Dan Kieran

by I Fought the Law- A Riotous Romp in Search of British Democracy (epub)

  The environmental campaigner George Monbiot wrote in the Times Literary Supplement:

  At the 1993 Conservative Party Conference, Michacl Howard announced a Criminal Justice Bill which would create a series of new offences criminalising both peaceful protest and certain forms of homelessness. Crude, ill-drafted and repressive, it succeeded in uniting all the disparate factions whose interests or activities it threatened. Hunt saboteurs, peace protesters, football supporters, squatters, radical lawyers, gypsies, pensioners, ravers, disabled rights activists, even an assistant chief constable and a Tory ex-minister, joined the broadest, and oddest, counter-cultural coalition Britain has ever known.

  Twyford Down, protesters pointed out, was destroyed because there were no legitimate means of defending it. Public inquiries for trunk-road schemes take place after the decision to build the road has been made; all the inquiry can discuss is where the road should go. Both the Department of Transport’s objectives and the potential alternatives to road-building, such as public transport or traffic management, are ruled outside the inquiry’s terms of reference, and the Department is both the promoter of the schcmc and the final decision-maker. Prompted by the Criminal Justice Act, campaigners began to see similar glaring democratic and constitutional deficits underlying our environmental crisis.’36

  The Criminal Justice Act was the SOCPA of its day, and after its succcss various governments have become even more confident in the policy of using the police not just for public safety but social control. The CJA criminalized dissent in a way that even the presence of middle-class demonstrators couldn’t overturn. It created a whole new raft of offenccs and gave the police unprecedented powers to deal with anyone actively voicing dissent. Suggesting legislation that erodes civil liberties to ‘solve’ some kind of moral panic only for the police to then use these new powers to stifle protest and dissent is now a powerful policy. (This approach has reached its zenith today, as you will see definitively in chapter 8.)

  Ironically, the bill that would help quash the protest over the M3 extension at Twyford Down was something for which the middle classes had clamoured to bring an end to the free parties of the 1990s rave culture. These free parties were simply not acceptable to the public at large, mainly due to misrepresentation by the media of what went on at them. The moral panic that ensued gave the then Conservative government the support they needed to add a clause to the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994 banning groups of more than a hundred people from congregating where music ‘wholly or predominantly characterized by a succession of repetitive beats’ was played, and another that would later prove problematic to road protesters called ‘aggravated trespass’. Section 68 of the CJA explains that anyone trespassing on land in the open air who intends to intimidate or prevent people going about ‘lawful activity’ (i.e. road-building contractors and their workmen) will be liable for three months in prison and a fine of £2,500. This section of the Act, when coupled with the public inquiry system, effectively gives the government the power to do whatever they like when it comes to large-scale developments, whether they’re for roads, airports or shopping centres. It is now impossible for local people to fight such schemes with any realistic chance of success, and certainly virtually impossible to oppose them effectively without breaking the law.

  Of course, the CJA brought an end to the free outdoor parties where people took drugs that made everyone smile and where no-one (except the dealers) made any money. Something that had evolved through youth culture in an unofficial way, from the ground up, to which people could go for free and which was clearly an offshoot of drug culture but built around loving each other and having fun, unlike the official violent drug culture taking place in city centres every night through the use of alcohol, was over. If you look at the consequences of that legislation, you begin to see its purpose. It was not the drug culture the government wanted to bring to an end, despite the moral panic about the use of Ecstasy and acid in the media, because that continues to this day; it was the unofficial actions of people looking for ways to bring fun into their lives that could not be sanctioned. To anyone who attended one of these parties, Britain’s rave culture was one of the most empowering and positive youth movements of the twentieth century. Sadly I didn’t go to any raves myself because I had developed an interest in heavy metal and was spending my afternoons dressed in black while singing along to songs about Satan.

  The cutting through Twyford Down is a monument to ugliness and stupidity. A better physical manifestation of the effects government policy has had on Britain you will never see. The fact that Twyford Down had such historical value, and was loved and treasured by the people who lived there and in the surrounding area, counted for nothing because the road had to be built for the sake of the ever-expanding economy. The new motorway link from London to Southampton simply could not be kept waiting any longer. Even though it had been fought against so bitterly and so bravely.

  After the huge public outcry at Twyford Down the government lost confidence in its road-building programme and the view that our environment has a value that can’t just be assessed in financial terms began to grow. Although battles still rage today against airport and road extensions a victory had been won, at least in the minds of the public. Legally, however, things are far worse today, and the threat we now face is more frightening than ever.

  As George Monbiot pointed out, the battle for Twyford Down exposed a much wider disease running through our political system, not just something limited to environmental policy. It highlighted the new logic the state would apply to any kind of dissent: the police and the law should not only be used for public safety but also for public control. The government has now effectively turned any member of the public who doesn’t agree with its policies and is prepared to protest against them into criminals. It is not doing it in an explicit way, because if they announced ‘protest is illegal’ everyone would complain, but that is increasingly what the police are using their new terrorist powers for. How else can you explain eighty-two-year-old Labour Party member Walter Wolfgang being manhandled out of the 2005 Labour Conference for shouting ‘Rubbish!’ at Jack Straw and then being detained under the Terrorist Act when he tried to re-enter the building? Or the child whose bike was searched by the police under the Terrorist Act, and all the other terrifying examples you will read about in chapter 8? The Serious and Organised Crime and Police Act and associated anti-terrorist legislation show how much faith the government has acquired in making use of all shades of moral panic to stifle any kind of political dissent. It’s ironic that while embracing this tactic so wholeheartedly with one arm they’re busy holding the other one up in disbelief, lamenting the fact that so few people in Britain are engaging with the electoral process.

  Back at Twyford Down, twelve years after the road was completed, the sides of the cutting are still enormous cliffs of off-white chalk, despite assurances from the government at the time that they would soon ‘green over’. You would imagine that some kind of lesson must have been learned from the whole miserable episode, but recently there was a horrible twist in the tale. As part of the government’s initial proposal the old road that became obsolete after the M3 was finished was given to the people of Winchester in perpetuity. Permission was granted for it to be turned into a meadow, to become a haven for butterflies and other insects and wildlife. It wasn’t much but it was something, and in the decade after the cutting was finished it thrived. A few years ago, however, the local council decided that this piece of land should be covered in concrete and tarmac so that Winchester’s park-and-ride car park could be extended. Apparently, Winchester’s council and businesses wanted more shoppers to have access to the high street. Again there was a demonstration, and again people complained. After all that had gone on at Twyford Down, how could they have the nerve even to think of doing such a thing? Once again the protesters couldn’t stop it and now the council have their new car park. I bet the local business leaders and councillors are please
d. And they wonder why so many of its own residents nominated Winchester as a crap place to live.

  I have another friend who played a role at Twyford Down, Chris Yates, the famous fisherman, writer and Master of Idleness. He lives a fairly frugal existence taking photographs, writing books and making radio and TV programmes, but he’s by far the most content person I have ever met. Chris was something of a protester in his youth, particularly when the building of new roads threatened to obliterate important parts of the countryside. He was also the one person I knew who had some conception of what it was like to live in Albion. His house is like something from a fairy tale, with woodland behind it and a well in the front garden, and his four children are as delightful, fearless and creative as he is. I went to see him to find out about the tactics he had used to fight road developments.

  I boarded the train at Waterloo one bright spring morning and felt my shoulders relax as I passed out of suburbia and into the lush countryside of southern Wiltshire. Chris lives a few miles away from a small village called Tollard Royal. It gained the ‘Royal’ in its name from King John of Magna Carta fame, who spent a great deal of time there from 1200 to 1213 and often hunted in nearby Cranbourne Chase. I took this news as another signpost that my journey was following the right track. An hour and a half later I spotted Chris dozing in his battered car at the train station. He beamed from ear to ear and greeted me. ‘I put some rods in the car, shall we go and see what the fish are doing? We won’t be long.’

  I don’t fish myself, but I’ve spent many hours standing behind Chris in long grass listening to him say ‘One more cast’ again and again for several hours at his preferred lake. Sometimes he brings an interesting book from his dusty study for me to peruse in the reeds while he stalks carp. (One of these contained a short story by Edgar Allan Poe that actually referred to the lake itself, something of which, at the time he gave me the book, Chris had no knowledge.)

  His preferred fishing spot does happen to be near a rather splendid pub too, so he never gets any complaints from me. After standing behind him again for a few hours at his favourite lake we drove up to the pub, ordered a few sandwiches and tucked into a few pints of local ale. Chris mined his memory for me, and soon stories of past protests were flowing out of his mouth between heartfelt guffaws.

  ‘My favourite one has to be the stink bombs. We were fighting the M25 extension years ago and we’d got hold of this eminent scientist who was prepared to fly in from America and testify about the dangers of lead in petrol and what effect this would have on the environment if the road went ahead. Anyway, the public inquiry was scheduled to close on the Friday but our man couldn’t get there until the Monday, so we had to find a way of making the inquiry overrun.

  ‘The night before, all the various campaigners came together for a meeting to work out how we could do it, and I had this great idea to let off stink bombs in the hall. It would take ages to fumigate the building, the inquiry would be forced to shut early for the day and then it would run over to the following week and we’d be able to get our scientist to give his evidence. Everyone agreed it was a brilliant and hilarious plan, but the problem was you were always searched when you went into the room and there was no way we’d be able to smuggle in stink bombs without Security noticing. We thought about trying to break in overnight to stash them somewhere but we didn’t want to get done for breaking and entering. Then, at the back of the room, this little old lady who was sitting with three others stood up and pointed out that none of their handbags had ever been searched by security when they visited the public inquiry. She sat down again and started whispering to the other three, then she stood up and said, “We’ll take them in and set them off. No problem.” Everyone collapsed laughing. I mean, can you imagine it! These sweet old ladies stuffing their handbags with stink bombs! But of course it was the perfect plan.

  ‘The next day we all went into the inquiry as normal and all these butch anti-road protester types were being searched by the doormen - it took them ages to search us all - and meanwhile these four old ladies were ushered through and took their seats down the front. A few minutes later we were all in and they started letting the stink bombs off. There was a terrible commotion and people began running out of the room as fast as they could. The fug was unbelievable. Well, of course they had no choice but to suspend the inquiry and extend it. Our man flew in, gave his evidence, and it was the final piece of evidence we needed. The extension was refused and we won! It didn’t stop there, though. His evidence about lead in petrol was so compelling that it got everything rolling to ban lead in petrol altogether. So everyone in Britain owes a lot to those brave and reckless grannies with their stink bombs.’

  When I first met Chris and discovered the staggeringly relaxed pattern of his life (despite being a single father of four) I told him he was a Master of Idleness and he looked at me in surprise. ‘But I’ve never even had a job.’ ‘Exactly,’ I replied. I asked him how he’d managed to do it and he gave me a typically Yates-like response. ‘Well, you see, in my experience you have two choices in life. You can have money or you can have time but you can never have both. I’ve always been happy because I’ve always chosen time.’

  I pressed him for more stories but he had other ideas. He told me the first thing I needed to do was to forget all about work, and he threw my dictaphone into the general detritus collecting in the back of his car. Then he showed me a brand-new, enormous wind-up aeroplane he’d just bought. He was desperate to try flying it on the hill behind his house so we went off and did that instead. Later that night, after spending the afternoon playing with his new plane and re-enacting Southampton’s recent defeat of Portsmouth with a small pink football, we stalked badgers and drank red wine while three of his children, Ellen, Alex and William, stared up into the sky looking for shooting stars. The badgers had got used to Chris on his moonlit walks and came out in a little line late that night, dipping their noses into the scraps of our dinner which Chris had put out for them.

  It really struck me, sitting there that evening, how few of us ever actually have the time to work out how to live. I had read a little book on the train by the Roman philosopher Seneca called On the Shortness of Life which argues that people are always fretting about extending their lives when in reality we are given plenty of time to savour being alive, we just waste most of it. ‘Men do not let anyone seize their estates,’ he wrote, ‘and if there is the slightest dispute about their boundaries they rush to stones and arms; but they allow others to encroach on their lives — why, they themselves even invite in those who will take over their lives. You will find no-one willing to share out his money; but to how many does each of us divide up his life! People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.’ He then went on to say, ‘learning how to live takes a whole life, and, which may surprise you more, it takes a whole life to learn how to die.’ Sitting there on a log chatting with Chris, I began to understand exactly what it was that Seneca meant. For a brief moment I got a glimpse of a life completely emptied of fear.

  Chris was an example of someone who had found his own way to escape the clutches of corporate Britain. The lesson from him seemed to be that our own time, inspiration, sense of creativity and desire to have plain old-fashioned fun are what you should rely on if you are looking for a different kind of life. Artists and creative types seem to be the only kinds of people who ever get to live in such a relaxed and free way. I’m becoming convinced that our obsession with celebrities simply reflects this desire to be in control of our own time. When you look at the gossip magazines that sell hundreds of thousands of copies every week they are always filled with pictures of famous people doing surprisingly tedious and mundane things: going shopping in Sainsbury’s on a Monday morning perhaps, having their hair done on a Thursday afternoon, or just going clothes shopping whenever they like. It’s almost as though it’s not them we lust
after but the fact that they can pretty much do what they want whenever they like. All the while the rest of us rot in offices, tied to desks and commuter trains by an umbilical cord of debt, fear and anxiety.

  The only other person I know who seems to have found his own kind of creative Albion is the artist/musician/ poet Billy Childish. Not that he found it without a struggle, though. I once heard a story about Billy, which I found particularly shocking and inspiring. When he was sixteen he started working at a dockyard in Chatham. He had no qualifications, had suffered a hellish and sexually abused childhood, was an alcoholic and couldn’t read or write. One afternoon he was chatting to an old man next to him in the yard. He told the man that he would only be working there for a few months because he wanted to go to art school. The story goes that the old man started laughing, so Billy asked him why. The man replied, ‘Everyone says they’re going to quit. I said that when I started here at fourteen, now look at me. You’ll never quit. You’ll get used to the security.’ Billy apparently then walked over to a block of granite, picked up a three-pound club hammer and pounded his left hand with it four times, mangling it into a bloody pulp. A year later he was in art school.

  He is now a successful artist and writer, but his music is what made Kurt Cobain one of his biggest fans. Beck and the White Stripes tried to get him to support them on tour, but he refused. He and his band won’t use modern equipment because it alters the authenticity of their sound. Terrifyingly, the only reason most people have heard of him is the least interesting thing about him: he once went out with the artist Tracey Emin.