![]() Some of the vehicles were driving round the field, I got caught up with a group on foot, some people were trying to rally us to fight, and what I discovered were police Snatch Squads running into our crowd trying to grab these organisers. As I ran, a copper ran past me swinging his truncheon just missing a fleeing girl’s head. Suddenly he was tripped up and was kneeling in front of me, I punched him in the back of the head – panic had made me a desperate man – and my hand swelled up immediately, then I helped educate him with my boots as the crowd swirled around him in a flurry of boots, fists and bits of the field’s fence. The fighting intensified and I ran, shitting myself, I thought I was going to be killed here in this green field in Jolly England. By now, the police were in some of the vehicles, ramming others, people and children were screaming, dogs were barking and biting and everyone had the look of the hunted – desperate. Suddenly a bus pulled in front of me and police swarmed out, I held up my hands saying “please, I surrender please” and I got beaten on the head and arms, them dragged by the hair and arms, bleeding, back across the field and into the queue of the arrested, where someone helped me walk towards the riot vans and held their t-shirt on my head to help stop the blood (thanks M). We were thrown into the van, then locked in a garage behind Amesbury Police Station with about 25 others, where we took all the drugs we had on us!! Then I was driven to Portsmouth and finally released on Monday morning about 3am, after being charged with assault, carrying an offensive weapon, resisting arrest etc. and signing a pledge not to go within 25 miles of the Henge.
Now I could tell you how the local landowner stopped the police trashing the women, children and vehicles that had stayed at Savernake, how fourteen children were in Salisbury hospital that night with head wounds, how Rosie’s windscreen was smashed all over her as she held her baby up and asked to surrender, how the dogs were put down that day, how the press stitched us up, the police all got commendations, how 500 people had marched from Amesbury Car Park that day and had also been trashed, but what I really want to say is that day changed my life forever. I was treated as a terrorist that day, and that is what I became, any grief or damage I could cause the System I then did. Be it throwing eggs at the police, to rioting in Trafalgar Square, I was turned into a warped freedom fighter. They let me get away with my life that day and I dedicated myself to making anyone in authority’s life as miserable as possible. I’m not saying there weren’t nutters on the scene already, but a lot of the peaceful people who went that day were similarly warped by the experience. Thatcher’s attempt at destroying us instead recruited a bigger problem and created a massive upsurge of contempt for them and their rules. When I look back now and think of the freedoms we enjoyed back then, free festivals every weekend through the summer and the right to party wherever we wanted and the freedom to demonstrate that we took for granted, it strikes home that our freedoms have been stolen from us for the last twenty years, and Blair’s gang want to clamp down even more, I say don’t just take it – Fight Back. This article first appeared in issue 7 of Now or Never! To buy a copy check out the Back Issues
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