Tag: Eco Village

Six years ago I went to the start of an event being held to mark 800 years since the Barons forced King Young to sign Magna Carta which placed important limitations on the power of the king and state and set in law important freedoms – at least for Barons. It was followed not long after by other charters which made those freedoms apply more widely.

The signing took place somewhere at Runnemede, though there seems to be no agreement at exactly where on this relatively wide are of flood plain between Staines where the barons stayed the previous night and Windsor where the king had his castle, though my own choice (on no historical basis) would be Ankerwyke, a little east of Magna Carta Island and to the north of the River Thames which I think back in those days proabably made most of that flat plain the National Trust calls Runnemede uncomfortably muddy.

Back on 16th June 2012 I’d sat in a circle of Diggers camped nearby on Cooper’s Hill next to the Magna Carta Memorial erected by the US Bar Association listening to a lecturer from Royal Holloway about both Magna Carta and the ‘Charter of the Forest’ issued shortly after, and discussing their plans for the future. A friendly police officer and a man from the National Trust came along to see what was happening and gave us some information about the area

There are pretty large areas of unused land in Surrey and the Diggers had come out from a community allotment in Syon Lane in Brentford to make a widely publicised occupation of a small neglected area of Windsor Great Park. Local residents assured them that nothing had been done on this land for many years, but they were served with injunctions and the Crown Estate produced someone to say he was shortly to crop the dense growth of nettles for silage. They moved on, camped overnight at Runnymede and then occupied a piece of land owned by Royal Holloway College. RHUL were fast to serve injunctions though I think 9 years later the land is still not used, but the diggers found a better site a short distance away in the grounds of the former Shoreditch College, which had been sold to a developer in 2007, who had not yet been able to find the cash or get planning permission.

The 2012 meeting decided enthusastically they would hold a people’s celebration of the popular celebration of the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta on their site and had done a great deal of planning for it as I saw when I arrived on 12 June 2015. There was also a general agreement that something needed to be done to reclaim civil liberties that have been eroded over recent years with various suggestions for action and perhaps a new people’s charter. The events of 2015 made this very clear – and things including the current Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill now make this far more urgent.

What we saw on Friday 12 June 2015 was a completely politically motivated operation against the community and its many friends to prevent their long-planned celebrations of Magna Carta, a charter supposed to represent freedom under the law but here at its very source 800 years ago it was being suppressed in an unfair and arbitrary manner by the forces of the Law.

Police or state security had put about fake rumours about a planned ‘rave’ on the football field next to their camp, and claimed to be ‘protecting people’ but I’d seen them clearly refusing entry to visitors to the fenced-off Eco-Village which was a clearly safe place. I listened to one of the officers in charge talking with Phoenix, one of the event organisers and it was very clear not only that he was lying but that he knew he was lying. Reading the Surrey police web site later that evening it made it clear that the police action was a deliberate attempt to prevent the planned festival from going ahead. Together with Surrey County Council they had made an order under Section 63 of the The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 which allows police power to restrict access, remove people and issue exclusion orders. It seemed a clear abuse of a law intended for quite different purposes, of stopping illegal raves, and though a number of people were arrested after having been given exclusion orders banning them from coming within five miles of the village, I don’t think any of their cases came to court.

As I left, despite my press card I was also handed a notice of exclusion, though it would have banned me from my home for three days. At the time I wrote:

It would indeed seem a travesty if at a time when we are celebrating 800 years of freedom under the law against the arbitrary power of the state achieved at Runnymede, the authorities should abuse the law by using those arbitrary powers to prevent a people’s celebration of freedom

Although police stopped many and arrested some, others found ways in over the fence and the festival continued though on a reduced scale. The Eco Village residents were summoned to court on the Monday of their festival, when the Queen was attending official celebrations at Runnymede. Few attended and the court refused to listen to their case, simply making an order for eviction, apparently on the basis that the right of private property trumps all other rights. But again the state acted clumsily, and a a few days later Mr Justice Knowles in the High Court ordered a stay of execution accepting that many matters raised by the applicants might not of been dealt with adequately by the lower Court. Interestingly their case included the assertion of rights granted by Magna Carta and its 1217 companion Charter of the Forest as well as the rather more recent European Convention on Human Rights. But they failed to convince the courts that these were a part of our Law, and three months later the High Court issued an order for eviction , which was carried out rather brutally. The site is now a luxury gated village with prices starting around £1.2 million for a 1-bed flat. Some of the residents came to Staines and occupied a former adult education centre which had been empty for some years. They were evicted after around six weeks despite considerable local support for their plans to make the building a local community hub – six years later it remains boarded up and unused.

More at Police threaten Runnymede Magna Carta festival

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