we’ve touched on this a couple of times – the biggest problems are getting all the central and local goverment agencies involved to agree and “security issues”.
In England and Wales it would need the local authority, the Home Office, Department for Culture, Media and Sport and Defra and maybe the Forestry Commision all to work together
out of these Defra may have once been the most amenable to such an idea and Forestry already have concerts in the woods.
I’ve seen some amazing comments from Defra ministers which looks like the sort of stuff that come out of that Indian chaps magazine that globaloon mentions in his sig (stuff like the spiritual value of recreation in the woods) but realistically Defra are overwhelmed with work such as farm subsidies and dealing with the potential problems from bird flu – if you lobbied them it would not be treated as a priority subject at the moment.
the Home Office and DCMS would deal with the licensing issues; but their official angle on raves and festivals appears to be that “they can happen but there is already a market-based solution which includes full recovery of the cost to the Emergency Services” and “robust measures should be in place to prevent drug use at the event and ensure security” (i.e you buy a ticket and pay for the cops to search you).
and another problem lies at our door. Within our community there are still a lot of angry young men who if they gather in large groups try to prove themselves by fighting amongst one another.
some of my friends have worked on security at festivals – they are not thugs but they are no angels (mind you nor was I in my youth) and even they are shocked by how easy it is for mindless violence to kick off at a festival, sometimes from people who aren’t even normally violent! its so easy for a mob mentality to take over or for male pride to drive people to violence, especially in the hot sun with people eagerly watching. At one festival in Oxfordshire people travelled 10 miles from a nearby city area to carry on a fight that had started in the city..
there is in fact a long-standing tradition of rival groups fighting it out at fairs/festivals (if you read English/celtic history you must have come across this at one point) and the conventional authorities being deployed to restore order – something which has been going on since middle ages and many larger village fairs were outlawed because of this when their commercial roles fell by the wayside.
even today authorities treat every festival under the Major Incident protocol (i.e setting up Silver command – extra control rooms for emergency services) which is more suited to dealing with contamination or terrorist attack!
we need to deal with our own binge/fighting/hard man culture and regulate ourselves before we can hope for the wider society to give any ground (either figuratively or literally), and too many people before us have fucked up along the way (think of the old style festivals and what happened to them, or the decline and fall of the Exodus collective) – we need to convince authorities such events would not just be a magnet for criminality and violence.. (that said there are good precendents like Guildford Ambient picnic)
