even in France there is more cooperation etc

not in my experience

it’s not great publicity, but there’s some balance in the article

interesting to see one person who was kept awake saying “there needs to be more talks”

which says to me he wasn’t against raves, but wanted a bit of compromise

shame all the events listed are problematic, and there are no quotes from any organisers

sadly thats the way things have become. all it takes is one idiot and everyone gets a bad name, also too many of the same venues have been rinsed too often and for too long, and stuff like litter picking/reducing contamination ignored until it was too late.

TBH I think the biggest bone of contention is not the drugs aspect as such; but the fact that from the outsiders POV it seems crews are just passing a lot of costs such as clean up etc on to the farmers/building owners, and disrupting the normal operations of their business, and this has happened time and time again for up to 14 years in some places.

Of course our scene does provide people with low-cost enjoyment – but its still other peoples resources we are using, the situation is worse outdoors as unless you are an agricultural type person yourself its easy to end up in or too near to crop fields, or to even cause livestock escapes through the breaching of fences.

At the moment trying to fight the case for raves is no better than nicking a bunch of flowers fom the market stall and then saying it wasn’t that bad because you gave the flowers to your mum as a present…

I think you’ve just come up with one of the best analogys of the ‘scenes’ state at the moment.

unfortunately, that’s true

you recon? id say thats a bit harsh. it may be balanced, but it was still an effectively anti-rave peice. the reason raves are not as good as they should be is that they have to conducted in an undergound way, which means their organisation is sketchy to say the least. the government are at least to blame as the ravers, that is the leg we have to stand on. dont want to listen to the media too much…

the government could indeed be a lot more receptive – but Blair’s government already tried it once with the Exodus collective – even overturning a decision to evict them from a farm they had squatted and then said they were doing loads of positive stuff with!

then a few years later the collective folded amidst all sorts of allegations of violence, misogyny, crack smoking and dealing (when the collective claimed to be outwardly totally against this), and the farm ended up being used more like an illegal club (thus pissing off the other areas residents) as well as the “positive social housing venture”

People still start arguments over this on SJ, about 5 years later…

it got to the stage where there entire rig was seized and put through a crusher by the old bill and council; but no one could be bothered to claim it (one person from the area said that the guy who now owned it had pissed off so many former crew members no one would back him up…

there are some reports on the demise of Exodus (including part 1 of an interview from their former spindoctor Glenn Jenkins) on here and it is widely reported in the underground press and local press from the Luton area.

The govt minister who let them have the farm got reshuffled and although he was kept on in another ministry appears to have had a number of his responsibilities reduced (AFAIK about the worst thing that could happen to a minister)

after a monumental fuckup like this (in true British style), can anyone blame the rest of society (not just govt/media) for becoming more “anti?” Look at the other reports of Reading raves just before the PEL busts, there are people of our age group not just grassing up raves to cops, but even openly complaining in the papers..

its gonna take a long time before anyone can regain that lost ground. And even though raves have by necessity to be underground, it does not mean a bit more effort cannot be put into organising them.

People still keep rinsing the same venues over and over again (and there are crews who leach on to others as they can’t be fucked to find their own places) – and then everybody wonders two years later why there is a massive backlash? A decent area map is less than a tenner; and shows where the nearest houses are. a bit of research will aid local knowledge and perhaps turn up venues where people can go unnoticed.

true said, which is why i’ve been looking for ways of getting more rigs to be responsible / join up etc instead of just blindly throwing loads of raves.

i do have a horrible feeling one day the military will be used against us, soon.

why do you think the other countries which Brits often say “are better at standing up for themselves” have gendarmes (gens d’armes) as well as police?

OTOH such an incident would be a dangerous precendent for (mainland) Britain, which would diminish our image across the World. (it is only probably our governments love of spin which stops this happening, it is a commonplace event in other countries – even in Europe!. However, for BRitain, the sight of soldiers carrying out crowd control duties on mainland streets would be a PR disaster for a Government of any colour… I doubt the army would be deployed to deal with the average free party – not even a teknival.

These events simply aren’t anywhere as big as people make them out to be…. and Britains military is already stretched due to our propensity to stick our nose into other countries business to improve the prospects for some of our own countries businesses…

I suppose it could happen in extreme circumstances for a very large event – but I would expect it would be a situation where a future Government (probably a Conservative one) decided to stop Glastonbury, Reading or even Geldof’s latest bandwagon in full swing as a show of strength against “continued drug use” –

there would be far more (understandble) resistance from the crowd as many would have paid a substantial sum to be at this event. The trouble could perhaps escalate where there was resistance from the crowd which involved the use of firearms or IEDS – but that would be a really extreme situation I can’t see happening for at least 10 years or so (and only if party people do not sort out their own image so they are not seen as a threat!, and there is no attempt to reach middle ground between locals and party people.)

You’d be surprised at how much can be “dealt with” with just cops alone, especially with their new comms systems making it easier to deploy units across force boundaries.

Last time I checked the home office figures there were 140,000 cops in the UK, with about 30,000 of them being metpol units.

Ever seen Scotland Yard TSG stop a multirigger? 16 full serials (“riot vans”) into the warehouse and surrounding areas within half an hour. They didn’t use any major physical force either; just force of numbers like crews do to take buildings in the first place, but better co-ordinated with their movements and far more focused.

Our cops have successfully helped break the miners strike, and dealt with riots in London. Raves are small potatoes to them.