The Battle of the Beanfield at 41: UK state violence unleashed
The most violent police assault on civilians in modern UK history was 41 years ago today. I trace an authoritarian line from there to the current designation of anti-genocide activists as terrorists.
The Rastabus, one of the last vehicles to be violently “decommissioned” at the Battle of the Beanfield on June 1, 1985.
Those of you who only know my work from my 20 years of writing about Guantánamo, and campaigning to get the prison closed, and from my two and a half years of bearing witness to, and condemning Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, may be surprised to know that, before all this, I wrote two books about Stonehenge and the counter-culture, Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield, both of which are still in print today.
The first book, a social history of Stonehenge, interwove the colourful stories of Druidic revivalists and those who established a free festival at Stonehenge in the 1970s with the interpretations of the ancient sun temple’s meaning by antiquarians and archaeologists, while the second focused on a particular bleak occasion, 41 years ago today, when the government, under Margaret Thatcher, tired of the anarchy of the free festival, marshalled the police for an extraordinarily violent attack on a convoy of travellers seeking to get to Stonehenge to establish what would have been the 12th free festival, bringing it to an end.
My books on Stonehenge and the Battle of the Beanfield.
In my new article on my website, The 41st Anniversary of the Battle of the Beanfield: Still No Accountability for a Monstrous Crime of State Violence, I revisit, as I do on June 1 every year, what I describe as “the most savage assault on unarmed civilians in modern British history.”
On that day, riot police from six counties cornered a vastly-outnumbered convoy of vehicles en route to Stonehenge to establish the festival, and “decommissioned” them with extreme violence, brutally assaulting the men and women of the convoy, terrorizing their children, destroying their live-in vehicles, and making 537 arrests in total.
Marking today’s anniversary, I revisit the history of the free festival and traveller movements that led up to the Beanfield, trace its impact on the communities involved, and also draw an important line from the draconian legislation that followed the Beanfield, in the Public Order Act of 1986, which undermined travellers’ rights, and our right to gather freely, through further legislation in the ‘90s, after the British counter-culture refused to accept Thatcher’s edict that all dissent was forbidden, through to the huge increase in even more draconian legislation in recent years.
Under the last Tory government, this was aimed primarily at climate activists, effectively banning any kind of even mildly disruptive climate protests, and also resulting in prison sentences for some of those involved.
Most recently, under the Labour government in place since July 2024, the increase in legislative hysteria has been introduced to punish those taking direct action against Israel’s biggest weapons manufacturer, Elbit Systems, who, alarmingly, have, as a result, been designated as a terrorist organization by the Labour government, which is seeking, via rigged trials, to impose lengthy prison sentences on them.
As I note in my conclusion, “what the authoritarian line drawn from the Public Order Act of 1986 to now shows most clearly is that, once enacted, draconian laws are rarely, if ever repealed, and, as a result, authoritarianism only ever increases until it starts, as now, to increasingly resemble the fundamental suppression of rights that accompanies the rise of fascism.”
Other new posts to read
I finally worked out how to add a link to “Notes” on my home page, so you can now easily keep track not only of my posts but also the Notes that I’m now posting regularly. Do check out the page here, and below are a few recent highlights.
Why the UN blacklisted Israel for conflict-related sexual violence
Netanyahu jokes about expanding the occupation of Gaza from 60% to 70%
Another doctor murdered by Israel in Gaza
Soon-to-be-indicted war criminal Bezalel Smotrich welcomed in New York City
Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur banned from the UK on Israel’s behalf
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Agreed. I do recall Thatcher, Reagan, etc. I'm older. There is much to learn about other places, even though I'm American. I say that to say the US has always been Americentric (if that's a word). It's even often difficult to keep up with the horrible motives of this empire.
I had no idea of this Beanfield event.