commemorated here and here.

Roger had been incredibly helpful to me while I was researching Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion, and several of his photos appeared in the book with his permission. I was also pleased to notice that he was interviewed for “Festivals Britannia,” a feature-length BBC4 documentary about the free festival scene (which mirrors the story I told in Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion), which was first broadcast last year, and is currently available to view on iPlayer, having recently been repeated.

To mark the solstice, to remember those ever more distant festivals, and also to remember Roger, I’m posting below some more of his photos. The first one was posted by Rob Young, author of Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music, who wrote, in a blog post following Roger’s death last year:

Roger’s photos of various free festivals of the 1970s, such as Windsor and Stonehenge, remain some of the most evocative and otherworldly of their kind. True to the spirit of these communal gatherings, he pointed his lens as much at the crowds as at the rock action on stage, and the exquisite misty colour lends the pictures a magical, idyllic, even timeless quality.

The other photos originally appeared in Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion.

Roger Hutchinson’s poster for the second Stonehenge Free Festival in 1975. Photo by Roger Hutchinson.

Revellers at the Stonehenge Free Festival in 1975 relax at the River Avon. Photo by Roger Hutchinson.

Tipis at the Stonehenge Free Festival in 1977. Photo by Roger Hutchinson.

A bucolic moment at the 1978 Stonehenge Free Festival. Photo by Roger Hutchinson.

Note: For further information see the excellent Festival Zone website, and also see my articles, Stonehenge and the summer solstice: past and present, In the Guardian: Remembering the Battle of the Beanfield, Remember the Battle of the Beanfield (in the Guardian), It’s 25 Years Since The Last Stonehenge Free Festival, The Battle of the Beanfield 25th Anniversary: An Interview with Phil Shakesby, Stonehenge Summer Solstice 2010: Remembering the Battle of the Beanfield, RIP Sid Rawle, Land Reformer, Free Festival Pioneer, Stonehenge Stalwart and The Year of Revolution: The “War on Tyranny” Replaces the “War on Terror”.

Andy Worthington is 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. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

The 1990s in the West: The rise of the anti-globalization movement

For the protestors, gatherings of the world’s most powerful countries — or other organizations supporting the status quo on a global scale — were symbols of the dark forces of globalization, and meetings had been the focus of huge protests since June 18, 1999, when a Carnival Against Capital (also known as J18) was held in the City of London to coincide with a G8 summit in Köln, Germany. The J18 drew on a long tradition of protest dating back to the 1960s, but with particular reference to the anti-road protests, the Reclaim the Streets movement, and the protests against the Criminal Justice Act, which had galvanized dissenters in large numbers from the early 1990s, and which, in turn, were influenced by the travellers’ movement in the 1970s and the 1980s, and the anti-nuclear protests focused on Greenham Common and Molesworth.

While these movements had dealt with environmental issues, land reform, the seizure of public spaces and freedom from State oppression, they were largely national in focus. The J18, however, building on preliminary events in 1998 (an international meeting of grassroots activists in Geneva in February 1998, a Global Street Party in 20 different countries during the G8 summit in Birmingham in May, and an anti-World Trade Organization protest in Geneva that same month, when, elsewhere, 50,000 Brazilians participated in a “Cry of the Excluded” march, and 200,000 Indian farmers and fishermen took to the streets of Hyderabad demanding India’s withdrawal from the WTO), widened the scope of the protests, with actions taking place simultaneously in 43 countries around the world, and it crystallized into what became known as the anti-globalization movement, fundamentally challenging the unfettered transnational capitalism that underpinned State control and exploitation, and immediately becoming global in scale when protestors from all around the world converged on the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference in Seattle, in November 1999.

Between November 1999 and July 2001, protestors from around the world took aim at a succession of international meetings, including protests at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2000, at an IMF and World Bank summit in Prague in September 2000, at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in April 2001, and in London on May Day 2001, when the British police first introduced “kettling.”

At Genova, however, the authorities fought back with lethal force. Three protestors had been shot and injured at protests outside a EU summit in Gothenburg in June 2001, but in Genova an Italian policeman shot and killed a 23-year-old activist, Carlo Giuliani, and the authorities’ determination to clamp down violently on the protests was also revealed through a series of nighttime raids on buildings housing protesters. At the Diaz Pascoli and Diaz Pertini schools, where protestors had established media centres that also provided medical and legal support, police raids left three activists, including British journalist Mark Covell, in comas. In total, over 60 people were severely injured, although a parliamentary inquiry later concluded that there had been no wrongdoing on the part of police.

However, elsewhere in the late 1990s and the start of the 21st century, the focus was not, as in the West, on an emerging youth movement challenging the financial status quo, and the continuing exploitation of the developing world by the world’s most powerful countries.

The 1990s in the Middle East: After the Communist “threat,” the West supports dictators against the Islamist “threat”

Across the Middle East, for example, a different narrative, with its roots in the colonial legacy and the Cold War, was developing. Fearful of socialist movements that would threaten their financial interests, the countries of the West had supported — or had helped install — brutal dictatorships whose continued oppression of their people prompted the rise of new resistance movements in which Communism gave way to militant offshoots of Islam. The West was particularly terrified by the Iranian revolution in 1979, which reinforced its determination to keep hardline Islamists at bay, but was generally less aware of how other factors were playing a major part in reshaping dissent throughout the Middle East.

Central to these new movements was the resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s (bankrolled, ironically, by the US, as well as by Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich Gulf countries), as battle-hardened mujahideen returned to their home countries and saw the appeal of overthrowing their own dictators. However, they were also reinforced by violent clampdowns — in Egypt, for example, during the same period, and in Algeria in the 1990s, where the West precipitated an almost unbelievably bloody civil war by backing the military when Islamists threatened to win electoral victory in 1991 — and were also fed by the ongoing oppression of the Palestinian people by Israel, and, from 1991 onwards, by the presence on Saudi soil of US forces who refused to leave after helping to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein.

By 1996, Islamist dissent found its own almost unspeakably bloody reworking of the anti-globalization movement when al-Qaeda, a core movement of mujahideen, who, in the wake of the Afghan conflict, had become focused on the overthrow of regimes oppressing Muslims anywhere in the world, shifted its focus to the United States, under the leadershp of Osama bin Laden, and, perhaps most crucially, members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, who, like Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s second-in-command, seemed to have become unquenchably vengeful after being tortured in Egypt in the 1980s.

After attacking US interests in 1998 and 2000 (in the US embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam, and the attack on the USS Cole), al-Qaeda achieved its aim of drawing the US into a global war through the terrorist attacks on the US mainland on September 11, 2001.

The 2000s: The “War on Terror” and the complete demonization of Islamists — and of Islam

Overnight, the global landscape changed. Terrorism became the obsession of the first decade of the 21st century, an ill-defined war was launched in Afghanistan, another entirely illegal war followed in Iraq, and the US drew on the vilest detention policies of its brutal allies in the Middle East by establishing a global network of secret torture prisons, specifically utilizing the expertise of Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Syria and Uzbekistan, and also establishing its own torture prisons in Thailand, Poland, Romania and Lithuania, and in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Ironically, the US appears only to have fulfilled bin Laden’s aims, establishing a “clash of civilizations” that suited al-Qaeda’s global jihadists, with all their talk of infidel crusaders and Jews, and that also played on the worst instincts of supposedly Christian nations, who found that their old bogeyman — the Soviet Union — could effortlessly be replaced with a new one — fundamenalist Islam, or, more generally, Islam itself, with a timeline stretching back to the Crusades for those inclined to revel in a Manichean struggle between two branches of the Abrahamic religious tradition.

This has been a disaster for relations between Christians and Muslims worldwide, leading to widespread Islamophobia in Western countries and a rewriting of history, in which liberation struggles in Bosnia and Chechnya, for example, have been recast as terrorism, and any opposition to the dictators of the Middle East has also been regarded as terrorism — even when, as with Libya, for example, opponents of Gaddafi’s regime used to be considered as victims of oppression until Gaddafi strategically decided to become an ally in the “War on Terror.”

The impact of the “War on Terror” has been no less ruinous in Muslim countries, where there has been widespread anger and indignation, and untold numbers of Muslims have, correctly, perceived that the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the thousands of people brutalized in Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere are — or were — all Muslims, and that, therefore, something akin to a modern Crusade must indeed be taking place.

2011: The “War Against Tyranny”; People Power banishes the Islamist threat, anti-globalization returns, and the West and the Middle East have a common enemy

Suddenly, however, the landscape has changed again, as popular uprisings across the Middle East fundamentally challenge the assumptions of the “War on Terror” — that dictators are needed more than ever to restrain the fundamentalists who, otherwise, would be establishing their own barbarous regimes and, of course, threatening Western interests.

In Tunisia and Egypt, where the dictators Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak were deposed, and in other countries where the people are rising up against their long-established dictators — primarily Libya, where Gaddafi has responded with typical brutality, and Algeria and Yemen, plus Iran, where the regime may not technically be a dictatorship, although it exhibits all the brutality associated with unaccountable authoritarian regimes — the movements that were triggered by the single self-immolation of a Tunisian man, Mohamed Bouazizi, on December 19 last year, are driven not by Islamist groups, but by the people, who are demonstrating that dictatorships can be toppled by sheer numbers.

Throughout the region, young people, who have known nothing but dictatorship, are rising up, forming alliances with trade unionists and disgruntled professionals, while the Islamists have either been content to stay in the background (as with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt) or, like Ennahdha in Tunisia, were largely imprisoned or in exile when the revolution that toppled Ben Ali took place.

If the Islamists had been centre-stage, I have no doubt that the West’s response to the popular revolutionary movements spreading throughout the Middle East would have been very different, as Western leaders would have been able to insert them into their tired “War on Terror” narrative. As it is, however, Western leaders have generally had to mouth platitudes about democracy and the will of the people, while refusing to become too engaged, as they are presumably aware that, for decades, their actions have actually demonstrated that they have no interest whatsoever in the welfare of the people of the Middle East, and that they have, instead, supported the very dictators who have either fallen or are now clinging onto power.

Moreover, the revolutionary zeal in the Middle East, which is inspired by economic desperation and the enduring misery of living in police states run by Western-backed torturers, is also reflected in the stirrings of popular dissent in the West. Just as an economic tipping point may have been reached in the Middle East through the manipulation of global food prices by Western speculators, protestors in the West are also beginning to revolt against the criminals of the unfettered financial markets, who have been allowed to continue their disgraceful global pillaging, despite causing the economic meltdown of 2008, and despite being bailed out by taxpayers. In some ways, the revolt in the West has involved young people picking up the baton of the anti-globalization movement, which has only sporadically made its presence felt in the last ten years.

Leading the way is the UK, prompted in particular by the activities of the Tory-led coalition government, which, despite having no mandate (with the Tories obliged to forge an aliance with the Liberal Democrats) and despite both parties having lied or omitted to mention their policies on the election trail, is now pampering the financial markets to an unprecedented degree, aiming to make the UK into the world’s largest tax haven, while introducing swingeing cuts to government spending, using the financial crisis as an excuse.

In its attacks on welfare, on university funding, on the NHS, and on almost every aspect of the British state that has not been privatized in the last 30 years, the government seems to delight in its plans to make as many people unemployed as possible, while cushioning its friends — and funders — in the City and in big business. However, although the response so far has generally been muted (with the exception of the students and schoolchildren who took to the streets last November and December), a widespread anger is just below the surface, and the rise of new protest groups — in particular UK Uncut, a direct action group that is focused unerringly on corporate tax avoiders and the banking sector, and that has just spawned a rapidly spreading offshoot in the US — indicates that the British government’s vile, ideological assault on the British people (with the exception of the rich and the super-rich) is likely to meet with increasing resistance.

I don’t mean to suggest that there will be revolutions in the West — as I think citizens of Western countries are too self-absorbed or diverted from the truth to notice what is happening until it is too late — but I do believe that, perhaps for the first time in living memory (or at least since 1990′s Poll Tax Riot), a substantial number of people believe that the government should be forced from power rather than be allowed to pursue its destructive agenda until the next election in 2015.

Moreover, with variations on the British story taking place throughout the West — with bankers unpunished, corporations systematically avoiding tax, austerity measures introduced that will only impact on those who had nothing to do with the economic crisis, and the gap between the rich and the poor widening still further from its current historic levels — all the elements are in place for the people of the West and the Middle East — and wherever else popular dissent erupts — to find that they share a common narrative, one which involves resistance to the relentless exploitation by the few, to enrich themselves still further at everyone else’s expense, and, when these forces are challenged, repression, be it through military means, arbitary detention and torture, or supposedly legitimate legislation, in which the magic words “choice” and “fairness” are meant to disguise the last push of a privatization agenda that seeks to destroy the final vestiges of the State’s responsibility for its people.

By now, with its lies and unaccountability exposed time and again, the push to privatize everything by playing on aging scare stories about the dangers of socialism ought to have been thoroughly discredited and replaced with new political movements that focus on the needs of society and of the people — a new socialism, if you like — and not on the further enrichment of Prime Ministers, Presidents, CEOs and dictators.

As the “War on Tyranny” undermines the tired clichés and distortions of the “War on Terror,” I hope for nothing less than a contagion of revolutionary impulses that spreads throughout the world, as without it, I fear, we are rapidly returning to the middle ages.

Andy Worthington is 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. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

The author and activist Jeremy Sandford (who died in 2003) described him as “the squatter to end them all, having squatted flats, houses, commons, forests, a village, boats, an island, an army camp, Windsor Great Park,” and I would only add that, if I was to be asked to identify one topic for which he should be remembered, it was his passion for land reform in the UK, something that the State always regards with the utmost fear and suspicion.

I only met Sid once, when I was invited to attend his SummerSpirit camp in August 2004, following the publication of my book Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion. I arrived to find Sid and the author and historian Ronald Hutton sitting together at a table in the camp’s café, greeting me warmly and congratulating me on writing the social history of Stonehenge and the counter-culture that they had hoped someone would eventually write (which was a great honour), and I spent a thoroughly enjoyable few days hanging out, holding a few workshops, at which I read out excerpts from the book and Sid chipped in, drawing on his vast repertoire of memories of the time, and, one evening, watching political folk-rockers Seize the Day play a storming set.

People tended to either love or loathe Sid, but I was given the most gracious welcome, and have nothing but respect for his revolutionary example. At the time of my visit, he was surrounded by supportive family members, who all made me feel extremely welcome, and his camp — which aimed to have no more than 400 people present — appeared to be a refined example of the kind of gatherings that he was involved in establishing in the 1970s — often chaotic affairs, but ones that were seeking out a new world.

Below I publish excerpts from Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion that deal with Sid’s life, interspersed with some contemporary commentary, and at the end of this article I publish Sid’s manifesto, “The Vision of Albion,” and some comments by Jeremy Sandford regarding his failings, and his attempts to address them in later life.

Sid Rawle and his contributions to the British counter-culture

In the mid-1960s, Sid was already a colourful figure in London’s counter-cultural scene, where he gave the youthful squatting movement some historical ballast by establishing the Hyde Park Diggers, inspired by the example of the original seventeenth century Diggers, founded by Gerrard Winstanley […]

By 1970, John Lennon was so impressed by Sid Rawle’s revolutionary rhetoric that he summoned him to the offices of Apple, the Beatles’ short-lived and ill-conceived Utopian business offshoot, and offered him custodianship of Dorinish Island — a small, uninhabited island off the coast of County Mayo that Lennon had bought in 1967 — for use as a Digger commune, ‘for the common good’. After a brief recruitment drive amongst the hippies of London, twenty-five adults and a baby duly set off for the west coast of Ireland. Rawle described their initial experience as follows: ‘We decided we would hold a six-week summer camp on the island. Then we would see what came out of that and decide if we wanted to extend our stay. It was heaven and it was hell. We lived in tents because there were no stone buildings on the island at all’, although he concluded that, ‘Most of the time it was really good’.

In the end, the Diggers stayed for two years, growing their own vegetables, which they stored in specially dug hollows, and cadging lifts off the local oyster fishermen every fortnight or so for supplementary shopping trips to Westport on the mainland. There was a certain amount of conflict — in March 1971 The Connaught Telegraph declared, ‘After a year of seething anger, Westport has finally declared war on the ‘Republic of Dorinish’ — but the commune finally closed down of its own volition the year after, when a fire destroyed the main tent used to store supplies.

Rawle had made sporadic visits to England throughout the duration of the commune. At the Glastonbury Fayre in June 1971, for example, free food had been provided by two groups — the wittily named Communal Knead, and Sid’s Diggers, now known as the Digger Action Movement. On his return to London in the spring of 1972, he took the Diggers’ message on from Dorinish and Glastonbury to a new and more politically explosive location. Along with members of the Free City of Camden, ‘a loose street-by-street network of squatters, revolutionaries and artists’ and the ubiquitous White Panthers, he was involved in setting up the first People’s Free Festival in Windsor Great Park over the August Bank Holiday weekend, under the leadership of Bill ‘Ubi’ Dwyer, a well-known anarchist activist, ‘on the basis of an acid vision he’d had’.

Windsor was the most direct affront to the land rights of the establishment yet seen. By squatting the Queen’s own backyard, the festival’s organizers were joining the Diggers in taking on unfinished historical business. Windsor’s park had been common land before it was enclosed by King George III to provide himself with an exclusive hunting ground. The hippies were simply taking back land that had been stolen from the people for 200 years.

The People’s Free Festival ran for three years, growing in size and influence, with the result that, in 1974, it was violently suppressed by the authorities. In the meantime, another charismatic individual, Phil Russell (aka Wally Hope) had established the Stonehenge Free Festival at Britain’s most celebrated ancient monument. Phil died in mysterious circumstances the following year, but the Stonehenge Free Festival had already taken root, and Sid Rawle soon became involved:

Imprisoned after the last Windsor festival along with Bill Dwyer, Sid came to Stonehenge as one of the chief organizers of the fourth People’s Free Festival, which took place in August 1975 at Watchfield, a disused airfield in Oxfordshire. Set up as a one-off replacement for the bitterly contested Windsor site, Watchfield was an extraordinary event — the only instance in British history of the government providing a free festival site. Although no inquest had taken place after the brutal suppression of Windsor the year before, Home Secretary Roy Jenkins clearly felt that the hippies were due some kind of compensation. Independent reports suggested that the police’s instructions for people to leave the site had not been clearly heard, that the Drug Squad broke the law in searching suspects for drugs, that excessive force had been used in the eviction of the site, and in particular that the 220 people arrested had been treated with unnecessary harshness. Taken to a nearby army barracks, suspects were made to undress completely, and were subjected to anal and vaginal searches, according to one of the doctors present.

Watchfield duly cemented the success of the second Stonehenge Free Festival, running for nine days, attracting over 5,000 people, and providing the clearest working example to date of the free festival as a self-regulating alternative community, despite a persistent police presence that led to ninety-five arrests, and despite sporadic violence from the Windsor chapter of the Hell’s Angels. Festival regular Convoy Steve ‘especially liked the daily site meetings where everyone sat around and said their piece. Policy was made, site matters were discussed and it felt like real democracy in action’ […]

In the end, however, the most significant aspect of the trade-off between the festival-goers and the government that led to the provision of Watchfield was that it also included the Stonehenge Free Festival in its ambit. According to Sid Rawle, ‘the representatives stated that if they [the festival-goers] kept away from Windsor Great Park, they would be left alone at Stonehenge’.

From 1976 to 1984, Sid was a key figure in the summer solstice celebrations at Stonehenge, where, as I explained in relation to my own visit in 1984, “on solstice morning the fences came down, the sun shone out in all its summer glory, and the Druids and the festival-goers were once more at the stones together. There were pagan weddings, children were blessed, there was nakedness, and all manner of other rituals were performed, from the profound to the impenetrable.”

Summer solstice at Stonehenge, 1984 (Sid Rawle, arms outstretched, greets the sun). Photo copyright Alan Lodge.

During this period, Sid was also involved in establishing the enormously influential Tipi Valley community in south Wales (also see here, here and here), where he lived from 1976 to 1982. He was then involved in setting up the Peace Convoy, which traveled from Stonehenge to Greenham Common in 1981, in solidarity with the Women’s Peace Camp, and in 1984 was involved in establishing the Rainbow Village at Molesworth in Cambridgeshire, the proposed site for the second cruise missile base in the UK after Greenham, which was broken up by the largest peacetime mobilization of the military in February 1985.

He was also involved in numerous other free festivals — mainly in the West Country and Wales — that were part of the travelling free festival community’s summer itinerary, and in establishing smaller, more sustainable gatherings than Stonehenge, whose unfettered anarchy — and crowds of 50,000 or more throughout the month of June — prompted the violent clampdown at the Beanfield in June 1985.

In the summer of 1980, for example:

[T]he first Ecology Party Summer Gathering was held at Worthy Farm in Pilton. This small but significant step for the nascent ecological movement was convened by Michael Eavis in the absence of the Glastonbury festival, which he’d been forced to cancel for a year while he juggled the financial loss he’d made in 1979 with his ambitious plans for a larger festival in 1981. Significantly, the Summer Gathering brought the existing green pioneers, including Jonathan Porritt, into contact with the ecological leanings of the free festival scene for the first time. Music was provided by Roy Harper and Nik Turner’s Inner City Unit, and Sid Rawle became so involved that he was duly elected to the Party Council at the Autumn Conference in Cardiff, when ‘a controversial motion for the legalisation of cannabis was passed’.

In July 1982, Sid was involved in establishing the first Green Gathering at Worthy Farm, a development of the Ecology Party meetings that attracted over 5,000 people. As I explained in Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion:

As well as widening the scope of the green movement, the gathering also established a template for sustainable gatherings that were able to maintain the ethos of the free festivals in the face of a growing influx of less focused ‘consumers’. The music was restricted to acoustic music only, everyone was encouraged to participate — financially, physically and spiritually — and it’s significant that the Green Gatherings, as well as other small scale gatherings along the same lines, are still running today [although see this report about the cancellation of the Big Green Gathering in 2009].

In 1985, after the Battle of the Beanfield, when over 1,300 police from six counties cornered a convoy travelling to Stonehenge to establish the 12th free festival and subjected men, women and children to brutal treatment, abruptly ending the festival and signaling an end to the state’s tolerance of the burgeoning new age traveller movement — and its interest in land reform and political campaigning against militarism and nuclear power — Sid retired from the road, settling in the Forest of Dean with his family, where he lived until his death.

On the day of the Beanfield, as I explained in my book The Battle of the Beanfield, Sid “was so convinced that the state was planning a disproportionate response to the threat posed by the convoy that he stayed behind in Savernake [Forest, the location from which the convoy for Stonehenge had set off], arguing that if all the travellers stayed put and waited for thousands more people to join them, the authorities would be powerless to break up the ever-growing movement that he had worked for so long to encourage.”

He may have been right, but we will never know. Personally, I think that, even if disaster had been avoided at the Beanfield, the State was committed to destroying the travellers’ movement. The Beanfield took place just four months after the eviction of Molesworth, and the two events were not unconnected. Both the Greenham women and the Rainbow Village had attracted the wrath of Margaret Thatcher’s government by opposing cruise missile bases on UK soil, and I have always maintained that the only reason that the authorities could not truncheon the Greenham protestors into submission — as they did with the travellers at the Battle of the Beanfield — was because they were women. With the Rainbow Village, however, the Stonehenge connection meant that “decommissioning” the travellers en route to Stonehenge could be sold to the media and the public as ridding the country of a violent anarchic scourge.

Sid subsequently became involved with the Green Party (as it developed from its original incarnation as the Ecology Party), and, after also playing a part in the Oak Dragon and Rainbow Circle camps — developments of the smaller scale gatherings pioneered in the early 1980s — set up Rainbow 2000, which held a number of camps each summer, including the SuperSpirit camp at which he passed away, while packing up on its final day.

Sunset at the SuperSpirit summer camp, August 2004.

The Vision of Albion
By Sid Rawle

In the end it all gets back to land. Looking back, I see that a link that runs through my life concerns the right to land and property on it.

Shared out equally, there would be a couple of acres for every adult living in Britain. That would mean each family or group could have a reasonably sized small holding of ten or twenty acres and learn once again to become self sufficient.

The present day reality is the reverse, with some folk owning hundreds of thousands of acres and others owning none. That can’t be fair!

There’s talk of community in wartime. We can be ordered to go and fight and die for Queen and country. In peacetime is it too much to ask for just a few square yards of our green and pleasant land to rear our children on?

That’s all we want, myself and the squatters and travellers and hippy movements I’ve been involved with. Just a few square yards of this land that we can quite easily be asked to go out and die for.

And if we ever achieve that, what else? What else is what I call the Vision of Albion.

Albion, the most ancient name of this fair country. It was in Albion that the industrial revolution occurred. And I and many others now have a sneaking suspicion that in Albion will be forged the first post industrial society, a Green Community in this green land, living in equity and peace.

The Vision of Albion is a vision of one world united in love, a vision of unity in diversity. Not the same chant every day. Not everyone finding the same cure for the same ills. But a vision of all people uniting in love and respect for one another.

We have to find out how all us individuals in the world can have enough space to live in love and harmony, enough to be self-sufficient and be ourselves, and how to give everyone else this space. That is the vision of Albion, that is the vision of the Rainbow people.

It is the Rainbow vision because the rainbow is the symbol of God’s promise. And it is the vision of Albion because there is a sneaking feeling amongst some of us that it is from these islands, the islands that make up Albion, that change will come. So many of the white man’s dreadful fuck-ups in the world originated here. It is from these islands that peace and harmony must come.

Because although we’ve given the world so many of its institutions and a common language to communicate to each other in, we’ve lost our own real ancient roots. We don’t know who built our stone circles, how they did it, how they loved, what their economic system was, what their religion was, all this we’re ignorant of.

All over the world there are other peoples who do remember what their roots are, people who are still in touch with their tribal history. What lies deep in their systems must also lie deep within our system. We have to learn to find it again.

We have to reclaim or rediscover some of their ancient wisdom, the wisdom of ancient Albion.

There’s no magic in this, no mystery, however. The mystery is that we keep ourselves in hell when we could be in heaven. That’s the mystery.

Note: Sid attracted criticism as well as praise during his life, and it would not be fair and balanced to present this article without acknowledging his failings. The best comments I have seen came from Jeremy Sandford, who explained how his “enthusiastic breaking down of what were then perceived as the shackles of sexual taboos, including boundaries of age, sex, or style, which were such a feature of the sixties, were in Sid’s case characterised by a fervour which, though not unusual then, became inappropriate when carried on into the time of vastly different sexual mores of the 80s and 90s.” He added that Sid, “although still admired by many, was not sufficiently able to change, or change enough, in these areas.”

After working with Sid on his unpublished memoirs, Jeremy Sandford noted, “Speaking very frankly of all of this and while defending his actions in many cases and roundly condemning his critics, there are areas in which the present day mature Sid feels he has erred and strayed into actions which he now regrets.” He also wrote that, in his memoirs, his “confession of mistakes, and what amounts to his first public confession and apology, gives to his book an added poignancy and resonance.” As I mentioned above, excerpts of the book are available here (scroll down for links that begin with “sid”), and I hope that someone will one day be able to make the whole manuscript available.

For further information about Sid Rawle, see the videos here, and the obituaries here, here and here. For information about the Beanfield and its impact on civil liberties, see this article I wrote for the Guardian last year, and this accompanying article, and also see the articles here and here, written to mark the 25th anniversary. Also see these articles about Stonehenge here, here and here (and also see here for information about a book of photos from the 1994 Solsbury Hill road protest). Also see the website of Alan Lodge, and the Festival Zone website.

Andy Worthington is 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. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

I haven’t attended the summer solstice at Stonehenge for five years, as my work on Guantánamo and related issues has taken over my life, but the summer solstice at the temple still fascinates me, as it did 26 years ago, in 1984, when I first witnessed it during the last Stonehenge Free Festival. As I explained in my book Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion, a counter-cultural history of Stonehenge:

[O]n solstice morning the fences came down, the sun shone out in all its summer glory, and the Druids and the festival-goers were once more at the stones together. There were pagan weddings, children were blessed, there was nakedness, and all manner of other rituals were performed, from the profound to the impenetrable. For myself, the occupation of Stonehenge was an opportunity to appreciate for the first time the sheer scale of the monument and the skill of its construction, giving me a visceral rush of astonishment and admiration that has not left me to this day, despite the fact that, behind the scenes, the authorities responsible for the temple and its immediate environment — the government, English Heritage (a quango that took over management of the monument on 1 April 1984), the National Trust, local landowners and the police — were already working on plans that would deny access to the stones at the summer solstice for the overwhelming majority of people for another sixteen years.

The anarchic annual gathering in the fields opposite Stonehenge, which began in 1974, was brutally crushed the year after my visit — 25 years ago — at the Battle of the Beanfield, when over 1,300 police from six counties and the Ministry of Defence, with the approval of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, used unprecedented violence, in a civil context, savagely attacking 450 new age travellers, green activists and festival-goers as they attempted to make their way to Stonehenge to establish the 12th festival.

Police violence at the Battle of the Beanfield, June 1, 1985 (Photo copyright Tim Malyon).

As I explained on June 1, on the 25th anniversary of the Battle of the Beanfield, this “notoriously violent, one-sided confrontation … crippled the New traveller movement in the UK, brought to an end the annual Stonehenge Free Festival, and marked the start of a concerted effort to curtail civil liberties in the UK, particular as they related to protests and gatherings without prior consent.”

To mark the occasion, I’m reproducing below a short excerpt from Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion, dealing with the distressing aftermath of the Beanfield. I hope that those celebrating at Stonehenge last night and this morning know that the open celebrations at Stonehenge, which began in 2000, only came about after 15 years of exile, which began with the Beanfield, and was followed, for over a decade, by the imposition of an exclusion zone around Stonehenge that was brutally enforced until the Law Lords finally ruled in 1999 that it was illegal.

Stonehenge summer solstice 1985: the aftermath of the Beanfield
From Chapter 8 (“Suppression”) of Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion by Andy Worthington

After the Beanfield, the travellers and hard-core festival-goers tried to regroup themselves. Some of the battered survivors fled to Glastonbury, where they received a welcome in the orchard of Greenlands Farm in the nearby village of Wick. Bruce Garrard, part of the Rainbow Village Peace Camp at Molesworth, commented that “Glastonbury was the only place that seemed to offer any kind of sanctuary at all.” Others limped back to Savernake Forest [from where the convoy ambushed in the Beanfield had originally set off], where more travellers, oblivious to the carnage occurring down the road, had continued to gather. The police approached the Earl of Cardigan [the owner of Savernake Forest, who subsequently spoke out in defence of the travellers, having witnessed the police’s brutality] for permission to evict the site. “They said they wanted to go into the campsite ‘suitably equipped’ and ‘finish unfinished business,’” the Earl told Squall magazine. “Make of that phrase what you will. I said to them that if it was my permission they were after, they did not have it. I did not want a repeat of the grotesque events that I’d seen the day before.” With the police rebuffed, the travellers had a few days to recuperate before a legal eviction order was raised, but it was clear that the area around Stonehenge was to remain off-limits to them throughout the solstice period.

On the morning of the solstice, the great sarsens of Stonehenge were guarded, imprisoned and alone. Even the Druids were banned. The Ancient Druid Order [who had been celebrating at Stonehenge, on and off, for nearly 80 years] performed a midnight ceremony at the familiar “double circle” on Normanton Down, before heading down to Maiden Castle in Dorset for the solstice dawn. Pagans for Peace, a group of fifty people who had walked to Stonehenge from London, were the only observers of the solstice dawn at the monument, strung out along the perimeter fence like refugees catching a glimpse of forbidden freedom. The Times ran a report: “Shivering beneath their protective blankets they held hands and chanted ‘I am at one with the infinite sun,’” although “The object of their worship remained hidden behind the cloud which dispensed unremitting rain.”

In the end, 2,000 people held a reconvened Stonehenge Solstice Celebration at Bratton Castle, an Iron Age hill-fort and, appropriately enough, a former Neolithic ritual site, complete with a long barrow, above the Westbury White Horse just twelve miles north west of Stonehenge. Hawkwind turned up to play, and the police stayed off-site. To this extent it was a triumph, although the fall-out from recent events was still readily apparent. Margaret Greenfields, a festival regular and welfare volunteer, recalled, “It was like a refugee camp — mud, rain, wind, people shocked and dazed, a man with a broken leg in plaster hauling water in the mud, people with dysentery.”

The alternative Stonehenge festival at Bratton Castle hill-fort, June 1985 (Photo copyright Alan Lodge)

Throughout the summer, the travellers attempted to hold their lives together. In late July, some of the Convoy made it to Cleeve Common in Gloucestershire, where an impromptu free festival took place, comprising a few hundred people at most. Others held a festival at Cannock Chase in Staffordshire, and in August the survivors moved onto the Cantlin Stone festival, which must have seemed like a rare and dependable oasis. In September, a brave collective of agitators on the south coast organized the first Torpedo Town free festival, at which Hawkwind made another appearance, and as the season came to an end, many of the travellers returned to rest in the welcoming orchard of Greenlands Farm. The worst year of their lives was over, but the violence and intimidation was not yet complete.

For what happened next, see Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion or The Battle of the Beanfield, a second book that I compiled and edited in 2005, to mark the 20th anniversary of the Beanfield.

For now, however, I’d simply like to wish everyone a happy solstice, and to leave you with a handful of photos from summer solstice at Stonehenge over the last 100 years!

Summer solstice at Stonehenge, 1910.

Summer solstice at Stonehenge, 1963 (Photo copyright the estate of Austin Underwood).

Summer solstice at Stonehenge, 1976.

Summer solstice at Stonehenge, 1984 (Photo copyright Alan Lodge).

Summer solstice at Stonehenge, 1985 (Photo copyright Alan Lodge).

Summer solstice at Stonehenge, 2001 (Photo copyright Stuart Henderson).

Summer solstice at Stonehenge, 2003 (Photo by Andy Worthington).

Note: For further information about the Beanfield and its impact on civil liberties, see this article I wrote for the Guardian last year, and this accompanying article, and also see the articles here and here, written to mark the 25th anniversary. Also see these articles about Stonehenge here and here (and also see here for information about a book of photos from the 1994 Solsbury Hill road protest). Also see the website of Alan Lodge, and the Festival Zone website.

Andy Worthington is 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. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

To mark the anniversary, I also reproduce below Chapter 2 of The Battle of the Beanfield, the book I compiled and edited for the 20th anniversary in 2005 (copies of which are still available). The interview, with traveller Phil Shakesby (also known as Phil the Beer) was conducted 20 years ago for “Operation Solstice” by Gareth Morris (who directed the documentary with Neil Goodwin) and Caroline Thomas, and was one of several that I transcribed in full for the book, and it covers events from the summer of 1984 through to the Beanfield on June 1, 1985. It has a particular resonance today because Phil passed away on April 26 this year, aged 57.

An Interview with Phil Shakesby

Nostell Priory, 1984

It was the back end of the summer time. We’d done the normal summer circuit — Stonehenge, Inglestone Common — and then people went on to Cumbria and then down to Nostell Priory. It was a paying do. They had all kinds of bands on, some big name bands. We were all parked up in this big horseshoe affair, and it was all going quite nicely. Then the trouble started.

It was the time of the miners’ strike, and the police had been herding them off into a field and battling it out with them. When the police steamed into Nostell Priory, they were fresh from beating up this bloody mega-wodge of miners. The first we knew of it was about half past eleven, when Alex came steaming past my gaff shouting, ‘The Old Bill’s coming up!’ As I leapt outside and looked up this huge field, there was these great big blocks of bobbies, just like the Roman epics, at least four or five hundred of them. And they came charging across the field towards us, with these batons banging on their riot shields, shouting a war cry. Oh, my goodness!

They surrounded us just right of the marquee. At that point we were well and truly sorted. As I say, they had these mega bloody riot sticks, and wagons chasing through the site running into benders. Now they didn’t know whether there was anybody in these benders, and they’d run into them at high speed, just loving the way that they exploded. The tarp and all the poles would blow out, scattering the contents all over the place. And they did several of these. One of the lads managed to fire up his truck and chase after this thing, and, of course, a few more riot wagons came in then, and they eventually stopped him by ramming him from either side.

The main Super Duper comes over when they’ve actually surrounded us, and he’s asking for Boris and Doris, who are the ring-leaders as far as he’s concerned, because we’d billed ourselves as, ‘The Peace Convoy, backed by Boris and Doris’ — who were two geese that we had on site. So on all the fly-posters it was ‘Boris and Doris proudly presents…’ sort of thing. So they wanted to arrest Boris and Doris. And of course, your arse is tweeting like nobody’s business because there’s all this thing going on. Your gaffs are being wrecked right before you, and you’re surrounded by all this police, and then the Chief Super Duper marches up and says, ‘Right, I want Boris and Doris to step out here now!’ as all 200 of us fell about guffawing. I mean, you couldn’t do anything else. Your arse is tweeting away one moment, and then there’s this loony toon asking for two geese to step forward. It was the funny moment of it all. Wicked!

The other thing that went down: these guys that looked just like us — there was about seven of them. They’d infiltrated us that summer and done a bloody good job. They’d been wheeling and dealing along with some of the other lads that did that kind of thing. As we’re surrounded, people are getting these lumps out of their back pockets and shoving them to one side. They were arresting us — arm up the back — and filing us out through the crowd and pushing us into the main bulk of the bobbies with the tackle.

It came to my turn to hand myself in. As I did, these two bobbies took hold of me and cuffed me up with two lots of cuffs, and quite smartly marched me away down the field. As they marched me down I looked to the right at my home. I had a Pilot Showman’s trailer, and the contents are literally flying out of the windows that they’d broken. They were supposedly looking for drugs but they were systematically smashing up every home in the place. In fact, the trailer next to me, the inside was a total and utter wreck. There was nothing left.

I’ve got down to where they’re photographing us and I’m complaining to this sergeant that my home is being smashed up. They’re not searching it at all –they’re smashing it up. And he just scribbled this number on my forehead and the camera went flash and I was dragged away. I told them what I felt about them. I told them that they were a gorgeous bunch of bastards. And so I was immediately nicked for that, and then they flung me headfirst into the riot wagon.

Anyhow, I slid down across the steely floor of this wagon, and they’ve seen this screwdriver in my back pocket. They pulled me back out by my feet, whipped me round in front of this sergeant, and showed him this screwdriver that I was supposedly going to use on them. And in fact, what the crack was, when they steamed in at half past eleven I was just finishing me fittings. You know, as you do when you’re working, you slip things in your back pocket so you know where it is. It was about five minutes later when the police came in.

We were taken off into the police cells, where we spent three days and nights. And that was pretty wicked. Those that were kicking up, if they didn’t get hosed down, they got a good hiding. I wouldn’t make a statement. When they asked your name it was ‘Joe Clone.’ I wouldn’t let them take me prints, and so they were going to get me sorted. They wanted to sort me there and then, so I offered them, ‘Come on then, let’s have it out now. I’ll have all five of you.’ And they thought that was too cocky for them, so they got these guys in from this borstal training thing, you know, and these guys actually turned up that night.

And there were these guys a few cells down from me who were being, like myself, non-cooperative. You could hear flesh and bone smacking against the brick wall as these borstal types were pummelling them down the way.  And the three guys that were in the cells with me, I told them about how they were getting these guys in to sort me later, and these three are literally crying and whimpering away, because you could hear what was happening to the others down there.

I managed to blag their mattresses and put them in front of me, which made it very spongy for these gorillas to stand on, and I was going to be on the bench doing the business, letting fly with everything. I felt that they were going to snuff me out. A bit extreme, I suppose, but you read about people being battered to death in the cells and nothing ever being done about it. And when you heard these bodies being slapped down the way there, my goodness!

They came up to the door, and I was sat meditating on the bed, sort of thing, trying to keep my composure. All I could hear was my cell-mates going wobbly-lip. And one of these borstal types ripped the latch down on the cell door. I opened my eyes and I looked at these two eyeballs peering through, and my heart was thumping away as these manic eyeballs roamed around the cell. But for some reason they never came in. They just carried on down.

We were regularly rioting throughout the day. Then they decided to give us all tea and coffee, and we thought, ‘Oh brilliant!’ We hadn’t had a drink of tea and coffee in days. You only got water and jam sandwiches and that was it. And of course, an hour or so later, after we had these drinks, it went deadly silent for the first time in days. They’d put Largactil — wodges of it — in the tea. Loads of people actually passed out or fell asleep, or they were laying there with their eyes open but couldn’t do anything. The same thing happened to me. There were just one or two people who hadn’t had this chemical cosh, and they sussed out what was going on pretty quick and started creating even more.

On the third or fourth day we were moved to army jail. This was quite a miserable experience for all concerned. You were banged-up 23 out of 24 hours, with only two half-hour exercise times. It was a miserable place. But when we first got out in the exercise yard we were quite chirpy, and John and I tried to crack a few laughs and warm proceedings up a bit.

In dribs and drabs I served ten days. Most people got up to a fortnight before they were taken to court. If you didn’t give your right name they were going to keep you in indefinitely, but after a fortnight they sussed most of our names out. Loads of us were filed into court in front of this magistrate, who systematically went through us all, finding us guilty and nicking us for whatever it was. Myself, I got two lots of suspended sentences, for six months each, for just being at a festival and complaining that these people were smashing my home up. I felt quite bitter about that, really.

When I came out and found my gaff in the state it were in — it were a total wreck. They’d actually ripped the hangings down that I’d just put up, and ripped out all the panels too, so-called looking for drugs. They were just being totally and utterly destructive. They just wanted to smash our homes up, because they still had this strange thing that if they decommissioned the homes they’re decommissioning us, sort of thing.

I hadn’t been on site long when some of the solicitors and barristers turned up that had been dealing with our cases. And they informed us that the police intended to do the very same thing the next day — to come in and arrest everybody there for whatever fairy tale charge they could make up. Well, of course, that sent paranoia charging right through the whole site.

Operation Amethyst

The next morning everybody was up bright and early. We were running and set off down the motorway, and at every exit we came to there were police cars and riot wagons all the way up and across the bridge. A mega-turnout.  You couldn’t leave the motorway. And this carried on in every county and at every exit as we charged down the M1 all the way to London. It just didn’t stop until we actually hit London.

We ended up at this lovely place in Kent, and at the end of a month staying there, there was just about ten or so left out of the original convoy, and we moved on from there and we went … well, we couldn’t go any further south without becoming amphibious. We thought they were going to run us straight into the sea, as it were. So we started going up north and ended up on this disused airfield. That was where this particular ‘Operation Amethyst’ took place.

As I say, there was very few of us. We’d had the usual hassle with them.  They’d dumped about five tons of this clay on our only route in and out. They’d blocked it good and proper. We spent a couple of days hacking a way through that and eventually shifted it all. And as soon as we’d shifted it, they came along with this reinforced concrete and dumped umpteen tons of that. So we started hacking away at that, but it was almost impossible to get through. Dan, who was with us — The Neck, as he’s known by the London firm — hijacked this JCB that was working just down the way from us, and he set about hacking away at this stuff. There was all this metal intertwined. He had to drive back and charge at it full-pelt with the bucket wide open, sort of thing, and grab into this stuff.

Anyway, we’re working on top of this mound of tackle at the same time with sledgehammers and picks, as this guy, our nearest neighbour, turns out with his shotgun and starts letting go. I was on top of the mound smashing away at this tackle, and all these leaves came floating down from this branch a few feet above my head. I was well impressed by that. People sort of stopped, and I said, ‘No, come on, let’s get on with it. It’s getting to the point when they’re going to have to kill us if they want to stop us. Let’s just carry on.’ And we did. And he fired another shot. The police turned out, and we explained what had happened, and of course they wanted the JCB back. Everything was sorted and sort of fell into place, and we thought things were ok. We finished the work for the night and went back to our homes.

At the crack of dawn the next morning, Special Branch came in with a warrant for guns and drugs. I’d just smoked me last bit of drug as they were banging on the door. I smiled and popped it in the range. It was burning away quite merrily as they steamed in. They had guns under their armpits and guns on their hips, and there was these riflemen set out round about. They were quite frightening, really. It did give you this impression that you were on a short bit of string, that, short of a bullet, some of us are not going to go away. And it seemed that that day was not far off, really, because all of a sudden they’re turning out with guns.

They arrested everyone on site again for whatever it was. As they’re going through my kit for the second time, because they haven’t found anything to arrest me on, Paddy’s being dragged past and he’s saying, ‘You’ll never guess what they’re arresting me for. They’re arresting me for being in possession of my own milk churn.’ These bobbies looked at my milk churn by the door and said, ‘Right, you’re under arrest for being in possession of that milk churn and that tarpaulin.’

When we got down to the local nick there were these blackboards, and all our names are on these blackboards and what cells we were going in. So they knew. They’d already pre-planned to have that particular set of people down the cells, regardless of whether they found anything or not. We were interviewed by Special Branch. As far as they were concerned, we were terrorists. We were to be dealt with as terrorists. They couldn’t find anything to nick us on, and so at the end of the day they’ve said, ‘Psst, if you leave the area we’ll drop the charges — the theft of the milk churn and the tarp.’ And the same with the others. But we dug our heels in and stayed in the area and they never nicked us.

Molesworth

When we got this site established, we pulled off and went up to Molesworth, where the Peace Convoy actually came about then. We’d been told that a few people were up there. We moved on to the Rainbow Village and joined in with the protest. And by just being there you were protesting against these Cruise missiles. I didn’t like Britain being used as a front line defence by some other country. It’s us that’ll get it in the head come the time, so I thought. So I ought to throw my threepence ha’penny’s worth in and see what can be done.

And that’s where I met lots and lots of new faces, and it was all working out pretty well there, though they’d been nicking bods for theft of firewood. It was freezing cold, you know. Winter. So I felt that that was really out of order. I’d never heard of it before. All the years that I’d been on the road, I’d never been nicked for theft of firewood. Being nicked for trying to keep warm, sort of thing.

High-ranking bobbies and officials would regularly come on, and I took them to one side and had a word with them about it. But they weren’t having none of it. I put it to them that we can have it tit-for-tat, if you like. ‘If you’re going to carry on nicking people for collecting firewood, I can always block off your main entrance’, I told them. They sort of said, ‘Go ahead’, so we did. Ten of us moved onto their main road, which only left them the one way in. There was no exit. And it stayed like that all the time, because they carried on nicking people for collecting the firewood. And we told them, when they stopped nicking people or when they dropped the charges, we’d open the road up, but until then it would be tit-for-tat. Well, they never did relent, so we kept the road blocked for three weeks.

It was quite a good do. Loads of Joe Public turning out at weekends, and coming along with old Wellingtons and old sets of work boots, and all kinds of stuff. There was this free food area, where loads of potatoes were done in the ovens, and loads and loads of food was always on the go at weekends. It was quite a good do down there.

A children’s parade at the Rainbow Village, Molesworth, 1984.

But on the night when they came in … It was about half past eleven. There’s this huge trail of motors that you could see in the distance. I’d never seen so many headlights in all my life, sort of Old Bill-wise. You knew who it was straight away. It was the Old Bill and the army, and there were thousands of them coming in. As they came closer and closer, the panic set in. People were running around with lumps of stash and sort of bimbling off in different directions and doing like they do. They steamed in and surrounded us. They had it well-timed. We were promptly ringed by the Old Bill, as these army sappers were running around with coils of barbed wire.

Talk about overkill. There were 1,500 Royal Engineers, 100 military police, and about 500 riot cops. It were the biggest Royal Engineer operation since the war. And Michael Heseltine flew in like Action Man. You know he has this long hair — well, he had this bloody hair-net on as well — quite a cod! Yeah, that was the do — Michael Heseltine.

Long Marston

After Molesworth, this main lump was put up in Bedford, and then on to Long Marston. We had a wodge of jam sandwiches steam in. They were trying to cut us up and slow us down. All you could do was keep going at the same speed and go up their back end and push them along, you know.  As we went through the different counties we had jam sandwiches, then we had these riot vans doing the same thing, and then all these motorcycle cops. It was quite a wacky race, if you like, from Bedfordshire to Long Marston. And then, in the last twenty miles, all the Old Bill that had been interfering with us disappeared. Instead of trying to stop us, the local Old Bill in Stratford are going, ‘Yeah, yeah, it’s alright. Just steam on up there.’ They even gave us directions.

When we got to the site, of course, there was the landowner in this bloody great mechanical digger, not letting us in. And the entrance was quite a big entrance. Jed was over one side and I was on the other. He’d come over with this big set of jaws at your windscreen, Jed would inch in a bit, and it would swing over to him and give him loads of grief. I’d inch in and it’d swing back to me. And on the third time, as Jed inched in and was about to go for the gate, he just swung the bucket round and went ‘Wham!’ straight through the roof and through the windscreen. And Jed is just sat there going, ‘Wow!’

Seconds later, Jed’s leapt out the cab, out through the hole where the windscreen went, and chased off up to this huge machine. And, of course, as he’s going up, this landowner has brought the arm in and he’s giving it some. Jed’s running around trying to get to the cab, and he’s following with this bucket affair trying to crush him. I leapt out of the motor and I went over as well, so he had both of us to contend with. And then, as he was having a dig at me, Jed got into his cab round the other side. He’s giving him a punch or two and he’s got him by the throat, and this huge arm sort of fell to the ground and it’s twitching away like a good ‘un, as Jed’s rattling his neck, and I drove my coach and trailer through the middle of this arm — this huge bloody arm — as everybody else followed in.

The convoy at Long Marston, May 1985. Photo © Alan Lodge.

The main bulk of the people came together there and we ended up with this quite large convoy. And it was from there that we set out to move down to the Stones. We’d put the word out. We’d been and seen Spider’s lot in Bristol and Pikey’s lot on the east coast, and our main lump was in the middle of the country, sort of thing, and we’d arranged to meet up on the first large field after Savernake Forest. And of course, Bald-Headed Ray had actually taken Savernake Forest for us, so that’s where our main bulk ended up. Later on, both Spider’s and Pikey’s lot came in, and it was quite a good festival we had going that night.

The Battle of the Beanfield

The next morning came along, and it was about half nine in the morning. I was listening to the local radio and it reported that there were 300 hippies actually at Stonehenge, and of course at that I was quite elated and I rushed off and told people. And it’s, ‘Ali! Ali! Come on, let’s go!’ We had this huge convoy with this carnival-cum-fairy-type atmosphere, you know — flags waving, Bob Marley on the ghetto blaster. It was wicked. And eventually we all set off and slowly meandered down the road towards what we now know as the Beanfield.

As we made our way down there, we were about ten miles or so away from Stonehenge, when these two old boys stopped us and told us of these large council lorries that were preparing to dump quite a few tons of grit on the road, along with this wodge of bobbies that were there. Mick, who was my co-pilot, he had another look at the map and he worked out that we could by-pass this huge roadblock by doing a quick left and then a right and then carrying on down the main A303 to Stonehenge. Which is what we did. Well, as we got to that point, they’d already hacked off a large portion of the back end. These hit squads of police had, you know, steamed in from out the junctions, blocked the road, and busily started setting about people and their homes, you know, smashing in their windows and knocking people about like they do.

And we were carrying on. I didn’t know any of this was going on, myself. I was in the lead vehicle at the front, as Dale came along on his motorbike. Dale was the outrider. He steamed along and told us, as we were going down the road, what had been happening at the back end. Of course, we knew what to expect at the front end any minute. And sure enough, no more than ten seconds had gone by from Dale telling us, when these riot wagons came steaming up the road two abreast. There was no way you could go round them. A quick negotiation started with the police, but they weren’t prepared to let us go on any further, and in fact we were to hand ourselves in or there’d be bother. Well, we told them there and then that there was no way that people were going to hand themselves in. Then the order was sent out by the high-ranking bobby to arrest all the drivers, and of course this line of riot bobbies had shot out along the side of us and started smashing in the windows.

Well, this chap came up from behind in a flat bed and, by the side of me, rammed into the hedge, and got stuck and reversed out, and then rammed through it again. I thought, ‘What a brilliant idea! Let’s pull into the field off the road.’ So I put my wagon into first gear, which was crawler gear, and made my own hole in the hedge and steamed off through. I’d recently fitted a huge bumper — a really big, heavy-duty sort of fuck-off bumper, you know — and I went and punctured ‘x’ amount of holes in the hedgerow for people to get through, because they’d already heard what were going on at the back end, and what were going on at the front, as these bobbies had just stormed down, and they were just wrecking homes as they went, you know, smashing in the windows. And people started quickly filtering in through the holes, and people had got chainsaws out and were cutting their own holes in the hedge. And what was the main bulk of us then moved into the Beanfield. At first there were quite a lot of people driving around who weren’t quite sure what was what, until we all got parked up and things seemed to settle down a bit.

I was hoping myself that we’d be allowed to leave that field and go to the alternative site. We kept waiting on this Chief Super Duper Grundy, who was the man of the time, and of course he did eventually turn up. I asked him if we could go to the alternative site, and he said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Well, can we go back to Savernake?’ He said, ‘No, you will hand yourself in and be processed’, and he gave us a deadline as to when we should be doing it.  And of course, all this time-wasting that had gone on was so they could build up the forces that they felt were necessary to comfortably outnumber us, and do the same business on us that they’d been doing on the miners.

I mean, the police say there were people throwing petrol bombs and stuff like this. I never actually saw any of our lot throwing petrol bombs. What I did see was quite a few people that felt very intimidated, very frightened after having their homes smashed. And quite a few people had been beat up at this stage by the police and arrested and taken away, and some were still with us that had been beaten up. And people were prepared to resist to a degree, as such. There were a few young ones that were actually having a bit of a running battle with the riot police, who kept coming into the field in full gear — with the batons and riot shields — having a dig at us. I suppose they wanted to know if they could just walk in and do as they pleased.

As I say, there was a lot of time-wasting so they could get their forces together. There was ITN reporters and other such reporters there who had been talking with the police, and the police had informed them that they were going to come in and do the business. These reporters were very concerned for our safety and welfare. You could see by the way they were shaking that things were going to take a very drastic turn for the worse. And sure enough, they did.

When the time came, things were very quiet, and people were just resigned to hanging in the field and hoping that it would all go away. The police came in and they were battering people where they stood, smashing homes up where they were, just going wild. Maybe about two-thirds of the vehicles actually started moving and took off, and they chased us into a field of beans. By this time there were police everywhere, charging along the side of us, and wherever you went there was a strong police presence. Well, they came in with all kinds of things: fire extinguishers and one thing and another. When they’d done throwing the fire extinguishers at us, they were stoning us with these lumps of flint and such.

And in fact, while things had been quiet that afternoon they had been considering whether to use these high-powered single-shot rifles to put a single shot into each engine lock to stop it, because they knew that we’d climb into the vehicles and try and drive off, like you do when somebody’s coming at you with a manic set of eyes and a large lump of something. You want to run away from it.

We’re charging around, and around and around, and of course as the minutes went by there were less and less of us. And as people were stopping, their homes were systematically broken, and the people were battered and taken away and flung into the riot wagons. It came to the point where there’s just Jed and myself left running in the field. Then there was all these bobbies left to deal with us. There didn’t seem much point in going on, so I drove out of the Beanfield. I’d been in and out of the Beanfield several times already. You just had to move away from where the main bulk were, and go for where there was less bobbies, you know, because you had less stuff being thrown at you at that point.

There was a dividing line between the Beanfield and the grassy field, and there was a dip where my front wheel went down. As I tried rocking the vehicle back and forth on my clutch, it wasn’t coming out, and by that time I’d been surrounded by about 40 policemen. In the same moment, every window in the vehicle came inwards. I’d had nothing broken at that point. It had all been bouncing off the bodywork and some of my windows were Perspex, so all the other windows had been left intact, but in that one instance every window came in.

I’d bolted my doors, and put big coach bolts through them so you couldn’t open them, and there were no handles on the front, so they wouldn’t be able to get in, but they ripped these doors open with the coach bolts in. How they did it I don’t know, but they ripped these doors open. And then this one single riot bobby leapt in and stood on my bed and shouted at Third Eye Jim to get out. He let Third Eye Jim out. He shouted at Mick to get out, and, as he got to the side door, this bobby smashed him right between the eyes with this huge riot stick, and of course Mick flew out the door backwards.

Then he told me to do likewise, and of course I realised as soon as I moved over to the door that he was going to hit me with this stick. Which he did. As soon as I got to the door, sure enough, he went to hit me right between the eyes — the same place he’d hit Mick — so I covered my face, and this baton hit me on the elbow and sent me reeling out the door. And just as they’d got me on to the brow of the field there, because that’s where they were taking our particular lot that was left, these bobbies stopped me and forcibly spun me round and made me look. They said, ‘See that’, and I looked at my home, and there was smoke coming out the side doors. They’d gone and set my home on fire, stopped me and turned me round, and made me look at the flames and the smoke coming out the sides.

The Rastabus, one of the last vehicles to be attacked at the Battle of the Beanfield.

Then they turned me back round and whisked me off and bumped me into the riot wagon, where there was a lot of other people that I knew. We’ve all had the same treatment. I don’t think there was anybody in the wagon that hadn’t been thumped with a riot stick. And of course, from there it was down to the police cells in Amesbury. They nicked over 400 of us. I heard of one poor kid who’d swallowed his entire stash before they steamed on, and of course the Old Bill sussed out pretty quickly that he’s tripping, and they’ve got him in the back of a riot wagon. They’re sitting on his chest and digging him in the kidneys, and threatening how they’re going to snuff him out down the cells, sort of thing, and this kid’s screaming. Oh, my goodness!

They really went for it that day. I’d never seen the Old Bill lose it so much. And of course, the TV footage of them doing the business went walkies. All Joe Public got to see of the Beanfield was shots of our kitchen knives and axes — so-called weapons — and various buses supposedly trying to run the Old Bill over.

Note: For further information about the Beanfield and its impact on civil liberties, see this article I wrote for the Guardian last year, and this accompanying article. Also see these articles about Stonehenge here and here (and also see here for information about a book of photos from the 1994 Solsbury Hill road protest). And for tributes to Phil Shakesby, from some of his friends, see the Festival Zone website.

Andy Worthington is the author of Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion, The Battle of the Beanfield and 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). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and currently on tour in the UK), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

That event on June 1, 1985 — a notoriously violent, one-sided confrontation between 450 unarmed travellers and a quasi-military police force of over 1,300 police and MoD personnel — is known as the Battle of the Beanfield. Further information can be found in The Battle of the Beanfield, the book I compiled and edited in 2005 for the 20th anniversary, and in the documentary “Operation Solstice,” directed by Gareth Morris and Neil Goodwin for Channel 4 in 1991. In addition, some indication of the significance of the Beanfield can hopefully be gleaned from this article I wrote for the Guardian last year — and the accompanying article here.

As I explained at the time:

[At the Battle of the Beanfield] a convoy of new age travellers, peace activists, anti-nuclear campaigners and free festival goers were ambushed en route to Stonehenge, to set up the 12th annual Stonehenge free festival, and subjected to a brutal display of State aggression.

On that dreadful day for civil liberties in the UK, when Margaret Thatcher, having crushed the miners, turned her attention to a new “enemy within,” the one-sided Battle of the Beanfield was followed up by legislation (the 1986 Public Order Act) that legitimized the government’s attempts to crush the way of life of travellers and Gypsies, curtailed the British public’s traditional right to gather freely without prior permission, and paved the way for a further assault on civil liberties (in the 1994 Criminal Justice Act), which was precipitated by the last large free festival in the UK, at Castlemorton, in May 1992.

And as I added in the Guardian:

[T]he 1994 Criminal Justice Act not only repealed the 1968 Caravans Sites Act, criminalising the entire way of life of gypsies and travellers by removing the obligation on local authorities to provide sites for gypsies, but also amended the Public Order Act by introducing the concept of “trespassory assembly.” This enabled the police to ban groups of 20 or more people meeting in a particular area if they feared “serious disruption to the life of the community,” even if the meeting was non-obstructive and non-violent, and the act also introduced “aggravated trespass,” which finally transformed trespass from a civil to a criminal concern.

Both had disturbing ramifications for almost all kinds of protests and alternative gatherings, and were clearly ramped up after the government failed to secure convictions after the Battle of the Beanfield using an ancient charge of “unlawful assembly.” Moreover, as protestors have been discovering in the years since the passing of the Criminal Justice Act, the groundwork laid by the Public Order Act and the Criminal Justice Act provided the Labour government, which has passed more legislation directed at civil liberties than any previous government, to start from a presumption that there were few, if any instances when a peaceful protest by just two people could not be suppressed.

To mark the anniversary, three screenings of “Operation Solstice” are taking place on Tuesday, in Bradford, Brighton and London, and a new play, based on the dreadful events of that day, starts a three-week run in Exeter. There have also been rumours that there will be some sort of Beanfield reunion at the actual site, beside the A303 in Wiltshire, and for further information on this please see this Facebook page.

The details of the film screenings and the play are as follows:

London, Tuesday June 1, 7 pm: Screening of “Operation Solstice” at The Broca, 4 Coulgate Street, Brockley, London, SE4 1XY.
Introduced by Andy Worthington, plus a post-screening Q&A session. Also see here for Andy’s other current events, involving screenings of the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” directed by Polly Nash and Andy. For The Broca, see the website here.

Bradford, Tuesday June 1, 7.30 pm: Screening of “Operation Solstice” at the 1in12 Club, 21-23 Albion Street, Bradford, BD1 2LY.
From the publicity: “Bolstered by a mandate from on high – and some dodgy injunctions, preventing 83 named individuals from approaching Stonehenge – the police brought to a violent end the 11th annual Stonehenge Free Festival, and set about “decommissioning” the new Travellers’ movement. We’ll be remembering these events at the 1in12 Club with a showing of “Operation Solstice” and considering the links between the attacks on the counterculture in 1985 and organised labour in 1984 (miners) and 1986 (printworkers) and how that set the pre-conditions for the acquiesce-or-else debt-based consumerist experiment which has now culminated in the return to power of the architects of some of the 1980s most shameful episodes.”

Brighton, Tuesday June 1, 8 pm: Screening of “Operation Solstice” at the Cowley Club, 12 London Road, Brighton, BN1 4JA.
Organized by SCHMovies (part of the excellent SCHNews collective). See the Cowley Club Facebook page here.

Exeter, Tuesday June 1 to Saturday June 19: “Beanfield,” a new play by Shaun McCarthy at The Bike Shed Theatre, St Olaves Close, Mary Archers Street, Exeter, EX4 3AT.
Produced by the Particular Theatre Company, “Beanfield” is described as follows: “Produced to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the Battle of the Beanfield, this beautiful play looks at the human cost of the tragedy, both at the time and for us now. Seen through the lens of a love story between Steamer, a veteran of the convoy, and Annie, the well-to-do daughter of a newspaper editor, and taking in an array of characters from policemen to English Heritage committee members, ‘Beanfield’ tells an epic story with a lightness of touch.”
Following the opening run in Exeter, “Beanfield” will be performed at the Tobacco Factory, Bristol, from August 24 to September 4.
See here for the Particular Theatre Company website, and here for the Bike Shed Theatre.

For further information on the Beanfield and civil liberties in the UK, see my book Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion, and two other articles here and here (and also see here for information about a book of photos from the 1994 Solsbury Hill road protest). I’ll also be posting an excerpt from the Beanfield book on the actual anniversary.

Andy Worthington is 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). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and currently on tour in the UK), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Celebrity Dialogue: Andy, we really appreciate the time you took out of your busy schedule for Celebrity Dialogue. First of all, let’s start from your early life. Tell us about your childhood, education etc.

Andy Worthington: I grew up near Hull, in the north of England, and studied English Language and Literature at New College, Oxford University more years ago than I care to remember.

Celebrity Dialogue: How did it all begin: your journey as a journalist and historian?

Andy Worthington: My journey began when I became fascinated by the ancient sacred sites of England in 1996. I then undertook a number of long-distance walks through the countryside of southern England in the summer of 1997 and 1998, visiting these sites, which I then attempted to write up as a book.

Celebrity Dialogue: One of your previous books, Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion, what was it about?

Andy Worthington: The process of writing a book about these long-distance walks was ultimately unsuccessful, but it led to me focusing on one particular part of the story — the Stonehenge Free Festival, an anarchic annual event that I had visited in my youth — and writing, instead, a social history of Stonehenge, Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion, in which I explained how, over the course of over 100 years, archaeologists and the State had come up against an extraordinary array of other people with claims on England’s most famous prehistoric monument: Druids, student revellers, free festival goers, anarchists, hippies, new age travellers, green activists, feminists, anti-nuclear protestors, anti-road protestors and land reformers. This then led to a second book, The Battle of the Beanfield, about a critical confrontation between a convoy of travellers and green protestors and the might of Margaret Thatcher’s police in a field in Wiltshire in June 1985, and from there, having conducted research into civil liberties, human rights and the law, I was in a good position to move onto a more challenging topic: Guantánamo.

Celebrity Dialogue: How did you get interested and involved in the Guantánamo detention camp?

Andy Worthington: I was interested from the moment Guantánamo opened, and we saw the dehumanized prisoners, shackled, kneeling in their orange jumpsuits, and subjected to sensory deprivation. I then followed the stories of the released British prisoners, in 2004 and 2005, and their accounts of torture and abuse, and, in the summer of 2005, began trying to find out who was held at Guantánamo. As the US government had not yet been obliged to release the names and nationalities of the prisoners, this involved tracking down news reports relating to released prisoners, reading interviews with released prisoners, and drawing on largely speculative prisoner lists compiled by the Washington Post and the British human rights group Cageprisoners, but it was enough to get me started.

Celebrity Dialogue: Tell us about your book, The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison. What motivated you to write this book?

Andy Worthington: In spring 2006, following the initial research described above, I got lucky. The Pentagon lost a lawsuit brought by the Associated Press and was obliged to release the first ever prisoner list, plus 8,000 pages of documents providing the allegations against the prisoners and transcripts of the tribunals and review boards held at Guantánamo — a largely sham process designed to demonstrate that the prisoners were “enemy combatants,” who could be held without rights. However, these tribunals and review boards at least allowed the prisoners to tell their side of the story, and it was through a four-month analysis of these documents — a process that no one else undertook, to my surprise — that I was able to establish a chronology of the men’s capture, and a context for their capture, whether in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, crossing from Afghanistan into Pakistan, or in other countries, subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and held in secret prisons. This, together with other information — including how the majority of the men were seized not by Americans but by their Afghan and Pakistani allies, at a time when bounty payments were widespread — enabled me to understand, and to demonstrate, that the overwhelming majority of the men were not terrorists, but were, instead, either completely innocent men or low-level Taliban recruits, mainly from Saudi Arabia and Yemen, who had been persuaded to take the side of the Taliban against other Muslims (in the Northern Alliance) in Afghanistan’s long-running civil war. Moreover, it seems clear that many of these men had not advanced beyond basic training, and others had served only as cooks or guards.

Celebrity Dialogue: You have researched so much about the Guantánamo Bay prison, yet you haven’t been to that place. How does it feel?

Andy Worthington: To be honest, it feels fine. I regret, in some ways, missing out on the Military Commissions — the trials that took place at Guantánamo in 2007-08 — because at those trials journalists could actually see the prisoners and hear the proceedings, whereas otherwise they are given a PR tour, and are told that the authorities are running a lawful, humane facility, even though the men are held without charge or trial and no one is allowed to speak to any of them. The only people who genuinely have insightful access to the prison are the lawyers (and their translators), who actually get to meet the men.

Celebrity Dialogue: If given a chance, would you like to visit the detention center personally?

Andy Worthington: As above, only if someone flew me out there to report on a trial, and I’m hoping that no further trials will take place at Guantánamo, and that those whom the administration wants to try — just 35 of those still held — will be tried in federal courts in the US.

Celebrity Dialogue: After meeting some of the former prisoners up and close, did you find them to be the “beasts” media has portrayed them to be?

Andy Worthington: Of course not. When the men were largely seized randomly, and were, in most cases, sold to their US captors, it’s extremely difficult to find anyone who would qualify as a dangerous person in any sense. Of the men I have met — mostly the British ex-prisoners, but a few others, including former al-Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj — what has impressed me the most is not just that they were seized by mistake, but that they have, in most cases, survived their ordeal in the most extraordinary manner, through their faith, and through the support network of the prisoners themselves.

Celebrity Dialogue: How did your personal relationship develop with some of the former prisoners you came to know during your quest in this case?

Andy Worthington: The people I have come to know the best are a former prisoner who does not live in the UK, with whom I have been in contact for several years, and two of the British ex-prisoners: Moazzam Begg, who read a draft of my book before publication, and Omar Deghayes, who was still in Guantánamo at that time. Omar and I are currently spending a lot of time together, taking the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” on a UK tour, and it is a real pleasure to be getting to know him better, and to be able to start working together on publicizing the stories of those who are still held at Guantánamo.

Celebrity Dialogue: You are the co-director of the documentary, “Outside the Law: The Stories from Guantánamo.” Tell us how you got involved in this project.

Andy Worthington: I proposed the idea of a documentary to a good friend, Polly Nash, around the time The Guantánamo Files was published. I thought that some of the central arguments of the book would translate well to film, and Polly agreed. We secured some seed funding from the college where she teaches — the London College of Communication — and established that we could tell the story most effectively through interviews with a handful of particularly knowledgeable individuals with whom I was in contact; primarily, the lawyers Tom Wilner in Washington D.C. and Clive Stafford Smith in the UK, and former prisoners Moazzam Begg and Omar Deghayes. I also took part in the film, and there are also appearances by solicitor Gareth Peirce, former Guantánamo chaplain James Yee, and Shakeel Begg, an Imam in London.

Celebrity Dialogue: Lately, you have been busy touring different locations for the screening of your documentary. Where have you been so far?

Andy Worthington: In early February, Polly and I went to Oslo to take part in the Human Rights, Human Wrongs Film Festival, and since then we have had several screenings in London — at Amnesty International’s Human Rights Action Centre, at the National Film Theatre, at LSE, SOAS, UCL and South Bank University. We have also taken it to Oxford, Bradford, Norwich, Canterbury, Dundee, Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow, and have many more screenings lined up for the coming months, including the London International Documentary Festival. Full details can be found here.

Celebrity Dialogue: What was the response that you received from the general public during the screenings?

Andy Worthington: The response has been very positive. People are very impressed with the humanity of Omar, in particular, whom I regard as the heart of the film, and his combination of inner strength and vulnerability very powerfully brings home to people the human tragedy of Guantánamo. In addition, we have received support for the campaign to secure the release of Shaker Aamer, who is also featured in the film. The last British resident in Guantánamo, Shaker was cleared for release in 2007, but continues to be held not because of anything that he did, but because he has relentlessly stood up for the prisoners’ rights. People are also particularly engaged right now, because of recent revelations, in the UK courts, of British complicity in the torture of Shaker Aamer and the other man featured in the film, Binyam Mohamed.

Celebrity Dialogue: Are there any other places you would like the documentary to be screened?

Andy Worthington: As mentioned above, we have just been accepted as part of the London International Documentary Festival, at the end of April, and we are hoping that other film festivals will take the film. We’re also in discussions with distributors, and are especially looking at ways of getting the film out to American audiences, where its message is particularly important. We’re also interested in screenings being facilitated in as many countries as possible, and are pleased that a few people have recently volunteered to translate the film into other languages. We’re also encouraging people to put on their own screenings, by buying a DVD from the website of the production company, Spectacle.

Celebrity Dialogue: Which television channels have aired it so far?

Andy Worthington: None, although we are in discussions with a few people. Personally, I’d love it to be shown on TV in the Middle East and in Pakistan.

Celebrity Dialogue: In addition to spreading awareness about the plight of those who are suffering at the hands of governments, what else can be done?

Andy Worthington: Spreading awareness is extremely important, but public pressure is also significant. In the UK, this involves sending letters to government ministers, contacting MPs, organizing and attending protests. In addition, sending letters to the prisoners themselves lets them know that the world has not forgotten them, and also makes them less likely to be subjected to abuse in custody.

Celebrity Dialogue: Do you see hope for the Guantánamo prisoners and others like them around the world?

Andy Worthington: I always try to see hope. President Obama has lacked courage in closing Guantánamo — both in comprehending the full extent of the mistakes made by the Bush administration, and in fighting back against his opponents, who are playing an unprincipled political game with questions of national security. However, although there are questions still to be answered about how the US treats terrorist suspects in future, and whether the application of the Geneva Conventions will be unconditionally restored for prisoners seized in wartime, I think it’s fair to say that Guantánamo is, above all, regarded as a failed experiment that needs to be brought to an end. Sadly, however, there is still some way to go before this can become a reality, and I am discouraged, and even dismayed by the refusal of US lawmakers to offer new homes on the US mainland to cleared prisoners who cannot be repatriated because they face the risk of torture or other ill-treatment in their home countries, by the revival of the Military Commission trial system as an alternative to federal court trials, and, in particular, by the decision to continue holding other prisoners indefinitely without charge or trial, because they are regarded as too dangerous to release, even though the evidence against them is untrustworthy. Endorsing Bush-era indefinite detention is a terrible thing for the Obama administration to be proposing.

Celebrity Dialogue: In your opinion, how can governments be stopped from illegal detention and torture?

Andy Worthington: Again, by public pressure. We need to campaign to make sure that people — including politicians — accept that torture is illegal, fundamentally unreliable and morally corrosive, and to roll back the casual way in which it has been accepted over the last decade. And we can, in addition, support lawyers and judges who are committed to outlawing these practices and holding those responsible to account, and, as always, we can continue to educate others be spreading the word. Fundamentally, the way I see it, the senior Bush administration officials and lawyers who created and endorsed horrific policies enacted in the “War on Terror” need to be held accountable in a court of law. Otherwise, US laws and the UN Convention Against Torture mean nothing.

Celebrity Dialogue: After the Guantánamo issue is settled, do you see yourself continuing your fight against similar injustices or do you have other projects in mind?

Andy Worthington: I’ll get back to you on that when the Guantánamo issue is finally settled!

Celebrity Dialogue: Thank you so much for your time, Andy. We wish you the best of luck in your efforts and hope for your success in life.

(‘’)

Andy Worthington is 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). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

I first met Adrian in 2003, when he allowed me to reproduce some of his photos in my book Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion, and, when we got back in touch recently, I was delighted to hear that he has collected 71 of his Solsbury Hill photos in a book, Solsbury Hill: Chronicle of a Road Protest, with an accompanying website. I urge anyone with an interest in this remarkable period in the history of environmental direct action — and a unique form of British eco-paganism — to buy the book and visit the website, and I reproduce below some excerpts from Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion that deal with the road protest movement:

[A]nother development that erupted spontaneously in 1992, but that clearly owed much of its impetus to the combination of paganism and political protest conceived by the travelling community and the women of Greenham Common in the 1980s … was the road protest movement, and from the beginning it demonstrated a raw, untutored paganism that went further than any previous protest movement in embracing the concept of the whole of the earth as a sacred landscape.

The story began in February 1992, when two young travellers, a woman called Sam and a man called Steph, pitched camp on Twyford Down near Winchester, an expanse of rolling chalk downland that was both a haven for wildlife and a repository of thousands of years of human history, including ancient tracks and Celtic field systems. The travellers were pleased to discover that this idyllic landscape was ‘the most protected landscape in southern England’, officially designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and a Site of Special Scientific Interest, and they were dismayed when a local rambler told them that an extension to the M3 was shortly to be driven through it. As it turned out, local people had been campaigning against the proposed extension for twenty years, writing letters, submitting petitions, lobbying parliament, mounting legal challenges and contributing to a public inquiry. The road scheme had even been the subject of an official complaint by the European Union, but this too had been ignored by the Department of Transport.

Sam and Steph resolved to take matters into their own hands, setting up a protest camp that immediately began to draw other supporters: ‘travellers, environmentalists, students, pagans, even businessmen and Tory councillors, from all over the country’. The Twyford Down protest was the first outing for the British off-shoot of Earth First!, an American direct action group, and support also came from Friends of the Earth, but it was the passion and ingenuity of the traveller-protestors that was to have the most resounding impact. In the early days, they contented themselves with digging defensive trenches, chaining themselves to earth-moving equipment and forming human chains across the landscape, but as the threat grew more severe, so too did their responses, and they were soon leaping onto moving machinery and hurling themselves into the path of the road-builders’ giant trucks. It was these actions that finally drew the attention of the national press, who soon came up with an apposite name for them — the ‘Dongas Tribe’, derived from a South African word for a track, which had, ironically enough, been given to the ancient tracks that criss-crossed the landscape of Twyford Down by a teacher at the public school in Winchester that had sold the land to the DoT in the first place.

After ten months, the protestors were violently evicted from their camp by Group 4 Security on 9 December 1992, a day that became known as Yellow Wednesday. The naturalist David Bellamy, who had come to Twyford Down as a high profile political campaigner, witnessed the brutal events of that day, and his description echoed the shock experienced by Nick Davies at the Beanfield eight years before: ‘I have been in many protests around the world in some very hairy countries and have never seen such unreasonable force used, especially on women. These boys were putting the boot and fist in and they didn’t care if they were men or women. There were ministry people there but no one tried to call them off. The security men went completely over the top’. All that had changed in eight years, it seemed, was that a quasi-military police force had been replaced by a private security firm that was, if anything, even less accountable for its actions than its predecessors.

Undeterred, the Dongas reformed their protest camp in February 1993, and direct action took place on a daily basis throughout the spring and summer, culminating in a site invasion by over 500 people on 4 July, two days after the DoT and Tarmac were granted a High Court injunction that led to the subsequent imprisonment of ten of the protestors. Significantly, however, their actions had already inspired other people, and throughout the country protest camps sprang up at the site of almost every road project proposed by the government.

In June 1993, for example, protests against the construction of a toll bridge connecting the Isle of Skye to the Scottish mainland combined ecological issues (the destruction of Europe’s second largest otter colony) with the first actions against the newly launched Private Finance Initiative (PFI), whereby the Bank of America bankrolled and profited from the bridge’s construction. That same month, at Cradlewell, the site of a proposed bypass near Newcastle, a group calling themselves the Flowerpot Tribe began a sustained occupation of trees, a tactic that was to become increasingly influential as the protest movement grew.

By September, the campaign had spread to London, where protests against the creation of a link road for the M11 through east London ran for two years, involving the occupation of entire streets of condemned houses and the creation of the ‘Autonomous Area of Wanstonia’ and ‘Leytonstonia’, independent mini-states complete with their own passports. In March 1994, after further large-scale protests at Twyford Down on 28-29 November 1993 and 3 January 1994, the Dongas turned their attention to Solsbury Hill on the outskirts of Bath, an Iron Age hill-fort that was to be cut into by a bypass that would also destroy miles of precious water-meadows and woodland, and in May the first protests against the M65 Blackburn bypass took place, at which tree-houses linked by high-level walkways were set up to protect the ancient woodland and bluebell dells of the Stanworth valley.

In the months before the Criminal Justice Bill was passed, the protests intensified. As the journalist and activist George Monbiot noted, the legislation, which was ‘crude, ill-drafted and repressive’, had succeeded in creating ‘the broadest, and oddest, counter-cultural coalition Britain has ever known’, uniting ‘Hunt saboteurs, peace protestors, football supporters, squatters, radical lawyers, gypsies, pensioners, ravers, disabled rights activists, even an assistant chief constable and a Tory ex-minister’.

5,000 people attended a mass trespass at Twyford Down on 2 July 1994, and another large demonstration took place on 18 July in Norfolk, where protestors calling themselves ‘The Lizard Tribe’ had been campaigning for a year against an expansion of the A11. In August, a protest camp was established on the Pollok Estate in Glasgow (‘Pollok Free State’) to protect a city amenity space from the development of the M77, and in September protests began against a new stretch of the A30 in Devon, including, at the Fairmile camp, the first instance of elaborate underground tunnels that would collapse on the occupants if heavy machinery was deployed. In July and October, national demonstrations against the Bill in London drew crowds of over 100,000 people, and on 3 November, the day that it became law, numerous protests took place across the country, including an invasion of the M11 construction site by over 300 protestors.

My visit to the exhibition on Friday was a vivid reminder of the powerful grass-roots political movements in the UK in the years when John Major was Prime Minister, and it made me think, sadly, that the revolutionary spirit of Albion, which surfaced in those years in the road protest movement, the free party scene, Reclaim the Streets, a revival of the 17th century Diggers movement and the struggle for access to Stonehenge, seems to have been asleep since Tony Blair wielded his psychic cosh on the British people in 1997, when unfettered greed was revitalized, a lawless “War on Terror” did to civil liberties and human rights what Margaret Thatcher would never have considered possible (or even, in some cases, acceptable), an illegal war was launched with impunity, and materialism and self-obsession became society’s dominant traits.

Note: For related articles, see: Stonehenge and the summer solstice: past and present (June 2008), Remember the Battle of the Beanfield (in the Guardian, June 2009) and a related article here, and It’s 25 Years Since The Last Stonehenge Free Festival (June 2009).

Andy Worthington is 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). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.