{"id":18482,"date":"2024-04-20T14:43:08","date_gmt":"2024-04-20T14:43:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/?p=18482"},"modified":"2024-04-20T15:09:43","modified_gmt":"2024-04-20T15:09:43","slug":"we-went-from-naive-hippyish-protesters-to-hardcore-anarchists-the-criminal-justice-bill-protests-30-years-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/archives\/18482","title":{"rendered":"\u2018We went from naive, hippyish protesters to hardcore anarchists\u2019: the criminal justice bill protests, 30 years on"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Protesters in Trafalgar Square, London, May 1994. Photograph: @mattkosnaps<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s three decades since the government\u2019s attempt to ban raves radicalised an oddball coalition of dance fans, squatters and \u2018new age\u2019 travellers. What became of the protesters who tried to kill the bill?<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

by Dorian Lynskey<\/a> Sat 20 Apr 2024 11.00 BST <\/p>\n\n\n\n

W<\/strong>hen Harry Harrison first saw the white paper for the criminal justice and public order bill at the end of 1993, he couldn\u2019t believe what he was reading. Harrison was the 27-year-old co-founder of Nottingham\u2019s DiY sound system, so-called house music anarchists, who were known for throwing joyful free parties in fields and forests, quarries and squats. Now those gatherings could be criminalised and, for the first time, the music he played was being legally codified as \u201csounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats\u201d. \u201cIt was almost like a surrealist prank,\u201d he says now. \u201cI said: \u2018Is this real?\u2019 It was a crazy mixture of the sinister and the absurd.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 179-page bill<\/a> was a hotchpotch of measures, from updating obscenity law and lowering the age of consent for gay men to restricting the right to silence when arrested and enabling the collection of DNA samples. Andrew Puddephatt, then director of the civil rights group Liberty, calls it \u201ca Christmas tree bill. You bung a lot of different issues into one big bill as a way of securing parliamentary time.\u201d At the time, Puddephatt described it as <\/strong>\u201cthe most wide-ranging attack on human rights in the UK in recent years\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When most protesters talked about the criminal justice bill (CJB) they meant \u201cpart V public order: collective trespass or nuisance on land\u201d. The notorious \u201crepetitive beats\u201d clause painted it as an anti-rave bill, but that was only the most eye-catching component. The new offences of aggravated trespass and trespassory assembly restricted the movement of travellers (a loose group comprising both ethnic Travellers and \u201cnew age\u201d travellers), squatters, road protesters and hunt saboteurs, as well as sound systems. The CJB was an efficient means for John Major, the then prime minister, and Michael Howard, the then home secretary, to appear tough on law and order, soothe the brows of rural Tories and restrict protest, safe in the knowledge that the groups affected had few friends among the press, politicians and public.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The more conspiratorially minded reading is that the government sought to nip in the bud a potentially dangerous coalition of young people who lived outside the system \u2013 but it backfired. By targeting so many groups at once, the CJB strengthened that alliance, turning loose connections into steel bonds. Overlapping with the growing movement against road-building, 1994\u2019s anti-CJB campaign filled central London with ravers, turned city streets into art installations, occupied Michael Howard\u2019s garden and made a battlefield of Park Lane<\/a>. It was the UK\u2019s most exciting collision of pop culture and protest since 1968 \u2013 young, creative, colourful, noisy \u2013 and its legacy is still with us 30 years later. It established strategies of dissent that went on to inform subsequent campaigns, from Reclaim the Streets to Occupy<\/a> to Just Stop Oil<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt was an explosion of dissent,\u201d says Camilla Berens, who was at the heart of the campaign. \u201cA lot of people said Michael Howard did us a favour \u2013 he brought a whole generation of outsiders together.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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T<\/strong>he root of the CJB was a moral panic about the \u201cunholy alliance\u201d forged between ravers and travellers at the Castlemorton Common festival in May 1992. \u201cThey have little in common,\u201d said one senior police officer, \u201cexcept music, parties, perhaps drugs, and a willingness to defy authority.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The travellers had experienced a rough few years since the Battle of the Beanfield<\/a> on 1 June 1985, when police demolished a 140-strong convoy heading for the Stonehenge free festival. The Public Order Act 1986 then gave the police new powers to evict encampments, forcing many travellers to move to Europe or come off the road. \u201cIt basically ended up as a refugee column, going from place to place,\u201d says Alan \u201cTash\u201d Lodge, a former traveller and Beanfield witness who has been photographing protests for 50 years. \u201cWith the law, the police action, the whole thing went down the tube.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Castlemorton Common festival, May 1992 \u2013 the trigger for the criminal justice bill. Photograph: Alan Lodge<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

At the 1990 Glastonbury festival, however, the travellers connected with a new wave of renegade rave sound systems that had begun throwing free parties in squats and warehouses. The sound systems latched on to the old free festival calendar, creating a thrillingly new alloy of the urban and the rural, the ancient and the futuristic. \u201cIt was a second wind to a lot of us,\u201d says Lodge. \u201cSuddenly there was hope again.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cComing out of the clubs and into the woods was a significant move,\u201d says the journalist CJ Stone. Now a retired postman, in the 90s he chronicled the scene in his Guardian column. \u201cAll of a sudden you see yourself as enmeshed in nature, and the parties as an expression of nature itself. The spiritual element felt revolutionary.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The two most famous free party sound systems were DiY and Spiral Tribe. \u201cIt was like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones,\u201d jokes DiY\u2019s Harry Harrison, who is now a social worker in Wales. \u201cWe had a healthy rivalry.\u201d Both systems saw their project as bigger than music. \u201cWe were young, radical, fearless and relentless,\u201d Harrison says. \u201cWe came from a background of animal rights protests, anarcho-punk and free festivals. I guess we wanted to provide an ideal for living.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Emerging from London squats, Spiral Tribe were self-styled \u201ctechno terrorists\u201d who threw parties almost constantly. \u201cTo tell you the truth, I don\u2019t ever remember sleeping,\u201d says co-founder Mark Harrison (no relation). \u201cWe were on a mission.\u201d Having attended Stonehenge as a teenager, Harrison saw free parties as a liberating, utopian force: taking back common land with the sound of the future. \u201cWe weren\u2019t a bunch of dirty, rotten caners. We felt, maybe naively, that we were bringing something of great worth to society.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Harry<\/a>
Harry Harrison, photographed in north Wales recently. Photograph: Francesca Jones\/The Guardian<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Harrison<\/a>
Harrison and riot police, Trafalgar Square, 1994. Photograph: Courtesy of Harry Harrison<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The free party scene exploded in summer 1991, primarily in the south-west, but there were signs that this merry lawlessness could not last. \u201cAs we came into 1992, we did sense a crackdown looming,\u201d says Harry Harrison. \u201cIt was growing exponentially and it was clearly about to escalate out of control.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nobody planned for tens of thousands of ravers to descend on Castlemorton Common in the Malvern Hills. A convoy of revellers looking for a site for the Avon free festival had been moved on several times when, on 22 May, West Mercia police allowed them on to the common, having no idea how big the party would get. Spiral Tribe were hiding out in a Welsh forest, \u201cbattered and bruised\u201d after a savage police raid on a warehouse rave<\/a> a month earlier. They got the call and headed east. \u201cAll these officers in shirt sleeves were waving and smiling,\u201d Mark Harrison recalls. \u201cWe were very confused. It felt like a trap. But in all honesty, I don\u2019t think it was intended as such.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The unprecedented scale of Castlemorton was largely a media-driven phenomenon. The more outraged attention it received (the Daily Telegraph denounced it as a \u201chippy siege\u201d<\/a>), the more people came. At its peak, there were between 20,000 and 40,000 people \u2013 one of the UK\u2019s largest free gatherings since the last Stonehenge free festival in 1984. Castlemorton was effectively a self-governing, 24-hour pop-up town, with its own power, lighting, catering and accommodation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Residents complained about the traffic, litter, dogs and noise. Somebody fired a distress flare at a police helicopter. There were tensions, too, between longtime travellers and fly-by-night ravers. \u201cI was going round yesterday at 4am burying their shit,\u201d one traveller told the Guardian<\/a>. \u201cThey don\u2019t seem to know how to use a shovel.\u201d For all that, there were only a few dozen arrests, mostly for minor drug offences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Spiral Tribe weren\u2019t the loudest sound system, because their usual rig had been trashed in the police raid, but they had targets on their backs. They were also the last to leave, on 29 May, so there was no safety in numbers. The police swooped, impounded vehicles and arrested 13 people for conspiracy to cause a public nuisance. \u201cThey were building Spiral Tribe into this unstoppable dark force so they could bring in the criminal justice bill, which wasn\u2019t just about repetitive beats,\u201d says Mark Harrison. \u201cWe were billed as folk devils.\u201d The police also raided Spiral Tribe\u2019s squats. \u201cThey were looking for me for a couple of weeks,\u201d recalls music producer Lol Hammond, of Spiral Tribe and the Drum Club. \u201cWe were in the flat with the lights off, making out we weren\u2019t in. For me, it was either get arrested or go legal.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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We were all outsiders in one way or another. We didn\u2019t buy into the system we were presented with<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The backlash to Castlemorton was immense. On 29 June, local MP Michael Spicer absurdly characterised the festival as an \u201cinvasion\u201d with the \u201cstrength of two motorised army divisions\u201d<\/a> and \u201ca highly sophisticated command and signals system\u201d. John Major then targeted travellers in his autumn party conference speech: \u201cNew age travellers? Not in this age. Not in any age.\u201d<\/a> Ministers had already been talking about cracking down on squatters and travellers. Castlemorton provided the perfect excuse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In March 1993, Kenneth Clarke, then home secretary, announced new proposals<\/a> to amend the 1986 act to outlaw \u201cillegal large raves\u201d. Under his successor, Michael Howard, the criminal justice bill was included in the Queen\u2019s speech on 18 November and published as a white paper in December.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The members of Spiral Tribe returned to the UK from their new base in France to stand trial in Wolverhampton on 10 January 1994. \u201cThe prosecutor was larging us as these techno-pagans from hell,\u201d says Mark Harrison. \u201cI think the jury realised it was a load of bullshit. Even the cops seemed reluctant to give evidence against us.\u201d It cost the crown millions to reach the conclusion that Spiral Tribe could not be found guilty under existing laws.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the trial\u2019s second day, the bill <\/strong>passed its second reading<\/a> in the Commons. The Labour party abstained<\/a>, its hawkish shadow home secretary Tony Blair refusing to appear soft on crime. Opposition would not come from Westminster.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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C<\/strong>oolTan Arts in Brixton, south London, took its name from its original home, an old suntan lotion factory, but by 1994 it was based in a defunct unemployment benefit office whose clients had once included a young John Major. It was run by Shane Collins, a Green party activist who had joined the Earth First! protest camp against the M3 extension at Twyford Down, in Hampshire, and then, after he was arrested and banned from the site, co-founded its urban equivalent, Reclaim the Streets. All of these groups, and more, worked out of CoolTan, an activist hub with offices, a cafe and two halls for fundraising club nights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At 7.30pm on Wednesday 12 January 1994, about 40 representatives of groups affected by the CJB came together at CoolTan under the deliberately cryptic name the Interactive Diners Club to discuss coordinated resistance. One of the organisers was Camilla Berens, a young journalist who covered the intersection of countercultural tribes in her magazine Pod. \u201cI came up with this term \u2018DIY culture\u2019 to explain what my generation was doing below the surface of mainstream life,\u201d she says. \u201cWe were all outsiders in one way or another. We didn\u2019t buy into the system we were presented with.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Campaigner Camilla Berens, photographed earlier this month. Photograph: Suki Dhanda\/The Guardian<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Berens on a \u2018funeral march\u2019 from Parliament Square to the gates of Downing Street, August 1994. Photograph: Adrian Short<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The Interactive Diners Club was soon formalised as the Freedom Network, with Berens as its media spokesperson. Young activists politicised by the poll tax or Twyford Down mingled with veterans of Beanfield and Greenham Common. <\/strong>\u201cThe bill definitely brought people together,\u201d says Chris Cocking, a sociology lecturer at the University of Brighton who was then a 23-year-old Twyford Down protester. \u201cIt felt that the subculture was under attack. This politicisation made people realise it didn\u2019t just affect them, it affected others. It was almost like a friendly allied country sending delegations.\u201d He recalls the movement\u2019s initial naivety with a grim smile. \u201cSome people were even saying: \u2018Oh, we\u2019ll appeal to the Queen, we\u2019ll get her to refuse to sign it off!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It was a bulldozer, this law, and nothing was going to stop it politically<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Soon there were roughly 90 Freedom Network branches and 200 anti-CJB groups around the country. The hubs were squatted community centres like CoolTan, the Rainbow Centre in Kentish Town, Exodus in Luton, Justice? in Brighton. For two months, the Freedom Network turned Artillery Mansions in Westminster into a homeless shelter known as New Squatland Yard. In Nottingham, DiY formed All Systems No!<\/a>, an alliance of sound systems. Everything was coordinated via hotlines, meetings and flyers. \u201cIt was pre-internet, no mobile phones,\u201d says Harry Harrison. \u201cYou think, how did we do anything? How do you ring up Spiral Tribe on a landline? With great difficulty!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBecause you were physically going around the country in vans, you would make very strong connections with people,\u201d says Gibby Zobel of Justice? and SchNEWS magazine. \u201cWe had a million meetings, just hammering out ways forward.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The political wing of the free party scene was the Advance Party \u2013 a name coined by Mark Harrison. It was launched by Debbie Staunton, who ran Spiral Tribe\u2019s information line, and Michelle Poole, who came from the radical left. Harrison says that Staunton, who died recently, was \u201ca very gentle, very kind woman but very strong. She was massively forward-thinking: this network of info lines could easily turn into a political force.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By 1994, the large-scale free parties were over. Operation Nomad and Operation Snapshot<\/a> pooled police resources throughout the south-west to monitor and block travellers and sound systems. \u201cAfter Castlemorton, we never went to a free festival again,\u201d says Harry Harrison. \u201cWe kept doing free parties for the next five years but as a mass movement it just dissipated.\u201d The No M11 campaign in London, however, spawned a kind of nonstop free party in Claremont Road, Leytonstone<\/a>. Protesters occupied the street with armchairs, barricades sculpted out of found objects and a 100ft-tall tower of brightly painted scaffolding. \u201cIt was like a living festival with a purpose,\u201d remembers Zobel. \u201cA really intelligent, active alternative crowd. It was an incredible place.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The activists\u2019 bridge to parliament was Liberty. Andrew Puddephatt recalls folk-rock band the Levellers turning up for a meeting with dozens of travellers in tow. \u201cFor a staid middle-aged organisation, it was quite a difference to have a very young, engaged constituency,\u201d he says fondly. \u201cA bit chaotic, but interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Puddephatt\u2019s primary concern was part V\u2019s repeal of the Caravan Sites Act 1968, which obliged councils to provide spaces for traveller encampments. But conversations with usually sympathetic MPs were ominous. \u201cThey would say: \u2018Yeah, we understand it, Andrew, but you\u2019ve got no chance.\u2019 Everybody hated travellers.\u201d Tory MP Bob Dunn labelled them \u201cno more than a bunch of unwashed, benefit-grabbing, socialist anarchists who deserve a good slap and a wash\u201d. The Telegraph called them \u201chuman locusts\u201d.skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Protesters outside parliament, July 1994. Photograph: @mattkosnaps<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

When, after the second reading, the bill entered its committee stage, Jim Carey was there every day. A musician who had been squatting and putting on free arts events for a decade, he was so disgusted by the unchallenged vilification of squatters that in 1992 he took a night-school journalism class and launched a magazine, Squall<\/a>, to provide a counter-narrative. He enjoyed cycling to parliament each day to show that this squatter with long hair and earrings knew every detail, but was shocked to discover that many MPs didn\u2019t. \u201cI kept wanting to stand up and correct them because their information was wrong. I could see MPs doing crosswords. It was a bulldozer, this law, and nothing was going to stop it politically.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On 13 April, the CJB passed its third reading<\/a> in the Commons, with Labour abstaining again. In its entirety, the bill was too big to fail. Now the more realistic goal of the Commons amending the worst sections of part V had been dashed. As the Labour peer Lord McIntosh later said in the Lords<\/a>, if he looked soft on squatters: \u201cMr Tony Blair would have me shot at dawn.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Did the activists truly believe they could win? \u201cOh God, yeah,\u201d says Zobel. \u201cIt was a cultural phenomenon. I don\u2019t think we had any hope in the mainstream media or political parties, but we definitely thought we could stop it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNot at all,\u201d counters Alan Lodge. \u201cBut it was still important that you could say you did your best. To curl up in a ball and say, \u2018It\u2019s so awful, I can\u2019t do anything,\u2019 is the worst thing that you can do.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A<\/strong>s the anti-CJB campaign gathered steam, the Advance Party\u2019s Staunton proposed something surprisingly conventional<\/a>: a march from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square on May Day. \u201cWe all thought: well, marches never get any coverage unless something goes wrong, but Debbie was very convincing,\u201d Berens recalls. \u201cShe said: \u2018Let\u2019s bring the free party scene into central London and make it a massive celebration and galvanise the movement.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What took place on that gloriously sunny day was a new kind of protest: a 20,000-strong rainbow parade, dancing from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square, drawing in many people who had never been on a demonstration before. \u201cTHEY WANNA FIGHT,\u201d read one giant banner, \u201cWE WANNA DANCE.\u201d But the audiovisual spectacle was more eloquent than words. With an ethos of \u201cparty and protest\u201d, it was a cheerful pageant of the lifestyles the bill sought to extinguish \u2013 DIY culture with its tailfeathers out. \u201cBecause music was now being criticised, music was protesting,\u201d Lodge reasons. \u201cIt was much more of an entertainment than a po-faced, down-with-that protest.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere was a real sense of camaraderie and effervescence,\u201d remembers Lol Hammond. \u201cThere was a lot of pride in the dance community. I think we were seen as a bunch of smiley-T-shirt nutters, off our faces.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The demonstration passed peacefully \u2013 with one notable exception. \u201cYou had to try quite hard to be arrested,\u201d Harry Harrison says with a roguish grin, \u201cbut we took our clothes off in the Trafalgar Square fountains, and that did it.\u201d He ended up in a police cell, roaringly drunk and dripping wet. \u201cParty and protest. We did both in equal measure.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This police helicopter came over saying, \u2018Everybody get out of the park!\u2019 And then it all exploded<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The CJB was expected to pass before the summer recess, but was delayed by amendments in the Lords. \u201cSo we had that whole summer we hadn\u2019t thought we\u2019d have,\u201d says Berens. In one of many nonviolent direct actions, she led a group of Freedom Network women who locked themselves to the parliament railings dressed as suffragettes<\/a>. Plans for the next march, however, were fractious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One day, four visitors went to CoolTan saying they were from the Coalition Against the Criminal Justice Bill and that they had the support of Tony Benn and the trade unions. \u201cWe know all the networks, so who the fuck are you?\u201d Berens replied. She soon learned that the coalition was a front for the Socialist Workers party (SWP), which had no history with the movement. \u201cMy views have softened a lot over the years,\u201d says Chris Cocking, \u201cbut at the time we viewed the SWP as a Trotskyist, entryist, parasitic organisation intent on taking over campaigns for their own agenda. That did cause a lot of bad feeling.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whether the SWP organised the 24 July march or just co-opted it is unclear, but it was certainly more conventional than the first, with a sea of \u201cKill the Bill\u201d placards. It was also three times bigger. Amid a largely peaceful day, there was a flammable encounter at Downing Street just after 3pm. A handful of protesters climbed the gates and started shaking them, eye to eye with a phalanx of armed police; and mounted police charged into the crowd.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jim Carey saw the demonstrations primarily as promotional tools: streets thronged with colourful young people forced the media to pay attention. He became a \u201cmedia tart\u201d and versatile public speaker, from Newsnight to nightclubs. \u201cWe were celebrating the culture that we\u2019d built outside of Thatcher\u2019s dream,\u201d he says, \u201cand that celebration was a dissenting voice.\u201d A photograph of ravers in Trafalgar Square graced the cover of the New Statesman, with an essay by CJ Stone about the \u201cnew politics\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, dance music artists joined the Levellers in getting the CJB into the music press. The Prodigy\u2019s chart-topping Music for the Jilted Generation was effectively an anti-CJB concept album: \u201cFuck \u2019em and their law!\u201d was the refrain of one track. Autechre programmed the rhythms of Flutter so that \u201cno bars contain identical beats and can therefore be played \u2026 under the proposed new law\u201d<\/a>, while Orbital\u2019s Are We Here? (Criminal Justice Bill?) was an eloquent four minutes of silence. In October, Lol Hammond orchestrated a fundraising single called \u2013 what else? \u2013 Repetitive Beats. \u201cYou do think you can change things,\u201d he says. \u201cBut I remember people saying, \u2018Why are we getting so political?\u2019 as well. They chose dance music as a means of escapism and all of a sudden they had to think about politics.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By then, though, time was running out: the bill was scheduled to return to the Commons on 19 October<\/a>. The mood going into the third and final march on 9 October was therefore angrier and more urgent. \u201cThere was an inexorable logic to the bill happening so people probably felt more desperate,\u201d says Puddephatt. This time there were as many as 100,000 protesters, but they were not of one mind. In July, Freedom Network flyers had cheerfully advised: \u201cKeep it fluffy\u201d<\/a> (in the sense of nonviolent direct action). Now the anarchist group Class War, who disdained the anti-CJB campaign as uselessly soft, retaliated with its own slogan: \u201cKeep it spiky.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Things did get spiky when two sound systems tried to get into Hyde Park. \u201cThe idea was \u2013 at least in my head \u2013 that we could hold Hyde Park for a week or so and have our festival,\u201d says CJ Stone. Eventually, the police let them in, but what seemed to avert a showdown only postponed it. Late in the afternoon, when most people had gone home, mounted police charged the stragglers. \u201cNo warning,\u201d says Berens. \u201cThey sent people flying. It was so shocking and surreal it was hard to believe it had actually happened. This police helicopter came over saying: \u2018Everybody get out of the park!\u2019 And then it all exploded, with riot vans charging up and down Park Lane, cops waving their shields: \u2018Get out! Get out!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The<\/a>
The Smokescreen sound system at a protest march in London in October 1994. Photograph: @mattkosnaps<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The Daily Mail called it Revolt of the Ravers<\/a>. By the end of the day, there had been 39 arrests, 53 shop windows smashed and 28 injuries<\/a>. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t as bad as the papers made out,\u201d Harry Harrison protests. \u201cI\u2019ve seen a lot worse. On the riot-o-meter, I\u2019d only give it a three or four.\u201d For Chris Cocking, it was a radicalising experience: \u201cA lot of people, myself included, went from quite naive, pacifistic, hippyish protesters to hardcore Class War anarchists.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Due to the publicity, Berens was invited to debate the CJB\u2019s implications with Tory MP Nigel Evans on BBC One\u2019s Kilroy and the scowling interrogators of Radio 4\u2019s Moral Maze. \u201cSuddenly, we were flavour of the month,\u201d she says ruefully, \u201cbut by then it was too late to do anything about it.\u201d The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act (CJA) received royal assent on 3 November.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDon\u2019t keep calling it the criminal justice bill,\u201d Alan Lodge scolds me at one point. \u201cIt\u2019s an act!<\/em> We lost.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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O<\/strong>n one level, the anti-CJB campaign experienced unmitigated defeat. The CJA<\/a> marked dance music\u2019s transition from a subversive force into a respectable pillar of the night-time economy. A thwarted attempt by Debbie Staunton\u2019s new group United Systems to stage \u201cthe Mother\u201d, a massive, defiant free party on 7 July 1995, led to three members of the Black Moon sound system in Derbyshire becoming the first people convicted under the \u201crepetitive beats\u201d clause<\/a>. They were fined and their sound system destroyed. More often, the mere threat of arrest was enough to quash a party. \u201cThe festival culture they tried to criminalise has gone mainstream,\u201d says an activist calling himself Phoenix, who was a 24-year-old organiser at the Rainbow Centre. \u201cBut they now put a big fence around them and charge people \u00a3250 to get in.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The act also made life intolerably difficult for travellers. \u201cIt made a bad situation unmanageable,\u201d says Puddephatt. The eviction of Claremont Road in November 1994 eliminated another outpost of DIY culture. In his book Party Lines, Ed Gillett calls the CJA \u201ca funeral knell for British counterculture\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

All the stuff that\u2019s now mainstream in the UK in the last five years was being discussed around campfires 30 years ago<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

For many activists, though, the CJA wasn\u2019t the end at all. The day after it became law, five campaigners climbed on to the roof of Westminster Hall and unfurled a banner reading \u201cDefy the CJA\u201d. More than 200 protesters, including Phoenix, occupied the garden of Michael Howard\u2019s country house in Kent and staged a mock trial. \u201cThe message was defy, defy, defy,\u201d says Berens. \u201cWe were all prepared to go to prison.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The immediate consequences, however, were not as bad as the campaigners had feared. By the start of 1997, there had been only 470 prosecutions for aggravated trespass and 42 for trespassory assembly. The utopian, carnivalesque energy of the 1994 protests flowed into the guerrilla street parties of the relaunched Reclaim the Streets, which began in May 1995 and escalated towards a symbolic return to Trafalgar Square to mark the general election two years later. Protesters blocked off streets to cars and installed climbing frames, bouncy castles and sound systems. On the M41 in July 1996, activists hidden beneath the giant skirts of stilt-walkers dug holes in the tarmac to plant trees. \u201cThe free festivals stopped, but now we had these urban festivals of resistance in the middle of London,\u201d says Berens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The road protests got bigger, too. The 1996 occupation against the Newbury bypass, where protesters set up home in trees and tunnels, made 23-year-old Dan \u201cSwampy\u201d Hooper a household name. \u201cThey were selective,\u201d says Cocking. \u201cThe idea that they would mass-arrest everybody didn\u2019t come to pass.\u201d All the existing projects went ahead, but the cost of security, damage and delays hobbled the Conservatives\u2019 \u00a323bn road-building programme before the Labour government junked it altogether. As Cocking puts it: \u201cThere are noisy defeats and quiet victories.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The protests were not always harmonious. As with all non-hierarchical movements, there were many disagreements about strategy. Drug addiction and mental illness caused friction, too. And there was growing concern about undercover police. \u201cWe all joked about it,\u201d says Phoenix. \u201cWe assumed our phones were bugged. We knew there was infiltration, but we tried not to get too paranoid.\u201d Shane Collins has participated in the government inquiry into \u201cspy cops<\/a>\u201d who used false identities to embed themselves in groups such as Greenpeace and Reclaim the Streets. Two of them, Jim Boyling and Andy Coles, were men he knew and trusted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is growing interest in this period and what it meant. Mark and Harry Harrison have published memoirs and appear in a new documentary, Free Party: A Folk History. Berens, co-founder of South East London Community Energy and a volunteer for Greenpeace, is writing her own memoir of a life in protest. Everyone I speak to sees the anti-CJB campaign as one stop on a continuum. Reclaim the Streets and the road protests rolled into Peoples\u2019 Global Action in the late 1990s, the Camps for Climate Action in the 2000s, Occupy in 2011 and, more recently, Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil. Figures from 1994 have played a part in all of these. They sit on councils, work at charities and train young activists. The cliche of hippies ageing into yuppies does not seem to apply here. \u201cI haven\u2019t stopped since 1991,\u201d says Phoenix. \u201cAll these movements flow into each other. I still want to be active when I\u2019m 70.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shane Collins, now a Green party councillor in Somerset, argues that the DIY coalition of the mid-90s was the cradle of modern environmentalism: \u201cWe lost a few battles but we won the war as regards the road protests, GM foods, new coal-fired power stations, fracking.\u201d Zobel, now an activist and journalist in Brazil, agrees: \u201cAll the stuff that\u2019s become mainstream in the UK in the last five years was being discussed earnestly around campfires 30 years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There have been setbacks, too. The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 placed even more restrictions on protest and trespass than the CJA, bringing \u201cKill the Bill\u201d placards back on to Britain\u2019s streets. Yet the veterans of 1994 fight on, in myriad ways. \u201cI\u2019m a perpetual optimist, so, yes, I thought this was going to change the world,\u201d says CJ Stone. \u201cIn a way, it did.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/culture\/2024\/apr\/20\/we-went-from-naive-hippyish-protesters-to-hardcore-anarchists-the-criminal-justice-bill-protests-30-years-on<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Protesters in Trafalgar Square, London, May 1994. Photograph: @mattkosnaps It\u2019s three decades since the government\u2019s attempt to ban raves radicalised an oddball coalition of dance fans, squatters and \u2018new age\u2019 travellers. What became of the protesters who tried to kill … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[1753,1274,886,1633,1752,1651,48,283],"class_list":["post-18482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-1","tag-1753","tag-act","tag-cja","tag-criminal","tag-harrison","tag-harry","tag-protest","tag-years"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18482"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18482\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18488,"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18482\/revisions\/18488"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}