It’s been three decades since the government’s attempt to ban raves radicalized a coalition of dance geeks, squatters, and “new age” travelers. What happened to the protesters who tried to derail the bill?
When Harry Harrison first saw the White Paper on the Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill in late 1993, he may not have seen it. Harrison, 27, was a co-founder of Nottingham’s DIY sound system, so-called space music. anarchists, known for throwing joyous parties in fields and forests, quarries and squatted houses. Now, such gatherings can be criminalized and, for the first time, the music he played was legally coded as “sounds wholly or principally characterized by the emission of a succession of repetitive rhythms. “”It was almost like a surreal farce,” he says today. I said, ‘Is this real?’It was a crazy combination of the sinister and the absurd. “
The 179-page bill was a combination of measures ranging from updating the obscenity law to lowering the age of consent for gay men, restricting the right to remain in silent arrest and allowing the collection of DNA samples. Andrew Puddephatt, then director of the civil rights organization Liberty, called it “the Christmas tree bill. “A lot of other issues are being lumped together into one big bill to save parliamentary time. “At the time, Puddephatt described it as “the most far-reaching attack on human rights in the UK in recent years”.
When most of the protesters were talking about the Criminal Justice Bill (CJB), they were talking about “Law and Order Part V: Collective Invasion or Land Nuisance. “The infamous “repetitive hitting” clause presented it as an anti-rave bill. However, that’s just the most striking element. The new crimes of trespassing and trespassing limited the movement of travelers (an informal organization made up of ethnic and “new age” travelers), squatters, roadside protesters, and hunting saboteurs, as well as the public. Cope with the systems. The JBC is an effective way to make John Major, then prime minister, and Michael Howard, then home secretary, look tough on matters of law and order, appease the eyebrows of rural conservatives and limit protests, knowing that the teams involved had few friends among the press, politicians and the public.
The most conspiratorial interpretation is that the government tried to nip in the bud a potentially harmful coalition of young people living outside the formula, but failed. By attacking so many groups at once, the JBC has strengthened this alliance, letting go of overlap with the developing movement opposed to road building, the anti-CJB crusade of 1994 filled central London with ravers, turned city streets into art installations, occupied Michael Howard’s garden, and turned Park Lane into a battlefield. the most exciting collision between pop culture and protest in the UK since 1968 (young, creative, colourful, loud) and its legacy lives on 30 years later. He established methods of dissent that later encouraged subsequent crusades, from Reclaim the Streets to Occupy. just stop the oil.
“It’s an explosion of dissent,” says Camilla Berens, who was at the center of the campaign. “A lot of other people have said that Michael Howard did us a favor: he brought together a whole generation of foreigners. “
The origin of the CJB is an ethical panic over the “unnatural alliance” forged between ravers and travellers at the Castlemorton Common festival in May 1992. “They have little in common,” said one senior police official, “other than music, parties, maybe drugs and a willingness to defy authority.
Travellers have endured difficult years since the Battle of Beanfield on June 1, 1985, when police demolished a convoy of 140 men heading to the informal Stonehenge festival. The Public Order Act of 1986 gave police new powers to evict camps, forcing many to “end up with a column of refugees going from one position to another,” says Alan “Tash” Lodge, a former traveler and Beanfield witness who has been photographing the protests for 50 years. “With the law, with the action of the police, everything has fallen by the wayside. “
However, at the 1990 Glastonbury Festival, travelers connected with a new wave of rogue rave sound systems who had begun hosting free parties in squatted homes and warehouses. Audio systems have clung to the old free festival calendar, creating an exciting new mix. of the urban and the rural, the ancient and the futuristic. “It’s been a windy time for a lot of us,” Lodge says. “All of a sudden, there’s hope again. “
“Getting out of the clubs and into the woods is a big step,” says journalist CJ Stone. Now a retired postman, he chronicled the scene in the 1990s in his Guardian column. “Suddenly, you find yourself preoccupied with nature and holidays as an expression of nature itself. The spiritual detail seemed revolutionary.
The two most prominent free PA systems were DIY and Spiral Tribe. “It’s like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones,” jokes DIY’s Harry Harrison, now a social worker in Wales. “We had a healthy rivalry. ” Both systems saw their task as bigger than music. “We were young, radical, fearless and relentless,” Harrison says. “We come from an environment of animal rights protests, anarcho-punk and free festivals. I suppose we were looking to be offering an ideal of life.
Hailing from squatted homes in London, the Spiral Tribe proclaimed “techno-terrorists” who threw parties almost constantly. “Truth be told, I don’t sleep,” says co-founder Mark Harrison (no relation). We were on a mission. ” Having frequented Stonehenge as a teenager, Harrison saw free parties as a liberating, utopian force: reclaiming a common ground with the sound of the future. “We weren’t a bunch of dirty, rotten fools. We felt, perhaps naively, that they were contributing something of wonderful value to society.
The free party scene exploded in the summer of 1991, most commonly in the Southwest, but there were signs that this gleeful anarchy might not last. “In early 1992, we felt that a crackdown was imminent,” Harrison said. It’s developing exponentially and obviously on the verge of getting out of control. “
No one predicted that tens of thousands of ravers would descend on Castlemorton Common in Malvern Hills. A convoy of revellers looking for a venue for the Avon Festival was moved several times when, on 22 May, West Mercia police granted them access. to the city, having no idea how big the ArraySpiral tribe was hiding in a Welsh forest, “beaten and bruised” after a savage police raid on a warehouse a month earlier. They got the call and headed east. The sleeves of their blouses were flapping and they were smiling,” Harrison recalled. “We were very confused. It looked like a trap. But honestly, I don’t think so.
The unprecedented scale of Castlemorton was largely a media phenomenon. The more outraged attention the case gained (the Daily Telegraph denounced it as a “hippie seat”), the more people flocked. At its peak, there were between 20,000 and 40,000 other people – one of the largest informal gatherings in the UK since the last free Stonehenge festival in 1984. Castlemorton was an autonomous emerging town, open 24 hours a day, with its own electricity, its own lighting, catering and accommodation.
Residents have complained about traffic, trash, dogs and noise. Someone fired a flare at a police helicopter. There were also tensions between regular travelers and late-night ravers. “At 4 a. m. I was on a hike to bury them,” one traveler told the Guardian. They don’t seem to know how to use a shovel. “However, there have only been a few dozen arrests, most of them for minor drug offenses.
The Spiral Tribe wasn’t the loudest sound system, as their old apparatus had been destroyed during the police raid, but they had goals on their backs. They were also the last to leave, on May 29, meaning there was no security in the groups. Police raided, impounded cars, and arrested thirteen other people on charges of conspiracy to cause public nuisance. They were building the Spiral Tribe into an unstoppable dark force so they could introduce the criminal justice bill, which wasn’t just about repetitive beatings,” Harrison said. “We were portrayed as folk demons. ” Police also searched the Spiral Tribe squats. “They’d been looking for me for a few weeks,” recalls music maker Lol Hammond of Spiral Tribe and the Drum Club. “We were in the apartment with the lights off, so it seems like we weren’t involved. For me, it was either getting arrested or going to court. “
The reaction against Castlemorton was immense. On June 29, local MP Michael Spicer absurdly referred to the festival as an “invasion” with “the strength of two motorised army divisions” and “a very complicated command and transmission system”. Lecture: “New Age Travelers? Not at this age. Not at any age. Ministers had already talked about cracking down on squatters and travelers. Castlemorton provided the best excuse.
In March 1993, Kenneth Clarke, then Home Secretary, announced new proposals to amend the 1986 Act to ban “large illegal raves”. Under his successor, Michael Howard, the Criminal Justice Bill included in the Queen’s Speech on 18 November and published as a White Paper in December.
Members of the Spiral Tribe returned to the United Kingdom from their new base in France to stand trial in Wolverhampton on 10 January 1994. “The prosecutor’s idea that we’re techno-pagans from hell,” Harrison said. “I think the jury found out a long time ago. ” A lot of. Even the cops seemed reluctant to testify against us. It took millions for the Crown to come to the conclusion that the Spiral Tribe may simply not be condemned under existing laws.
On the second day of the trial, the bill passed the second reading in the House of Commons. Labour abstained, and its shadow home secretary, Tony Blair, refused to seem comfortable with crime. Opposition would come from Westminster.
CoolTan Arts in Brixton, south London, takes its name from its original home, a former sunscreen lotion factory, but until 1994 it was founded in a former unemployment benefits office whose clients once included a young John Major. He led Shane Collins, a Green Party Activist who had joined Earth First!against the extension of the M3 in Twyford Down, Hampshire, and then, after being arrested and evicted from the site, he co-founded its urban equivalent, Reclaim the Streets. All of those groups, and many more, worked at CoolTan, an activist center with offices, a coffee shop, and two rooms for fundraising club nights.
On Wednesday, January 12, 1994, at 7:30 p. m. , some 40 representatives of the teams involved in the CJB gathered at CoolTan under the intentionally enigmatic call of the Interactive Diners Club to talk about coordinated resistance. One of the organizers was Camilla Berens, a young journalist who covered the intersection of countercultural tribes in her magazine Pod. “I coined the term ‘do-it-yourself culture’ to refer to what my generation was doing beneath the surface of mainstream life,” he says. “We were all strangers in one way or another. We do not accept the formula that was presented to us.
The Interactive Diners Club soon formalized as the Freedom Network, with Berens as its media spokesperson. Young activists were politicised through the poll tax or Twyford Down mingled with the veterans at Beanfield and Greenham Common. “The bill has definitely brought other people closer together. “”I felt like the subculture was under attack. This politicization has made other people perceive that not only them, but they are others. It was almost as if a friendly best friend was sending delegations. He evokes the initial naivety of the motion with a sinister smile. “Some were even saying, ‘Oh, we’re going to appeal to the Queen, we’re going to make her refuse to sign!'”
Soon, there were around 90 Freedom Network branches and two hundred anti-CJB teams across the country. The centers were squatted network centers such as CoolTan, the Rainbow Center in Kentish Town, Exodus in Luton, Justice?For two months, the Freedom Network Network transformed Artillery Mansions in Westminster into a homeless shelter known as New Squatland Yard. In Ottingham, DIY has shaped All Systems No!, an audio systems alliance. All coordinated through hotlines, meetings and brochures. “This was before the Internet, not cell phones,” Harrison says. “Do you think, how did we do something? How do I call Spiral Tribe on a landline? With great difficulty!
“Because you physically traveled around the country in vans, you made very strong connections with people,” says Gibby Zobel of Justice magazine?and SchNEWS. ” We’ve had a million meetings to find solutions. “
The political wing of the free party scene, the Advance Party, a name coined by Mark Harrison. It started with Debbie Staunton, who ran the Spiral Tribe’s news line, and Michelle Poole, who came from the radical left. Harrison says Staunton, who died recently, “a very sweet woman, very kind but very strong. It’s incredibly progressive: this network of data lines can seamlessly reshape itself and become a political force. “
By 1994, the large-scale loose parties were over. Operation Nomad and Operation Snapshot marshaled police resources in the southwest to monitor and block travelers and audio systems. “After Castlemorton, we never went to an informal festival again,” says Harry Harrison. “We continued to organize informal parties for the next five years, however, as a mass movement, it just dissipated. ” The No M11 crusade in London, however, resulted in a kind of non-stop party on Claremont Road, Leytonstone. Protesters filled the street with couches, barricades carved from uncovered objects, and a 100-foot-tall scaffolding tower painted brightly painted. “It was like a living festival with a purpose,” Zobel recalls. “A really wise and active crowd. It was an amazing place.
Andrew Puddephatt remembers the folk-rock band The Levellers appearing at an assembly with dozens of commuters following them. “For a serious, middle-aged organization, it made a big difference to have a very young member and an engaged audience,” he says fondly. “A little chaotic, but interesting. “
Puddephatt’s main fear was the repeal by Part V of the Caravan Sites Act 1968, which required councils to provide spaces for traveller camps. But conversations with sympathetic parliamentarians were ominous. ” They’d say, ‘Yes, we get it, Andrew, but you don’t have a chance. “Everybody hated the travelers. ” Conservative MP Bob Dunn called them “nothing more than a bunch of dirty, profit-hungry socialist anarchists who deserve a clever slap in the face and clever laundering. “The Telegraph called them “human locusts. “
When, after a brief reading, the bill came to committee, Jim Carey was there every day. A musician who had been squatting and organizing free art events for a decade, he was so disgusted by the indisputable squatter defamation that in 1992 he took a journalism career at a night school and started a magazine, Squall, to provide a counter-narrative. He liked to ride his bike to Parliament every day to prove that the long-haired man, the squatter who wore earrings knew each and every detail, but he was surprised to notice that many parliamentarians did not. “I tried to stand up and correct them because their details were incorrect. You may see members doing crossword puzzles. This law was a bulldozer, and nothing was going to stop it politically.
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On 13 April, the JBC passed its third reading in the House of Commons, with Labour abstaining. Taken together, the bill is too big to defeat. By now, the most realistic purpose of the House of Commons is to amend the worst sections of the House of Commons. As his Labour counterpart Lord McIntosh later put it in the Lords case, if he sounded lenient with squatters: “Mr Tony Blair would have me shot at dawn. “
Is it possible for the activists to win?” Oh my God, yes,” Zobel says. “It was a cultural phenomenon. I don’t think we had any hope in the mainstream media or in the political parties, but we actually had the idea that it might just prevent this. “
“Not at all,” says Alan Lodge. But it’s still vital that you can say you did the best you could. Curling up and saying, “This is so awful, I can’t do anything” is the worst thing you can do.
As the anti-CJB crusade gained momentum, Staunton of the Advance Party proposed something strangely conventional: a march from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square on May Day. “We all think, well, protests are never covered unless something goes wrong, but Debbie “is very compelling,” Berens recalls. “He said, ‘Let’s bring the casual party scene to central London, turn it into a big birthday party and galvanize the movement. ‘”
What took place on that gloriously sunny day was a new kind of protest: a rainbow parade of another 20,000 people, dancing from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square, attracting many other people who had never taken part in a protest before. “THEY WANT TO FIGHT. ” A giant banner read: “WE WANT TO DANCE. ” But the audiovisual spectacle spoke louder than words. With a “feast and protest” philosophy, it was a lighthearted spectacle of the lifestyles the bill sought to extinguish: the culture of DIY with feathers out. “Because now the music is being criticized, the music is protesting,” Lodge says. “It’s much more entertainment than a moving, earthy protest. “
“There’s a genuine feeling of camaraderie and excitement,” Hammond recalls. “There’s a lot of pride in the dance community. I think we were noticed as a bunch of crazy, smiling, faceless t-shirts.
The protest was non-violent, with one notable exception. “It took a lot of effort to get us arrested,” Harry Harrison says with a mischievous smile, “but we stripped naked in the fountains in Trafalgar Square and that was it. “I ended up in a police cell, absolutely soaking wet. “Celebration and protest. We did both equally.
The JBC was due to be passed before the summer recess, but was delayed due to the Lords’ amendments. “So we had a total summer that we didn’t think we’d have,” Berens says. In one of many nonviolent direct actions, she led a women’s organization of Freedom Network who locked themselves in front of the doors of Parliament, dressed as suffragettes. However, plans for the next march were difficult.
One day, four visitors came to CoolTan saying they belonged to the Coalition Against the Criminal Justice Bill and had the support of Tony Benn and the unions. “We know all the networks, so who are you?” replied Berens. He soon learned that the coalition was a front for the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), which had no history with the movement. “My perspectives have softened a lot over the years,” says Chris Cocking, “but at that time we saw the SWP, as a Trotskyist, entryist, parasitic organization, bent on taking up campaigns for its own agenda. This caused a lot of bad feelings.
It’s unclear whether the SWP organized the July 24 march or simply co-opted it, but in fact it was more traditional than the first, with a sea of “Kill the bill” signs. It was also three times larger. On a largely non-violent day, a flammable encounter occurred in Downing Street shortly after 3pm. A handful of protesters climbed the gates and began shaking them, face-to-face with a phalanx of armed police; and the stationary police charged into the crowd.
Jim Carey saw the protests primarily as promotional tools: the streets filled with colorful young people forced the media to pay attention. He has become a “media enthusiast” and a flexible speaker, from Newsnight to nightclubs. “We were celebrating the culture we had built. ” Out of Thatcher’s dream,” he says, “and at that birthday party a dissenting voice. A photograph of ravers in Trafalgar Square in the canopy of the New Statesman, along with an essay written by C. J. Stone on the “new politics. “
Meanwhile, dance music artists joined the Levellers in bringing CJB into the music press. The Prodigy’s hit, “Music for the Jilted Generation,” was an anti-CJB concept album: “Them and Their Law!”It was the chorus of a song. Autechre programmed Flutter’s rhythms in such a way that “no measure comprehends the same rhythms and therefore cannot be played. . . according to the proposed new law,” while Are We Here?(Criminal Justice Bill?) There were 4 eloquent minutes of silence. In October, Lol Hammond orchestrated a fundraising single titled – What Else? – Repetitive Rhythms. “You think you can make a difference,” he says. But I don’t forget other people who also say, ‘Why are we so political?’They chose dance music as a means of escapism and suddenly had to think about politics.
But time was running out: the bill was due to return to the House of Commons on October 19. The mood in the run-up to the third and final march, on October 9, was more angry and urgent. “There was an inexorable logic to passing the bill, so other people probably felt even more desperate,” Puddephatt says. This time, there were as many as 100,000 protesters, but they disagreed. In July, Freedom Network flyers gleefully advised, “Keep it up. “Fluffy” (in the sense of nonviolent direct action). Now, the anarchist organization Class War, which had disdained the anti-CJB crusade as unnecessarily soft, responded with its own slogan: “Keep it Sharp. “
Things got tense when two PA systems tried to enter Hyde Park. “The idea was, at least in my head, that we could be in Hyde Park for about a week and host our festival,” says CJ Stone. Eventually, the police let them in, but what seemed to prevent a confrontation only postponed it. Late in the afternoon, when most of the people had returned home, the stationary police charged the stragglers. “Without warning,” Berens says. It was so shocking and surreal that it was hard to tell if it had actually happened. This police helicopter came here and said, “Everyone, get out of the park!And then it all exploded, with insurrectionary vans charging into Park Lane, cops waving their shields: “Get out!Get out!”
The Daily Mail called it the ravers’ revolt. By the end of the day, there had been 39 arrests, 53 broken windows and 28 injuries. “It’s not as bad as the newspapers make it out to be,” Harry Harrison protests. I’ve noticed much worse things at the insurrection counter, I’d only give it 3 or four. For Chris Cocking, it’s a radicalizing experience: “A lot of people, myself included, went from being pretty naïve, pacifist and hippie protesters to being hardcore protesters. anarchists of war of elegance. “
Due to publicity, Berens was invited to debate the implications of the CJB with Conservative MP Nigel Evans on BBC One’s Kilroy and frowning interrogators on Radio 4’s Moral Maze. “All of a sudden, we were the flavor of the month,” he says ruefully, “but until then I didn’t have to do anything anymore. The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act (CJA) won royal approval on 3 November.
“Don’t keep calling it a criminal justice bill,” Alan Lodge scolds me at one point. “It’s an act! We lost. “
On some level, the anti-CJB crusade has been completely defeated. The CJA marked dance music’s transition from a subversive force to a respectable pillar of the nightlife economy. A foiled attempt through Debbie Staunton’s new band, United Systems, to release ‘The Mother’, a large and provocative party held on 7 July 1995, led to three members of Derthroughshire’s Black Moon sounding group becoming the first people to be convicted of ‘repetitive beats’. They were fined and their solid formula destroyed. More than anything, the mere risk of arrest was enough to kill a party. “The party culture they tried to criminalize has become widespread,” says a 24-year-old activist who passes through the so-called Phoenix and organizes the Rainbow Center. “But now they’ve put a big fence around them and charged other people £250 to get in. “
This law also made the lives of travelers intolerably difficult. “It made a bad scenario unmanageable,” says Puddephatt. The Claremont Road eviction in November 1994 wiped out an outpost of DIY culture. In his e-book Party Lines, Ed Gillett calls the CJA “the death knell of the British counterculture. “
But for many activists, CJA doesn’t mean the end. The day after it came into force, five activists climbed onto the roof of Westminster Hall and unfurled a banner reading “Challenge the CJA. “Phoenix, they occupied the lawn of Michael Howard’s country home in Kent and staged a mock trial. “The message challenges, challenges, challenges,” Berens says. “We were all fit to go to jail. “
However, the immediate consequences were not as severe as activists feared. At the beginning of 1997, there were only 470 prosecutions for trespassing and 42 for trespassing. The utopian, carnivalesque power of the 1994 protests extended to the guerrilla street parties of the revived Reclaim the Streets movement, which began in May 1995 and degenerated into a symbolic return to Trafalgar Square to commemorate the general election two years later. Protesters blocked streets to cars and set up swings, bouncy castles and sound systems. On the M41 in July 1996, activists, hiding under the giant skirts of wading birds, dug holes in the asphalt to plant trees. “The loose festivals have ceased, but now we have these urban resistance festivals in central London,” Berens says.
Protests on the roads have also intensified. The 1996 construction of the Newbury Bypass, where protesters camped out in trees and tunnels, made 23-year-old Dan “Swampy” Hooper a family name. “They were selective,” says Cocking. The concept that they would arrest everyone en masse materialized. All existing projects were completed, but the accusation of safety, damage and delays hampered the Conservatives’ £23 billion road structure programme before the Labour government scrapped it entirely. As Cocking says, “There are noisy defeats and silent victories. “
The protests have not been harmonious. As with all non-hierarchical movements, there were many disagreements over strategy. Substance abuse and intellectual illness have also caused friction. And fear was developing about undercover policing. “We were all joking about it,” Phoenix says. We knew there was an infiltration, but we tried not to get too paranoid. Shane Collins was concerned about the government’s investigation into “spy cops” who used false identities to join teams such as London Greenpeace and Reclaim the Streets. Two of them, Jim Boyling and Andy Coles, were men I knew and trusted.
There is a growing interest in this era and what it means. Mark and Harry Harrison have published memoirs and are featured in a new documentary, Free Party: A Folk History. Berens, co-founder of South East London Community Energy and Greenpeace volunteer. , is writing his own memoir about a life of protest. Everyone I talk to sees the anti-CJB crusade as one step on a continuum. Reclaim the Streets and road protests morphed into Peoples’ Global Action in the late 1990s, Camps for Climate Action in the 2000s, Occupy in 2011, and most recently Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil. The figures of 1994 played a role in all of this. They participate in posters, paint for charities, and exercise young activists. The cliché of hippies fitting in doesn’t seem to apply here. ” I haven’t stopped since 1991,” Phoenix says. All those movements stick to each other. I still need to be active at 70.
Shane Collins, now a Green Party councillor in Somerset, says the DIY coalition of the mid-90s was the cradle of fashionable environmentalism: “We’ve lost some battles, but we’ve won the war when it comes to road protests, genetically changed food, new coal plants, power plants forced through power plants, hydraulic fracturing. Zobel, now an activist and journalist in Brazil, agrees: “Everything that hasn’t been unusual in the UK in the last five years has been seriously discussed around campfires for 30 years. back. “
There have also been setbacks. The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 has imposed even more restrictions on protests and invasion than the CJA, bringing “Kill the Bill” symptoms back to the streets of Britain. However, the veterans of 1994 continue to struggle, in many ways “I’m a perpetual optimist, so yes, I have an idea that it will replace the world,” says CJ Stone. “In a way, it is. “
This article last changed on April 22, 2024. Dr. Chris Cocking is a senior lecturer in psychology and not sociology, as a previous edition said.