The 1995 Criminal Justice Bill killed rave culture, expanded police powers and limited the rights of Traveller communities. Meet the people who resisted the criminalisation of fun and listen to some (illegal) repetitive beats. 13 June @NewRiverStudios programme.antiuniversity.org/id/23-years-of…
"Africa is for black people. Period. We need our land back and we're going to take it by force," said a woman amongst an angry crowd trying to occupy a field on the north-eastern edge of Johannesburg in South Africa.
She is wearing a red beret indicating her support for the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), a small, radical party which advocates the nationalisation of all land in South Africa.
In a country grappling with so many different challenges, land reform has recently emerged as a dominant and potentially explosive issue - the focus of furious political contestation and increasingly inflammatory rhetoric.
The field was empty, overgrown, unused, and far too much of a temptation.
"This is my boundary," said 50-year-old Christina Mashaba, striding through the long grass and pointing to a stick she had pushed into the ground, some 15 yards (13m) away.
"It's going to be my home… if the government will let me have the ground," she said, looking up, across the sunlit valley.
Image captionThe slow pace of land reforms have led to confrontations
A little further down the gentle slope, an electrician called Ishmael Motswali was examining an area already littered with homemade flags and markers.
"I came to check if I can get a piece of land, and to see if it is legal," he said.
"I'm renting a place at the moment. In my beautiful country, after 20 years of democracy, you can understand the frustration. I just want a piece of land where I can put my family."
A few hundred metres further up the hill, at the entrance to the field, beside a brand-new housing estate, a large and increasingly angry crowd from the nearby township of Alexandra was confronted by a group of South African policemen, who were trying to seal the area, insisting that the land is private, and that "land-grabbers" would be dealt with harshly.
"Democracy?" scoffed a community leader called Mafasi Kubai, after listening to the pleas of a police captain.
"How can we participate when some are super rich and others are poor. Whites should be empathetic… but they are exploiting us."
Mass trespass calling for land justice in the south west
On Sunday about 75 protesters travelled to the Bathurst Estate in Cirencester to participate in a mass trespass, calling for land Justice. Organised by groups including RisingUp and the Land Justice Network the protest included speeches, songs and marching band.
Gail Bradbrook of RisingUp said afterwards:
[Lord Bathurst] watched on with family and game keepers bemusedly / slightly chewing a wasp at times – but we got a good balance of friendliness and calling out behaviours that need to change I think. It was quite a spectacle!
The protesters marched down the main avenue into the estate and then went to a private field and climbed the fence to surround a tree on the land. A banner was raised over the main road leading into Cirencester saying “No Justice Without Land Justice”.
The trespass was to demonstrate that land is an essential resource that our society, culture and economy depend upon. However, land ownership in Britain is still one of the most unequal in the world. 0.6% of the population owns 69% of the land. More than a third is still owned by the aristocracy whose ancestors seized it during the Norman Conquest and through the use of land trusts they are avoiding paying inheritance tax while maintaining the concentration of ownership to this day. During the enclosures our ancestors were violently thrown off the land and much of our current common land is being privatised (Cahill, 2001).
When a student researching in the archives of a London museum read the unpublished memoirs of a suffragette bomber, she began to wonder if the history of the movement had been sanitised. The suffragettes may have won the vote for women, but some of them, she argues, were terrorists.
Fern Riddell recognised the bomb straight away.
On the morning of 15 September 2017 an explosion on a rush-hour train at Parsons Green underground station in west London had resulted in dozens of injuries.
It was the fifth act of terror in the capital in less than a year, and Riddell was anxious for more information. Combing through social media looking for real-time updates, she came across the image of a burning white plastic bucket.
The crude bomb that had detonated in the packed train carriage had been wrapped in a plastic grocery bag and concealed inside that bucket.
To Riddell, the image had a powerful resonance.
"That," she thought, "is a suffragette bomb. Home-made and with materials you could buy in chemist's and hardware stores. That is the kind of bomb the women used to terrorise the country into paying attention."
Riddell's interest in the suffragettes had begun five years earlier while she was studying for a PhD in history, though her first instinct had been to have nothing to do with them.
"It felt like a trap. That to be a young female historian, I had to write about women, about suffrage," she says.
She was far more interested in Victorian music halls. They featured skits and novelty acts, and, frequented by all classes, were a democratic and affordable form of entertainment.
"They were the internet of their day," says Riddell. "Just like memes appear on social media today, a song would be written and performed in music halls on the day of a significant cultural event. It was a raw, electric and relevant world that told of a society that differed from the restrained images often painted by historians of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Especially when it came to women. It captivated me and I was excited to learn more."
But a chance discovery in the archives of the Museum of London, made with the help of archivist Beverley Cook, led to a dramatic change of direction.
"Bev said to me, 'I've got this unpublished autobiography of a young music hall artist, very few people have ever really looked at it. She was also a suffragette. I don't know if you're interested?'
"And I kind of rolled my eyes and thought, 'Oh God not a suffragette,'" Riddell says.
"At that time I had a certain impression of suffragettes that many people did. I knew about the window-smashing, being chained to rails, the force-feeding, the posters and marching. I thought I knew everything there was to know about these women."
AFP
The trespass was to demonstrate that land is an essential resource that our society, culture and economy depend upon. However, land ownership in Britain is still one of the most unequal in the world. 0.6% of the population owns 69% of the land. More than a third is still owned by the aristocracy whose ancestors seized it during the Norman Conquest and through the use of land trusts they are avoiding paying inheritance tax while maintaining the concentration of ownership to this day. During the enclosures our ancestors were violently thrown off the land and much of our current common land is being privatised (Cahill, 2001).
