Section 63 | >Re-PHOTO

Police Close Down Runnymede Magna Carta Festival: A couple of weeks ago I got on my e-bike and tried to cycle from Egham up Coopers Hill Lane which goes steeply up the wooded hill above the Thames flood plain at Runnemede. It wasn’t a great success as although the motor could cope with the gradient with a little more than usual help from my pedalling, the surface of the lane – here just a footpath was far too uneven and broken and I kept having to stop to prevent myself coming off the bike, eventually having to give up and get off and walk, pushing the bike for the final hundred yards or so.

Close to the top I reached the metalled section of the lane and cycled on, past the fence I had gone through a gap in in ten years ago on my way to visit the Runnymede Eco Village and past the road leading to the expensive private estate that now occupies the site. On Friday 12th June 2015 I had cycled up the same route by pedal power alone, locked up my bike and walked to the Eco Village.

There I was warmly greeted and shown around the site, as you can read on My London Diary. The residents were busy getting ready for the Magna Carta weekend four day free ‘Festival For Democracy’ which was due to start the following day, celebrating both the anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta in the nearby meadows 800 years earlier and the third anniversary of the setting up of the village.

Although I’d not lived there I found it – as I commented in 2015- “seemed a great place to live so long as you were able to put up with a slightly spartan lifestyle. At my age I feel a need for hot and cold running water and a more pampered existence, but at least in summer a more open existence in the woods has its attractions.” It was a community that felt truly positive.

During my time there that day it became increasingly obvious that the authorities had decided that the free festival was not going to take place, although it was an entirely legal event and would have caused no distress to local residents with whom the villagers have good relations, and some at least were looking forward to the event.

Orders had clearly come down, possibly from royalty itself via our government that the festival must be stopped by any means whatever the law. And police had come telling lies that they about a cock and bull story of a ‘rave’ that was going to take place on a neighbouring football field that they had come to ‘protect’ the village from.

The invented story of an illegal rave was used by police and Surrey County Council to justify 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, and they used this to stop and turn away those coming to the ‘Festival For Democracy’.

*Kettles on the fire for tea – and all were offered various infusions*

Section 63 is specifically aimed at stopping illegal raves and should only be used to prevent ‘amplified music’ being played during the night, and certainly not for the festivals such as this one – hence the need for the authorities to spread rumours of an illegal rave. As well as being turned away, people were being given exclusion orders banning them from coming within five miles of the village, and several arrests were made for breach of this. The police action seemed a clear abuse of a law intended for quite different purposes, and I will be surprised if any of those arrested ever reach court.

*One woman had built her home around a fallen tree*

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.

*The festival starts, but police are turning people away.*

This wasn’t the only action by which the state tried to stop the festival – and you can read more on My London Diary in Police threaten Runnymede Magna Carta festival which was at the time also posted on the now long defunct Demotix website. They didn’t entirely succeed, but it was on a rather smaller scale with so many being prevented from attending, though others managed to climb over the fences around the area. The account there also has many more pictures of the Eco Village.

I also write about this here on >Re:PHOTO at Celebrating Magna Carta, where I concluded:

Perhaps rather than celebrating Magna Carta we should all now be out on the streets and demanding a new charter for the freedoms we thought had been won 800 years ago.

Since 2015 we have instead seen governments introducing yet more restrictive public order laws and used them to take action against political protests and used to imprison peaceful protesters for long stretches, and Labour has continued these policies .

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*Police stop a man entering the 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.

*Police watched me as I took pictures at the Runnymede entrance* *earlier in the day*

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

*One of the well-organised public areas of the eco-village*

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.

*Vinny’s badge says ‘Who Protects Us From the Police’*

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.

*Luke, a trained forester tells me the woods have been neglected*

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.

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Tag: Section 63

Time for a New Magna Carta