It’s 35 Years Since the Battle of the Beanfield; Where Do We Go Now?

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Today is the 35th anniversary of the Battle of the Beanfield; actually, a one-sided rout of heartbreaking brutality in a field in Wiltshire, when 1,400 police from six counties and the MoD violently “decommissioned” a convoy of 400 travellers trying to get to Stonehenge to establish what would have been the 12th annual Stonehenge Free Festival, a huge autonomous settlement, numbering tens of thousands of people, that occupied the fields by Stonehenge for the whole of the month of June, and that had become a target for violent suppression by Margaret Thatcher.

My book The Battle of the Beanfield, published to mark the 20th anniversary of the Battle of the Beanfield, is still in print, so please feel free to order a copy. Also available: Stonehenge: Celebration & Subversion, my counter-cultural history of Stonehenge.

Thatcher had spent 1984 crushing one group of citizens described as the “enemy within” — the miners — while also paving the way for the next “enemy within” to be crushed — the travellers, anarchists and environmental and anti-nuclear activists who made up the convoy attempting to get to Stonehenge when they were ambushed, and then crushed after they sought refuge in a bean field off the A303.

Elements of the convoy had been violently set upon by police in the summer of 1984, at Nostell Priory in Yorkshire, and in February 1985, activists and travellers who had established a settlement at RAF Molesworth in Cambridgeshire (the second proposed site for cruise missiles after Greenham Common in Berkshire, the site of the famous women’s peace camp) were evicted by the largest peacetime mobilisation of troops in modern British history, symbolically led by Thatcher’s right-hand man and defence secretary, Michael Heseltine.

The Battle of the Beanfield irrevocably changed the lives of many of those caught up in it  — and, for many, many others, it stands as a crucial example of how, although the UK likes to pretend that it is a liberal democracy, it can crush dissent when it feels like it, using shocking physical force, and can then clamp down further through the passing of illiberal laws, the intention being, eventually, to quell the very notion that citizens have any right to rebel in any meaningful manner against the established order.

Laws suppressing unlicensed gatherings and trespass followed the Beanfield in 1986 (the Public Order Act), and again in 1994 (the Criminal Justice Act), but although severe damage was done to the travelling community, dissent reemerged in ways that the government didn’t — and perhaps couldn’t —foresee, via the rave scene and the road protest movement, which led to dissent on quite a colossal scale.

Even after the Criminal Justice Act was passed in 1994, suppressing any kind of unlicensed gathering, dissent continued. The road protest movement — and its offshoot Reclaim the Streets — fed into the massive anti-globalisation movement, when protest went global, and it wasn’t until 2001, and the 9/11 attacks, that states picked up on an opportunity to stifle this growing anti-capitalist dissent and to accelerate the curtailment of civil liberties; efforts that have only been punctuated on a couple of occasions since, via the Occupy movement of 2011-12, and Extinction Rebellion.

That said, it is, I think, the steady erosion of combative political awareness that has caused the most damage to people’s willingness or ability to dissent in the last two decades, largely facilitated by a compliant media, and a concerted effort to seduce people into becoming vain and largely passive consumers — plus the effects of CCTV and the extraordinary surveillance potential of smartphones.

Thinking back to the times I visited the Stonehenge Free Festival, in 1983 and 1984, from the vantage point of being 57, looking back on being 22, is to revisit a time of extraordinary autonomy, when, in general, no one was watching us, or had any idea where we were. That wasn’t true for the convoy, of course, who were under surveillance for at least a year before the Battle of the Beanfield, but in general we lived with a kind of freedom that can only be imagined now if everyone threw away their smartphones and toppled every CCTV mast.

This year, of course, our memories of when we took advantage of informal precedent — in the absence of a written constitution — to gather freely and in significant numbers are up against a new menace, the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, which has, to date, killed at least 375,000 people worldwide despite lockdowns of varying degrees of severity being imposed around the world to try and prevent its spread, with at least ten percent of those deaths occurring in the UK.

Today, the 35th anniversary of the Battle of the Beanfield, probably won’t be mentioned in the mainstream media, which has never taken much interest in the violent events of June 1, 1985. In addition, newsrooms today will also be massively distracted by the supposed opening up of the country after ten weeks of lockdown, an ill-timed celebration of the return of “normality”, when the infection rate is still high, which has been designed more to protect the economy, and Dominic Cummings, than for any sound medical reasons.

As a result, it is not safe to think about gathering freely right now, but I do hope that, in the imminent future, we work out ways in which we can begin to protest safely, with masks and social distancing, as this government — the barbaric inheritors of Thatcher’s brutal intolerance — is literally getting away with murder right now, without concerted opposition either in Parliament, which has largely been shut down, replaced by daily press conferences in which dissent can be easily suppressed or ignored, or on the streets.

POSTSCRIPT: Check out this video below of the talk I gave about the Beanfield at the start of Neil Goodwin’s Virtual Stonehenge Festival, which ran through to the solstice, in which Neil stitched together my commentary with footage from the day.

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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 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, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from seven 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 the 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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