Monday 1 June 2015

30 years anniversary of Battle of Beanfield



The Battle of the Beanfield took place over several hours , 30 years ago  today on the afternoom  of Saturday 1 June 1985. When Wiltshire police prevented a vehicle convoy of several hundred New Age Travelers, known as the 'Convoy'  and referred  to  as the ' Peace Convoy' by the media,  from setting up at the 11th Stonehenge Free Festival in Wiltshire, England. 
It resulted in innocent people, women and children being violently beaten up in their own homes, after 12 years of gathering  in the same place of celebration, by the combined  forces of the state, who armed with shields and batons ran savagely amok. There was carnage and mayham as the marginalised  and dispossessed were brutally  targeted by a police forces  under the auspices of  Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Government,  were allowed to get seriously out of control, trying to suppress a peoples thirst for freedom, this quasi military force carried out serious abuses of their power with an unrelenting  frenzied brutality following similar attacks in the year on the miners. 
A horrible time, like today, when people who live on societies  edges are attacked simply for being different. Women and their babies were left showered with glass after the police had smashed up their vehicles. It would  leave over 116 travelers  hospitalised. and 420  of their number arrested ( few arrested were ever prosecuted) as  their homes were systematically looted, smashed and burnt  with their possessions stolen..
A dark day for British justice and civil liberties.  30 years later people still  suffering the consequences , and bearing the scars of this dark passage in history. But the stones remain.




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