34 Years On from the Battle of the Beanfield, Is Widespread Environmental Dissent Conceivable?

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It’s 34 long years since the boot of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain crushed one of the most visible demonstrations of counter-cultural dissent in the UK via a brutal demonstration of the violence of the establishment at what became known as the Battle of the Beanfield, when 1,400 police — from six counties and the MoD — shut down a vastly outnumbered convoy of nomadic new age travellers, anarchists, environmental activists and free festival stalwarts as they attempted to get to Stonehenge to establish what would have been the 12th annual Stonehenge Free Festival.

From humble origins in 1974, the festival grew — reflecting massive discontent in Thatcher’s Britain, where unemployment was at an all-time high in the early ‘80s — so that by the time it was suppressed, tens of thousands of people, for the whole of June, set up a makeshift settlement, the size of a small town, in the fields opposite Stonehenge. 

Drug use was rife, as was acid rock music, while the festival’s regulars, who took part in a circuit of free festivals in England and Wales from May to September, tried to get by via the creation of a low-level, low-impact economy that, like their decision to take to the road in old vehicles rather than stagnating on the dole in towns and cities without jobs, fundamentally challenged the state’s insistence that nomadic activities were reserved solely for Gypsies, who, themselves, have a long history of persecution, as settled people generally, it seems, despise nomadic people. 

The convoy also, unacceptably from the state’s point of view, confronted the establishment’s claimed land rights, embraced environmental awareness in contrast to corporate materialism, and opposed nuclear power and nuclear weapons, both of which were endorsed by Thatcher and the Tories.  

While the state’s brutality dealt a serious blow to the coherence of the traveller and festival movement, it wasn’t enough to stifle dissent. I had visited the Stonehenge Free Festival as a student in 1983 and 1984, and it had a transformational effect on me. News of the Beanfield was genuinely shocking, as was the suppression of the festival, and the passing of new laws, in the 1986 Public Order Act, that were designed to cripple the ability of any group of perceived troublemakers to gather freely, but it was foolish of the Tories to believe that they could prevent active and vocal criticism of Thatcher’s vision of a new privatised Britain of unfettered banking and rabid materialism.

A new drug, ecstasy, soon emerged to create a loved-up party scene involving huge and illegal warehouse raves, which soon attracted survivors of the traveller and festival scene, creating new counter-cultural hybrids, the culmination of which was the last Stonehenge-sized free festival, on Castlemorton Common in Gloucestershire, over the Whitsun Bank Holiday weekend in May 1992, where all the many tribes came together — boy racers from the Home Counties meeting the crusty encampments of the Brew Crew, as rave sound systems played 24/7. 

That prompted a further clampdown, via 1994’s Criminal Justice Act, with its absurd efforts to ban music characterised by “a series of repetitive beats,” and further, draconian bans on unlicensed gatherings, as well as the effective criminalisation of trespass, but what no one saw coming was a broad protest movement that saw the earth as sacred, and that involved protestors occupying trees, digging tunnels and working out how to lock themselves on to equipment to prevent the creation of roads and bypasses. 

In 1993-94, a huge battle of resistance took place in east London, to try to prevent the creation of the M11 Link Road, and in the meantime another urban expression of dissent came about via Reclaim the Streets, which blocked roads and held parties in spaces that were suddenly car-free and autonomous.

These movements in turn fed into the huge anti-globalisation movement of the late ‘90s and early 2000s, and the Occupy movement of 2011-12, when public space was once more occupied, and the prevailing economic system was dissected and found wanting. Nevertheless, the prevailing trend in the 21st century has been for the corporate world to consolidate its power, turning populations into docile consumers, and trapping as many people as possible in insanely expensive housing so that, in theory, they — we — are too tied up and distracted to rise up.

Sadly, this has been largely successful, but it requires serious levels of employment to work well, and decent jobs, meanwhile, are drying up, through outsourcing, mechanisation and A.I. advances. As those falling through a deliberately frayed safety net — part of the cynical “age of austerity” implemented by the Tories in response to the banker-led global economic crash of 2008 — drop off the system’s radar, they are forced to find ways to subsist peripherally, living on the streets, permanently crashing at the houses of friends, as so-called “sofa surfers”, in tents, in cars or vans, in caravans, or through squatting in empty industrial buildings, which are the only buildings that can now be successfully squatted, after the Tories, disgracefully, made squatting in empty houses a criminal, rather than a civil offence.

In some crucial ways, the situation is similar to that which created a growing traveller movement in the early ‘80s, under Thatcher, but now, of course, people can’t easily sign on and live largely without scrutiny, and the cheap vehicles of the ‘80s no longer exist. Many of the counter-cultural impulses, however, live on, and after the long drought in serious dissent that preceded the Occupy movement, a similarly long subsequent drought in opposing the status quo had to wait until last October, when Extinction Rebellion (XR) announced itself via the simultaneous occupation of five central London bridges.

As someone who has lived through, and taken part in the various counter-cultural movements from the free festivals to the road protest movement to the anti-globalisation protests and the Occupy movement, I was intrigued by the thought that had gone into XR’s efforts at mass mobilisation and mass dissent — disrupting “business as usual” via scrupulously non-violent direct action, and, more contentiously seeking mass arrests, to highlight the unprecedented man-made environmental crisis we currently face, and when, in April, campaigners occupied four central London sites for a week — Waterloo Bridge, Oxford Circus, Parliament Square and Marble Arch — it felt very much as though a spark drawing inspiration from the extraordinary Women’s Peace Camp at Greenham Common, the road protest movement, the anti-globalisation movement and Occupy had been re-ignited, that, this time, might lead to significant system change.

I don’t mean to sound naive about the state’s desire and ability to mobilise in resistance to any efforts to break the current state of business, but what XR — and the powerful figure of 16-year old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and the school strike for climate movement she inspired — have that none of our previous movements have been able to achieve is a global sense of absolute emergency. We are, to be blunt, already killing the planet as a sustainable entity for humans, and, for the first time, large numbers of people seem to be waking up to the painful truth that, if we don’t embrace a complete, revolutionary change in the way that we deplete and consume the world’s resources, fill the planet with plastic, and pump out carbon dioxide, we face a dangerously super-heated atmosphere and the total collapse of civilisation as we know it not only within our lifetimes, but possibly within the next ten years. 

34 years on, gazing back in time to the Battle of the Beanfield is in many ways a sad indicator of quite how much the world has changed in the intervening decades, with hectic over-consumption, self-absorption and self-entitlement at unprecedented levels, but those of us who have never settled for dystopian materialism as meaningful or worthwhile need to remember that what was being sought back then, and is still being sought now, is more important than ever, and that the struggle for a less rapacious and more sustainable world can still be won, and, indeed, must be won, because nothing less than the very future of humanity is at stake.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from six years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

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