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Battle Of The Beanfield: Birth Of A Police State

Posted by Jon King on Aug 08, 2009

Tagged with: 1980s, battle of the beanfield, big brother, big green gathering, convoy, counterculture, free festival, margaret thatcher, new world order, new world politics, police state, stonehenge

Battle of the Beanfield, June 21st, 1985, when counterculture died and the police state was born…

Battle Of The Beanfield: A Police State

A Stark And Bloody Symbol

“What we – the ITN camera crew and myself as a reporter – 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 inquiry after what has happened today”.

The above quote was taken from a report by ITN correspondent Kim Sabido, who was commenting on an event that took place on June 1st, 1985, in a field close to Stonehenge in Wiltshire.

The incident would come to be known as the Battle of the Beanfield, and would mark the day when counterculture finally died—our civil liberties and freedoms along with it.

Indeed, it was a stark and bloody symbol of the time in which it occurred.

Battle Of The Beanfield: A Police State

The Thatcher Years

The ‘Thatcher Years’, as the 80s became known, marked a real turning point in the breakdown of counterculture and the establishment of the emerging New World Order. Perhaps a repercussion of the revolutionary 60s, and the equally anarchical 70s, the 1980s provided the perfect platform on which Orwellian Britain could finally be established.

And it was. Out went the Welfare State. In came Duran Duran, Big Brother and Jack Boots. It was almost as if, from nowhere it seemed, Fascism had become fashionable again.

Little surprise that out of this new political order the police state was born.

It was against this new, restrictive socio-political backdrop that a group of largely peaceful young people set off in convoy for the Stonehenge Free Festival (yes folks, festivals were FREE in those days!).

But the newly empowered police state had other ideas—in light of new legislation increasing police powers, and at the same time restricting social gatherings to a maximum of three, the police decided to have a festival of their own: psycho-style.

As the above report from Kim Sabido attests, no mercy was shown by this brave new police force, who set about trashing the convoy of ‘new age travellers’ and festival goers in a manner never before witnessed in Britain. Leastwise not in full public view.

As Nick Davies reported in The Observer at the time:

“There was glass breaking, people screaming, black smoke towering out of burning caravans and everywhere there seemed to be people being bashed and flattened and pulled by the hair … men, women and children were led away, shivering, swearing, crying, bleeding, leaving their homes in pieces.”

The report concluded: “Over the years I had seen all kinds of horrible and frightening things and always managed to grin and write it. But as I left the Beanfield, for the first time I felt sick enough to cry.”

Battle Of The Beanfield: A Police State

The Big Green Gathering

Needless to say no inquiry was ever ordered into the Beanfield incident. But then this was the 1980s; inquiries were no longer in fashion. This was the decade of martial law—when travelling hippies, striking workers, anti-nuclear protestors et al came up against the new police state, and came off second best.

The Battle of the Beanfield perhaps enshrines this Dark Age better than any other singular event.

Even recent events at the 2009 G20 protests in London pale in the face of what happened that day, 24 years ago this summer. But we should not in any degree be comforted by this.

The fact that police acted in the way they did at the G20 march, and that police intelligence was behind the closure of the 2009 Big Green Gathering this week – itself an attempt to prevent environmental protestors gathering and protesting – is an ominous sign that almost a quarter of century on from the Battle of the Beanfield we still live in a police state.

Scarier still, most people have become so ‘institutionalized’ by it they no longer realize it’s there.

I’ll leave you with the words of Kim Sabido, a testament to how controlled the media had become back in the 1980s. And a warning that, if we think it’s any less so today, we’d best think again.

“When I got back to ITN during the following week and I went to the library to look at all the rushes, most of what I’d thought we’d shot was no longer there. From what I’ve seen of what ITN has provided since, it just disappeared, particularly some of the nastier shots.”

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Are you old enough to remember the Battle of the Beanfield? Were you there? What do you think about the police state anyway?

Love to get your views…

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image: Tim Malyon/Andy Worthington and Batrewick