It’s like the 80s (and 90s) all over again: UK police are repressing and stalling and making a nuisance of themselves with campaigners and activists as if their jobs depend on it. The latest twist is the cancellation of the Big Green Gathering, a get together of greens which dates back to 1994, basically celebrating life and the planet, and chai lattes and reiki massage and reed-bed sewage systems and other such dangerous things.

Just three days before it was due to kick off on July 29th, the police finally pulled the plug. This followed six months of intensive negotiations between the organisers, the local council, and the police about security levels, with police demanding road blocks, steel perimeter walls, watchtowers and patrols, all of which took the security bill up and up and up to about £200,000, double the amount that organisers had budgeted for when they set ticket prices last september.

Now why would police go and do something like this? The BGG is very low-key, very low-maintenance, all powered by renewable energy and visited by the sort of people who will actually pick up after themselves (unlike some of the bigger corporate festivals, which leave a carpet of waste behind them). But its downfall comes from, in some ways, its success. BGG is a crucial fund-raising nodule for the Climate Camp, which will be losing something like £10-15,000 as a result. And Climate Camp has arisen partially thanks to BGG, which began life in the Green Fields of Glastonbury, and has always shouted loud the ethos which Climate Camp has also embraced: You can’t just talk about a better world and a better way of living in it, you have to show
people how it could work.

And, as before, the government and police just don’t like this. They really hate Climate Camp (which does, it's true, announce that it's going to be doing some kind of direct action) and they don't very much like any other camps either. I suppose, strictly speaking, you can understand that, if you were running a country, you might not like people setting up a little autonomous camp in it every once in a while to demonstrate how to do things better. But I like to think that, if you really believed in free speech and diversity, you might just let the camp get on with it, and perhaps, (if you were really open-minded) listen to some of the ideas that were being discussed. That however is clearly not how it works. In come the police, plod plod plod, and shut it down. Bish bosh, just stop talking everyone, and do exactly what we say.

When will they figure out that lining up against activists like this just makes everyone into a united front? When will they understand that when police stop talking and start biffing, movements form and gather force because at last they understand who the opposition is? In the 80s the miners, in the 90s the ravers, and now, in the noughties, the greens. Round and round we go, but when will we ever go forwards?