The VOAG looks back to the Battle Of The Beanfield: 27 Years On

The Battle Of The Beanfield: 27 Years On 

June 1, 2012
Today year marks the 27th anniversary of the infamous police attack on travellers on their way to Stonehenge in an incident now known as the Battle Of The Beanfield.

“What I have seen in the last thirty minutes here in this field has been some of the most brutal police treatment of people that I’ve witnessed in my entire career as a journalist. The number of people who have been hit by policemen, who have been clubbed whilst holding babies in their arms in coaches around this field, is yet to be counted. There must surely be an enquiry after what has happened today.”-Ken Sabido, ITN journalist. 

Twenty four years have passed since the defining moment of the Thatcher government’s assault on the traveller movement – the Battle of the Beanfield. On June 1st 1985 a convoy of vehicles set off from Savernake Forest in Wiltshire towards Stonehenge, with several hundred travellers on their way to setting up the 14th Stonehenge Free Festival. But this year English Heritage, who laughably were legally considered the owners of the Stonehenge Sarsen circle (built several thousand years before by god knows who), had secured an injunction against trespass naming 83 people. This was considered legal justification enough for a brutal assault on the entire convoy. What followed was a police riot and the largest mass arrest in British history.As the Convoy made its way to the Stones the road was blocked with tonnes of gravel and it was diverted down a narrow country lane, which was also blocked. Suddenly a group of police officers came forward and started to break vehicle windows with their truncheons. Trapped, the convoy swung into a field, crashing through a hedge.

For the next four hours there was an ugly stalemate. The Convoy started trying to negotiate, offering to abandon the festival and return to Savernake Forest or leave Wiltshire altogether. The police refused to negotiate and told them they could all surrender or face the consequences.At ten past seven the ‘battle’ began. In the next half hour, the police operation “became a chaotic whirl of violence.” Convoy member Phil Shakesby later gave his account of the day: “The police came in [to the grass field] 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.”By the end of the day over four hundred were under arrest and dispersed across police stations around the whole of the south of England. Their homes had been destroyed, impounded and in some cases torched.

THE VAN GUARD?
In today’s surveillance society Britain it is seems inconceivable that festivals like the Stonehenge Free Festival ever happened. At their height these gatherings attracted 30,000 people for the solstice celebration – 30,000 people celebrating and getting on with it without any need for the state or its institutions. The festivals themselves were just the highpoint of a year-round lifestyle of living in vehicles. As one traveller said at the time, “The number of people who were living on buses had been doubling every year for four years. It was anarchy in action, and it was seen to be working by so many people that they wanted to be a part of it too.”Having seen off the miners strike – the first casualties in the plan to re-order Britain according to neo-liberal economics (or as it was known locally – Thatcherism), the state turned its force on a more subtle threat. This time not people fighting for jobs and a secure place in the system but people who rejected that system outright. Although prejudice against travellers was nothing new, the traditional ‘ethnic’ travelling minority represented no significant threat to the status quo that couldn’t be dealt with by local authorities. But to many of the millions left unemployed by the Thatcher revolution, life on the road looked increasingly appealing. This was inconvenient for a state determined that conditions for the unemployed be miserable enough to spur them into any form of low-paid work.

WHEELS ON FIRE
The propaganda directed against the so-called ‘peace convoys’ by all sections of the media created an atmosphere which allowed draconian action. The Beanfield was not an isolated incident. The Nostell Priory busts of the previous year were a vicious foreboding of what was to come. Months before the Beanfield a convoy-peace camp site at Molesworth was evicted by police acting with 1500 troops and bulldozers headed by a flak-jacketed Michael Heseltine, then Defence Secretary. In 1986 Stoney Cross in the New Forest saw another mass eviction. At the time Thatcher said she was “only too delighted to do what we can to make things difficult for such things as hippy convoys”. This attempt to create a separate yet peaceful existence from mainstream society was to be ruthlessly suppressed.Over the next ten years – notably with the Public Order Act 1986 and the Criminal Justice Act 1994 the whole lifestyle was virtually outlawed. As John Major said at the Tory Party conference in 1992 to thunderous applause: “New age travellers – not in this age – not in any age”. The CJA removed the duty of councils to provide stop-over sites for travellers and regular evictions began to punctuate traveller life. But it wasn’t all one way, thousands stayed on the road and the free festival circuit was infused with fresh blood from the rave scene. Even after the massive crackdown that followed the Castlemorton free festival the convoys in many cases moved onto road protest sites.

Ultimately however travellers were forced to adapt – abandoning the garish war paint of the hippy convoys for more anonymous vans, moving and taking sites in smaller groups. Many went abroad or were driven back into the cities. However, despite the worst excesses of the cultural clampdown, travellers remain all over the country. Many are now in smaller groups, inconspicuous and unregistered. It’s become more common for vehicle dwellers to take dis-used industrial sites blurring then lines between travelling and squatting. 

The fact that Stonehenge is now open again on the solstice might – on the face of it – look like a victory. But the event is a top-down affair complete with massive police presence, burger vans and floodlights – a far cry from the anarchistic experiments of the 70s and 80s. A smaller gathering had been permitted just down the road at the Avebury stone circle over recent years with the National Trust taking a far more lenient stance on live-in vehicles than English Heritage. But even there, since 2007, there’s now a ban on overnight stays on the solstice. 

Much of the festival circuit these days is in the hands of profit-motivated commercial promoters apart from the growing shoots of a range of smaller festivals, who continue in the spirit of people-led celebrations of community co-operation. But festivals today are also mostly buried under an avalanche of red tape and security, health and safety requirements – The Big Green gathering saw its security costs treble in one year (2007) as they were told to ‘terrorist harden’ the event.

When popular history recalls the pivotal moments in the mid-80s for Thatcher’s Britain, the Battle Of The Beanfield rarely adequately takes its place alongside the Miners Strike and Wapping. For UK Plc, travellers became – and remain – another ‘enemy within’, to be dealt with by organised state violence, like all others who have found an escape route from a society subordinated to profit, where freedom had been reduced to a series of consumer choices.

* For the definitive account see Andy Worthington’s book ‘The Battle Of The Beanfield’ – www.andyworthington.co.uk

Save EMA – Labour Party and trade unions seek to bring UK EMA protests under control

Labour Party and trade unions seek to bring UK education cuts protests under control.

The British Conservative/Liberal Democrat government’s decision to scrap the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) is part of an assault on education, which includes the slashing of college and university budgets and a tripling of university tuition fees to £9,000.

Starting in January, EMA will be closed to new applicants, and it will be ended completely at the end of the 2011 academic year. The benefit was introduced by the previous Labour government in 2004. The program costs £560 million a year and provides financial assistance to 674,000 college and sixth-form students in England, aged between 16 and 19. Students receive £30 a week if they come from households with an income less than £20,817 or £10 if below £30,810. The allowance is used by students to pay for necessities such as travel, stationary or course books.

The loss of EMA will mean many poor students will be unable to afford the attendant costs of college, particularly as more working families are hit by the economic crisis and wider government cuts. Many others will face a threat to their educational success as they resort to more part-time work—at a time when competition is increasing drastically for university places.

Over the past two months students, lecturers, sixth former and school children have protested nationwide against the education cuts, including the withdrawal of EMA, at demonstrations in many cities and towns. A feature of the protests has been the active participation of many school children and sixth form students.

The protests began in opposition to the National Union of Students (NUS), who from the outset had refused to organise any struggle to oppose the cuts. It was only when it became increasingly apparent that the protests were escalating out of the control of the NUS, that its leader Aaron Porter—a supporter of the Labour Party—made a show of supporting the protests. It was under these same conditions of a growing alienation of young people from the NUS, the Labour Party and the trade unions, that the official “Save EMA” group was formed.

The Save EMA campaign is not an oppositional movement, but a vehicle designed to promote illusions in the Labour Party and the trade unions. Its aims, as listed on its web site, are based exclusively on making calls to the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats to retain the EMA and writing letters to MPs.

Despite the stated intention of the government to abolish the benefit, Save EMA states its desire to “Get every party to be as clear as possible about where they stand on EMA” and to “Get those parties who oppose EMA to change their policy”.

Save EMA’s boast of providing “a voice to over half a million of the poorest young people in Britain” is a fraud. What credentials does it have to make such a claim?

The Save EMA campaign is wholly a creation of the Labour Party. It was set up by Labour Party member and staffer James Mills.

Mills, a member of the Hammersmith Constituency Labour Party in London, was a former chair of the Labour club at the University of St Andrews. He then became a parliamentary researcher to Margaret Curran, a current Labour Party MP and former Member of the Scottish Parliament. Mills is now employed as the parliamentary researcher to another Labour MP, John Robertson. Prior to this he was a member of the Ed Balls Labour leadership campaign team. Balls was a critical architect of the entire right wing New Labour formation. As a former secretary of the treasury, he worked closely for over a decade as an adviser to former prime minister and chancellor, Gordon Brown.

According to his Labourlist blog profile, Mills also interned with “the Fabian Society and Progress”. Both of these are pro-Labour Party think tanks that provided the Tony Blair/Gordon Brown Labour governments with the “intellectual” justification for their right wing, pro-capitalist agenda.

Save EMA is backed by prominent Labour Party figures, including leader Ed Miliband, 2010 leadership contest candidate Andy Burnham, MP Hazel Blears and former MP and Major of London Ken Livingstone. Another supporter is Polly Toynbee, a Guardian columnist and long-time supporter of New Labour.

Save EMA’s attempt to portray Labour as champion of education is an exercise in cynicism. It was the Labour government under Prime Minister Tony Blair, elected in May 1997, which abolished the student grant system and introduced tuition fees. Under the Teaching and Higher Education Act of September 1998, the student grant of £1,710 was abolished and replaced by student loans.

In 2004 Labour introduced the Educational Maintenance Allowance. This was partly to facilitate its declared goal of increasing the numbers of young people going to university to 50 percent, on the basis of creating a “knowledge economy”. It was able to do this at a time when the economy was still growing, based on a massive credit bubble, largely facilitated by increasing house prices. However, even as Labour introduced EMA it was escalating its attacks against higher education. The Higher Education Act 2004 enabled the introduction of variable tuition fees. From 2006-07 higher education institutions in England began charging new students variable fees of up to £3,000. In 2009-10 this rose to £3,225.

These attacks laid the basis for the Conservative/Liberal coalition government to triple tuition fees earlier this month.

Among those who voted for the increase in tuition fees in 2004 are backers of the Save EMA campaign, Andy Burnham and John Robertson. Both MPs also enthusiastically supported the war in Iraq, endorsed Labour’s dictatorial “anti-terror” laws, ID cards, and the introduction of other anti-working class measures including foundation hospitals.

For her part, Polly Toynbee is on record as being an opponent of the student protests against the coalition. In a November 5 Guardian article, she called for the EMA to be retained, whilst opposing student protests against the trebling of tuition fees and other attacks on education. Toynbee said, “There is a limit to how many protests can be heard”, adding, “My own view is that graduates come quite low in that pecking order of pain”.

This attempt to divide students from lecturers, other education workers, sixth formers and school children who are seeking to oppose all education cuts, provides grist to the mill of the Conservative/Liberal austerity programme. The filthy record of those such as Burnham, Robertson and Toynbee should be thrown back in their faces by young people seeking to oppose these measures.

But Save EMA’s attempt to present the Labour Party and trade unions as the last line in the defence of education has actually proved more effective at demonstrating how little opposition these deeply discredited and bankrupt organisations are now able to muster.

The self-proclaimed “Save EMA Day”, held by the Save EMA campaign on December 13, was set up in opposition to the ongoing protests, occupations, and strikes by student and sixth formers and came just days after the December 9 tuition fees legislation vote in Parliament. It was best described as a day of inaction.

With the backing of eight trade unions, including the NUS, National Union of Teachers, University and College Union and Unison, the day was confined to events held at lunch-time at schools and colleges. Requests were made for university students and others not to attend. Each small protest was limited to waving banners, while those in attendance were forced to listen to platitudes from Labourites and trade union functionaries seeking a photo-op. The only “action” put forward on Save EMA Day was for protesters to contact their local MP and to queue up to sign a petition.

That evening a nationwide protest to defend the EMA was held by the UCU, other unions and the Education Activist Network outside the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills in London. This managed to gather just a handful of students and a total of fewer than 100 assorted trade union officials.

The Save EMA campaign has in addition been careful to ensure they are not in any way identified with the ongoing struggles of students, which they denounce as violent. In an article on the Save EMA site, posted November 12, Mills said violence by students was “evil and wrong”. He studiously ignored the systematic brutal violence that has been meted out against protesting students, dutifully lining up behind the self-serving propaganda of the government and the police.

The constant refrain of the fake left groups such as the Socialist Workers Party is that the further development of the student protests demands above all accepting the leading role of the trade unions. This is routinely equated with students linking up with the working class. The opposite is the case. Far from a way forward, accepting the leadership of Labour, the unions or a front such as Save EMA would be the kiss of death.

Don’t let the Tories Scrap EMA.
Demonstration called by National Campaign Against Fees And Cuts.
12th January 12.00 – 3.00pm. To coincide with the vote in parliament.

Day Of Action – Bring Back EMA
Demonstration in Guildford and across the country
26th January 12.00 – 3.00pm

National Demonstration. No Fees, No Cuts Defend EMA, Education & Public Services
29th January 12.00 – 3.00pm. Central London