Never Underestimate a Minority

Abstract

The poll tax riots and M11 protests highlighted the new marginal counterculture growing up around squatting and life on the street, in New Age traveller convoys and free festivals fuelled by drugs and mysticism. Panicked by the ‘rave’ scene and the appearance of travellers at Stonehenge and other prehistoric sites, the government formulated laws to control ‘riotous’ gatherings. Such laws were the descendants of the anti-union laws which had been passed in order to control secondary picketing. By the late 1990s, the anarchist movement had emerged not as a powerful counterforce to parliamentary government but as a major and uncontrollable lobby which could put unbearable pressure on the City and its investors and on government policy on environmental and scientific issues. Its amorphous nature and transient ‘population’ also made it difficult to penetrate by Special Branch and MI5.