remember the moot on the ridgeway (5th October 2002)…

http://www.fushion.org.uk/gallery/folder/2002/7.Moot%20of%20the%20Mist%205th%20Oct%202002

the police wanted to put the message across at the end of the party season that ridgeway parties were to be stopped, so came in heavy handed with horses, dogs, chopper etc.

It worked as well. no big parties have happened up there since.

I see this happening in Norfolk.

parties still go on, and will always….. .just gotta give the area a rest for a while…

Bugs (missing the Ridgeway!)

shouldn’t the title of this thread be changed to “police respond in the way they are paid to and are expected to by the vast majority of people, following an en masse invasion of a police station and large group breaking into a business premises” ?

lo..not quite as snappy mate. and while we can all see they were backed into a corner and had little other option, anyone of us who have witnessed the police taking their numbers off (iilegal) and charging a crowd of people half as armed and half their age and numbers will tesify…they dont have to be quite so enthusiastic, do they?

but then i spose fear makes people do funny things. like beat defeseless 15 year old girls unconcious. just cos its understandable, doesnt make it right. that goes for both sides.

also what is being overlooked here slightly, is this is hardly the first time the police have acted like psychoes, but it is the first time theyve been able to justify it and therefore get national news coverage and therefore spark such a debate (well second – there was essex last summer-but in twenty years opf raves these are the anomolies, and its just one crew). i have been to many peaceful parties and legal demos where the violence was started by the police, not the protesters.

they push and push until we loose our rags, and then they turn around and say “see? theyre an angry mob”… Who radicalised these parties, and who started the violence in the long term?

i dont know wanyone who can truthfully say it was a rave crew. it is the police that brought violence to the free party scene, and anyone involved in raves surely knows that.

but once the BEEB and the sun tell us something, somehow we forget experience and start agreeing with the. even the best of us get brainwashed.

first time i saw police go mad was when we marched on london in the 80’s to peacefully protest the illegal bombing of libya. i was about 5. we marched to oxford street and peacefully sat down. they charged with horses and batons

thatcher later changed the rules so that US bombers couldn’t use UK air bases to commit acts of war outside war. A victory for the protesters, but one that was won with innocent blood from the Libyans and the protestors

thing is, everyone except ravers have had to stand aside while we rave for 20 years now. the cops, landowners, politicians etc have been getting more and more frustrated for 2 decades. ever since castle morton ‘we’ have been giving more and more rope to hang ourselves with.

no-one else is to blame for the current situation of deep alienation on both sides

not sure what you mean by this. no-one else except who, us? are you now siding with general lighting in that “the rave community desrves everything it gets”? i expected better from you.

i dont think we’ve had to stand aside, and i dont think the majority of parties have been unreasonable. aare you saying you feel guilty for the raves that you helped put on back in the day? i know i am proud of every single one. if ts on common land there is no landowner issue. if there is no crime outside of rave laws, then no real crime is committed, and as for politicians. i cant feel sorry for them.

no that’s not what i’m saying

what i’m trying to say is that we have had 20 years of apparent victories over the law (in the eyes of joe public)

in the eyes the cops, the landowners, the villagers, the warehouse owners etc etc there has been no effective law to stop us from doing what we want

i can see it from both points of view, is all

i run a small charity. right now we are desperately trying to expand, purely because we have to to survive, financially. one of the only places we could go in this city is an industrial unit. the break in for leccy at that party at yarmouth last w/e could easily have been our office. a situation like that would finish a small organisation like ours. although we are a charity, we share a lot of characteristics with small business. so i share some of the concerns of the people who wanted that party stopped

unless party crews recognise and demonstrate that ‘we’ can be part of the bigger picture, ‘we’ will be alienated, not accepted.

there are a great many party crews who are worthy of freedom, there are some that are not and unfortunately ‘we’ are failing to present our case by weeding out the shit and presenting the case weshould be

I have the same headache at work when i’m fundraising… there are a few crappy charities that are so vocal and unprofessional that it makes it almost impossible to win the confidence of those who hold the purse strings, because we get lumped in together

right. sorry i misunderstood. my bad. i havent been around and its late so forgive my misinterpretation.

the point you make a bout the one or two crews ruining it fro us all is spot on, and makes it so hard to fight our corner when we are constantly havin to fight to get out of the massive shadow that such a small contingent casts on us all.

i think its the same for any marginal group, whether it be charities, rave crews or travelling people, that the whole community is defined by national media in terms of the worst possible aspects, because extreme news sells papers. sad but true. i spose the only way round that is to control our own media coverage, which is in part what this site is all about. grassroots media. now if only we had a tv show/station/nation news column.,.

and yea, i totally feel for that company in yarmouth. no-one deserves that.

so…

how do we find and present a unified and peaceful front?

to me, that is stage 1

I don’t think my response in post 18 regarding July’s party being broken up (this one was on common land/Forestry and there would have been no mess caused had the riot cops not charged everyone off site!) was exactly “siding with the police actions” – I was there and saw this all happen, it wasn’t pleasant at all..

all I was pointing out is what happened in East Anglia is the same as other regions, just maybe 2-3 years later – and that in more recent times there is a more agressive atmosphere at parties even without any cops (something I was mentioning on here back in 2004)

Lots of common land areas round here and SE England have been rinsed (not all crews clear up as well as they should) and I have seen clearly private farms turned over for raves as well – often its elderly farmers who aren’t as “security aware” as they perhaps should be or feel that old East Anglian traditions meant you didn’t have to lock down everything as people respected the boundaries..

thats whats created the backlash and people writing to MPs etc

Whatever has gone on with previous parties, partying that in-use warehouse was an absolute fucking disaster, for the people there, for Thermaglow, for police/community/society relations in EA and for Brains Kan – everyone has lost out of this…the saddest part of it is BK were a crew who once had their heads screwed on -have a look at some older threads from the original EA ravers like Biotech and Frij and see how things have changed.

i wasnt tryign to say you were siding with babylon, but you do seem very quick to blame everythign from drugs legislation to inapropriate police crackdowns (as ive said this was not one, i understand why the popo had to do what they did to an extent in yarmouth) on ravers. its a very defeatist attitude which i have to say gets me down and seems a departure from days gone by when i saw you as more of an independant thinker. and a supporter of the positive elements in ravescene, which seem to be documented less and less on this site.

im fully aware of skans history and used to have a lot of respeect fpr them as they seemed more politically aware than most, which i feel is important. i spose thats what makes recent events so sad that they have lost the plot so thoroughly.

it ain’t just BK who’s lost the plot though

and i reckon it’s too late to stop the next round of legislation

the ‘keep your head down’ approach has worked well in some parts… the same approach has been coupled with a political / social awareness by some

me, i’m going legal… or at least, when in a grey area, keeping it quiet

times have changed.

There unfortunately are less positive elements of raves these days, and more bad shit happening like people getting hurt, overdoing drugs, fires, road traffic collisions on convoys etc.

there have been a fair few ambulances called to Eastern raves this year for instance – not violence but people falling off stuff and actually breaking bones because they were so trashed.

then you have the “angry chav” element – at a so-called fluffy norfolk rave one of the lads I was with got punched because he was “flirting with someone elses bird” – and there have been other shady incidents at raves recently (yet this area is still fluffier than SE England/London!)

the sad thing is its not by any means all ravers but a small minority of them who fuck things up but we are all judged by their activities and a lot of the bad stuff – particularly youths substance misuse issues and the road safety problems are being noticed by the rest of society a lot more..

On one of the drugs threads here its mentioned that ketamine can now be obtained for £5 per gram in London, prices in the provinces are down, and the bulk prices appear to have halved too. there is also way more alcohol drunk at raves than ever before. I can’t help but think there is a connection here….