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Home | Friday 26th June 2009 | Issue 681

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YOU’RE NICKED SUNSHINE!

AS POLICE CLAMP DOWN ON STONEHENGE SOLSTICE CELEBRATIONS

Revellers attending this year’s solstice celebrations at Stonehenge last weekend reported a massive police presence. Bolstered by tooled-up private security (presumably employed by English Heritage), police took control of the gathering but, in the words of one attendee, “If the Babylon are going to start bringing their shit to Stonehenge again, and act in an intimidating, intrusive manner as they did this year, we need to treat it as a serious threat to our right to gather peacefully.”

“[There were] Hundreds of coppers in total; at the entrance to the stones, the exit from the car park and patrolling all over the site supported by considerable numbers of private security contractors with stab vests, handcuffs and sniffer dogs at the entrance to the stones”.

To totally destroy any remnants of sacred energy, Wiltshire police continually buzzed the site with an unmanned drone copter, which filmed the crowd below. Also a police helicopter hovered over the car park at low altitude for about an hour from around 10am. There were 37 arrests and three hundred searches with sniffer dogs.

As one told us “There was nothing free about it”. Another commented on Indymedia “Let’s bring Fitwatch tactics to the party next year, give out some flyers encouraging people to challenge the policing of the event, and, if possible, find a way to knock that fucking drone out of the sky. If the pigs are going to police Stonehenge as if it was a demo, it’s because they rightly see such free and anarchic gatherings as a threat to their authority. To preserve the spirit of the summer solstice, I really think it’s time for us to organise against them.”

* SchNEWS recommends Andy Worthington’s book Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion, featuring the history of spiritual and counter-cultural activity around the Stones going from 19th century pagan and Druidic gatherings through to the Stonehenge free festivals, the Battle Of The Beanfield, and more recently.

See www.andyworthington.co.uk/2009/06/20/its-25-years-since-the-last-stonehenge-free-festival 

Keywords: english heritage, fitwatch, police, stonehenge, summer solstice, wiltshire


 

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