MAYDAY! MAYDAY! - village in the sky all set for eviction
RECLAIM THE LAND - Positive and Sustainable Futures
TRAVELLERS CHALLENGE CJA - over eviction order
STRANGEWAYS RIOTS - five years on
Party and Protest - those diary dates
That's right folks as from Monday 1st May tree-dwellers in Stanworth Valley near Preston in the way of the proposed M65 are all set to defend this beautiful ancient woodland from the bulldozers.
Last Wednesday saw the Court of Appeal in London finally end 3 months of legal wrangling between the tree-people and the Department of Transport. Now the only hope is that a complaint made by the European Commission earlier this week, will bring a halt to the destruction.
The woods are home to a wide range of species of flora and fauna including Tawny Owls and Goldcrest, and are also recognised by local nature conservation groups as being part of one of the ten most valuable woodlands in Lancashire.
There are presently over 30 tree-houses with 4 km of aerial walkways on a steep which even the Under-Sheriff of Lancashire has acknowledged will be "very difficult" to evict. Hundreds of anti- road protestors are expected to arrive over the weekend.
The No M65 Campaign are advising everyone to go to the woods by way of the public footpath from the Sun Paper Mill, nr. Feniscowles, Blackburn by very early Monday at the latest. To be in the trees, safety equipment is essential, for specific details ring 0161 861 7895. Please arrive on Sunday for safety training and to find a space. Self-sufficiency in outdoor clothing, food and water strongly recommended.
Last Sunday around 400 people from a mish-mash of direct action groups converged on a site in surrey to reclaim the land that is rightfully everyones. Some farmland on the disused Wisley aerodrome, near Leatherhead is being occupied for a week to draw attention to our lack of access to land.
One enthusiastic occupier told the SchNews... "greetings from rural idyllic paradise as the land rights movement parties its way to the end of a brilliant week. The camp is well sorted - terraced gardens leading to a huge communal bender where acoustic music and singing goes down. There's a reception area, kitchen with bread oven, healing space and bath (fire underneath it). Amazing response from locals... Many people from the area are expected to come to the procession and play 'St. George and the Dragon' Donga-style on Friday evening..."
Others are less pleased that the venue was changed at the last minute, from the symbolically important St. George's Hill (Once the site of the Diggers land occupation, now the home of a golf course and some of England's most disgustingly wealthy people), to the old airfield at Wisley, several miles away.
Secondly, some of the statements of the organisers indicated that this was a campaign determined to emasculate itself from the very start. Remember - the land is a priceless resource monopolised by a few to the detriment of the many, and that privilege is not something they will give up easily and yet the organisers were using the language of the elite - St. George's Hill had been rejected as a venue because the likelihood of "criminal damage on our part was apparently too high. Never mind the (perfectly legal) "criminal damage" inflicted on the land by the golf course, with its neatly clipped lawns and chemical saturated turf.
Furthermore, it seemed, that "The Land is Ours" was not in the business of taking anybodys "private property" away from them. Aside from the issue of whether the land actually belongs to anybody, such "private property" was won by the sword and a system of extortion and enclosure in the first place. In the present day exclusion from the "private property" of the big landowners is a major part of what keeps us down. All off this is what is what the original diggers were fighting against - but no, as opening up public access (not occupation) to the land, reforming (admittedly idiotic) planning guidelines, and so on. This is not likely to have the land-owning elite quaking in their boots.
A women whose child suffers from a serious medical condition is set to become the first traveller to challenge an eviction order brought under the Criminal Justice Act.
Tracey Foster has been granted Legal Aid to fight the order under the Children's Act which states that a council has a legal duty to safeguard and promote the welfare of children in need.
Wealdon District Council in East Sussex issued the eviction order on March 22nd. About 50 travellers, including two pregnant mothers and 12 toddlers live in Phie forest, a 42 acre woodland site, which is an old army training camp.
Under the CJA the council does not have a legal duty to find another site for the travellers - it intends to move the group on to a lay-by where they will then be the responsibility of East Sussex County Council!
Another traveller has also been granted legal aid on behalf oh her 21 month old child, whose health and safety may be put at risk if she is moved to a place nearb road traffic and no access to food and water such as a lay-by..
Linda Dodge, a spokesperson from the Health Visitors Association, said "If children are receiving medical care they should not be evicted at all. Chelsea Foster could easily ended up brain damaged if she does not receive proper care....if they've got no other use for the land its wrong to evict families with children." The eviction has now been postponed until April 24th.
Five years ago, Strangeways prison in Manchester saw the biggest protest in the history of British prisons. As the CJA threatens more and more of us with prison - as well as reducing the already few rights prisoners have - it's a protest with a lot of relevance for today.
'When the sun rose over Strangeways on Monday 2nd April 1990, 140 prisoners were in control of five wings of the prison. Some of those on the roof gave clenched fist salutes to the crowd below. Some wore prison officers' caps and jackets; others sported head or face coverings improvised from towels or blankets. A few strummed guitars and makeshift drums...' from Strangeways 1990: a serious disturbance.
The uprising lasted from the first to the 25th of April with smaller protests in over 20 other prisons. It was a lengthy and extremely courageous protest aimed at focusing attention on the horrific treatment of prisoners on British prisons. It took place at a time of nationwide resistance to government policies, not unlike today's anti-CJA and anti-road building campaigns - the day before Strangeways kicked off, the battle of Trafalgar Square had taken place when a massive anti-poll tax demonstration was violently attacked by police leading to pitched battles between the police and anti-poll tax protesters.
Without any evidence, the media claimed that 20 sex offenders had been murdered; water was repeatedly sprayed on to the roof; and for a while the scene resembled an outdoor rock festival as the police played deafeningly loud music to try and force the prisoners down. This tactic may have worked in Panama on General Noriega, who loved opera and hated being blasted with Deep Purple but, despite being treated to Wagner's Valkyrie at full blast as well as the collected works of Queen, a few prisoners danced for the cameras, while others donned headphones and did their best to ignore it. The Observer described how 'bright spotlights and strobes are trained on the roof, rock music is intermittently played and a low-flying helicopter buzzes...' Some former prisoners still refer to the riot as the 'Strangeways Open Air Concert'.
When all these proved ineffective, the prison system devised more cunning ploys to end the protest. Women prison officers crept through the prison at night and seductively called out the names of the protesters. According to the Daily Mirror 'ring-leader' Paul Taylor had two such 'brave young women' all to himself, one imitating a 'devoted girlfriend, softly moaning his name in the night' the other pretending to be his mother urging him to surrender.
Meanwhile the prisoners were engaging in their own psychological warfare: as Paul Taylor says, 'We asked prisoners leaving to appear reluctant at first to speak about booby traps, then to tell the Prison Service chiefs that sections of the landings had been taken out with lino covering the gap, making a lion-trap. Also that there were weights on the underside of landings attached to string-rope on the upper levels to bring them crashing down on the riot squad. To give further foundation to our claims, we put chairs and tables up against the landing doors with eating trays on top so that whenever a sneak-squad came along and through, the trays would clatter to the ground and they would back off in retreat again.'
men held three to a cell, 23 hours a day, with no sanitation, one shower a week, clean clothing in short supply, 15 minute visits for remand prisoners with no physical contact permitted. It was also notorious for the thuggery and bullying of some of the screws who terrorised prisoners purely for kicks. Many screws openly flaunted their membership of fascist groups like the National Front.
Before the protest was over the government announced the commissioning of the Woolfe Inquiry, the most far-reaching inquiry ever into the state of British prisons. The protest had succeeded in exposing the squalor and brutality of Britain's penal dustbins and something had to be seen to be done.
As the final five protesters surrendered on 25th April 1990 no one anywhere was saying that the prison system was working well. Even a government White Paper stated 'Imprisonment can lessen people's sense of responsibility for their actions and reduce their self-respect...Imprisonment is costly for the individual, for the prisoner's family and for the community'.
This mood was short lived. Today the backlash is in full swing with the prison population soaring, sentence lengths increasing and conditions in jail being deliberately harassed. All while Home Secretary Michael Howard confidently announces that 'Prison works'. When Strangeways blew Britain already had the highest prison population in western Europe. It is now higher than ever before - 51,300 men and women are behind bars in England and Wales alone. Only the man who thought up the CJA could see those sort of figures as a success story.
Many of the prisoners who highlighted the state of the prison system by their rooftop protest at Strangeways have been victimised in a series of show trials. 23 men were sentenced to between four and 13 years additional imprisonment for taking part in the protest. And they are being victimised in more grotesque ways - when compulsory drug-testing under the CJA was introduced into Wakefield prison recently, the very first prisoner chosen for a test was Barry Morton, who is serving nine and a half years for his part in the Strangeways revolt.
The final Strangeways trial opens on 12th June at Nottingham Crown Court. David Bowen is charged with escaping from custody on the way to Manchester Crown Court to be tried for riot. David is currently serving 12 years for charges arising from the revolt, charges of which he strongly maintains his innocence. At the time of the protest in April 1990 he was in Strangeways awaiting a trial for shoplifting.
Glyn Williams, Mark Azzopardi (DA0147) HMP Full Sutton, York YO 1PS;
Alan Lord ((K80382) HMP Hull, Hedon Road, Hull HU9 5LS;
David Bowen (DA0146) HMP Liverpool, 68 Hornby Road, Liverpool L9 3DF;
Tony Bush (CD0405), John Spencer (AL0532), Kevin Gee HMP Frankland, Brasside, Durham DH1 5YD;
Ian Allen (AL3435) HMP Garth, Leyland, Preston PR5 3NE;
Mark Williams, Ashworth Secure Hospital, Maghull, Liverpool;
Barry Morton (CV0221), Paul Taylor (AN0564) HMP Wakefield, 5 Love Lane, Wakefield WF2 9AG.
* For the full inside story of the Strangeways protest there is an excellent book about it, co-written by a former Strangeways prisoner, called Strangeways 1990 - a serious disturbance by Nicki Jameson and Eric Allison (Larkin Publications �7.95 - phone 0171 837 1688 or through AK Press).
***One man was done under the CJA for blowing a horn up a tree during a hunt. He was one of the Northamptonshire 5 arrested on 5 November 1994, the first Hunt Sabs to be arrested under the CJA. He was fined �200 and given a two year bindover. The rest of them were let off. Police evidence against them was flimsy. One officer was convinced that he witnessed the offence when he and his colleagues were 3-400 yards away from the protesters. Another policeman from the same group reckoned they were only 30-40 yards away. Obviously the judge didn't seem to mind the discrepancy....
*** Chaotic scenes at the Wimpey AGM last Monday! A group of protesters from Pollok turned up and the delegates refused to answer their questions. The protesters then clambered onto the display to make their point but it collapsed. Sound monitors outside the conference centre picked up this and the noisy expulsion of the people involved!
***Crap Arrest! A busker on the London underground was done for begging under the Vagrancy Act!!! When he turned up to court, the case was dropped. A massive clampdown on buskers on the tube is in progress.
*** A long established biker club was chased all over Wiltshire by police wielding the CJA when they tried to hold a spring rally last week. At one point they even tried to set up their PA on their own land but police eventually hassled them into a neighbouring county. The section of the CJA which refers to "repetitive beats" is not just being used against ravers it seems...
*** Help needed in Bromley area - monthly mag to include info on CJA, music and anything vaguely controversial wants people to contribute
Contact Amy & Sam, PO Box 430, Orpington, Kent, BR6 OAP
*** Bristol has a new Anti CJA Centre with squatting advice (given by Bristol Housing Action Movement) and info room and hopefully a cafe soon too.
It's at 4 Sussex Place, St.Werburghs, Bristol
*** Thanks to police intervention Norwich cyclists brought their city centre to a standstill on global warming day. Initially the police had threatened the Norwich Cycling Campaign with the Public Order Act and considered banning the ride as it was intended to disrupt traffic. It was pointed out that bicycles are traffic too! In the end 2 van loads of police led the 150 cyclists which included children and o.a.p.'s with 16 traffic wardens stopping cars at every junction giving the riders probably the safest journey they'll ever have thru the city centre!
*** Next Wednesday special banner making day at Justice? squat in defiance of the CJA. Meet at midday with paints, ideas, sheets 01273 685913
*** The women's peace camp outside Menwith Hill US Spy-Base in Yorkshire was recently evicted by 30 police and bailiffs (for 7 people). Six women were arrested for chaining themselves to caravans and charged with obstruction of the highway
Jim Chambers still on remand for alleged criminal damage to a road construction site PV 2504, HMP Pentonville prison, Caledonian Rd., London N7.
John Livingstone, arrested at the No M77 Pollok Free State in Glasgow HMP Greenock, Greenock, Glasgow.
Tracey Hart, on remand on trumped up charges of criminal damage to perimeter fence of Menwith Hill SpyBase in Yorkshire. Low Newton women's prison, Brasside, Durham, DH1 55D.
As ever, there's quite a lot of competition for the daftest arrest by the boys in blue. But this week it's back to Shoreham to the case of the clearly-a-criminal motorist who had the audacity to gave a supportive hoot to demonstrators while driving along the A259. The police quickly weighed up the situation and decided to take the necessary action - three of them dragged him out his car, locked him in handcuffs, shoved him in a police van and drove off.
We don't edit: we sample/massacre/customise/blag and rip off - do the same!
