UK : Things.... could nearly have been better....

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UK : Things…. could nearly have been better….

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March 19, 2007 at 6:39 pm

#691905
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General Lighting

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OK that probably doesn’t scan very well and it was a shit pop dance tune anyway, but I was thinking about how things were 10 years ago and around the time Blair first got in…

Even then I was sceptical about a lot of the spin and the bullshit like the millennium dome, but he seemed more like an overbearing but well meaning Christian youth club leader (whom you could run rings round) rather the troubled-looking, old, warmonger control freak he has now become….

the country was still a bit fucked (especially after Major) but there was the start of the dot-com euphoria and all this wonderful new multimedia technology (even if half of it didn’t quite work properly and you had to use sketchy dial up connections..)

plus – best of all, you genuinely were being given a “bit of a chance” to do something “alternative”. I’m not sure whether it was by accident or design, but the nanny state surveillance methods (although extant, having been put into place in the mid 90s post CJA by the Tories) weren’t at all being used to their full extent – you could get away with anything it seemed – squatting, parties, drugs.. jobs were easy to get and had loads of slack time and resources as well…..

anyone else was around on the scene at that time notice this?

my friends at the time were cracking a new squat every other weekend ; often they’d have one set of buildings to live in and another to party! the cops never gave us any real grief either, nor even the property companies….

There were also times when it did seem that a deliberate “laissez-faire” strategy was in operation to see how “cool britannia” (remember that?) coped with less regulation (stuff like cannabis “decriminalisation”, the Lambeth experiment, superclubs (which clearly were linked with dance music/drugs culture rather than booze) actually getting licensed etc….

The govt even tolerated the Exodus lot and let them buy the farm at the last minute instead of evicting them (a minister does not make a u-turn like that without being authorised to do so)

In hindsight, were we all given a chance and fucked it up?
March 19, 2007 at 8:53 pm

#882100
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globalloon

@globalloon

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General Lighting wrote:

In hindsight, were we all given a chance and fucked it up?

i think successive governments have been hell bent on crushing any real alternatives to the consumer nation we live in since whenever

i don’t know enough about pre-thatcher england, but older friends were getting picked up and harrassed by cops in 1980 for attending public meetings for groups like friends of the earth

things like freedom don’t really exist, the government just has more elected lawyers now than ever before, hence the legislation is written without loopholes and with sly catch-alls for those in power
March 19, 2007 at 9:22 pm

#882099
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General Lighting

@general-lighting

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globalloon wrote:

i think successive governments have been hell bent on crushing any real alternatives to the consumer nation we live in since whenever

i don’t know enough about pre-thatcher england, but older friends were getting picked up and harrassed by cops in 1980 for attending public meetings for groups like friends of the earth

things like freedom don’t really exist, the government just has more elected lawyers now than ever before, hence the legislation is written without loopholes and with sly catch-alls for those in power

this is all true, my teenage years were the dark days of the 1980s and even some of my high school teachers were the activists of those days (TBH I think one of them now runs one of those reiki practices near your part of the country..

but there was something different about the times from 1997 to 2001 or so – the more hedonistic end of the party scene definitely seemed to be “let go” a bit more by the authorities, and if they really wanted to they could have clamped down a lot harder (there was still the odd heavy bust)

maybe it was something that happened mostly in the part of SE England I was living in at the time – but you’d have things like a sizeable squat rave the cops would turn up and and laugh and leave you alone provided the bulk of the crowd dispersed by Sunday afternoon (the squatters were allowed to stay and live in the building) – none of these ASBO evictions, although ASBOS did exist even then…..

you could put party lines on here and other forums and the cops rarely bothered, there were raves on the Ridgeway every few weeks in summer and one cop car would turn up…

legal events were also easy enough to put on

maybe though it was just that there was more money around in wider society so they didn’t care about the disused buildings and land being “borrowed” so much, and the dot-com euphoria allowed “mixing business with pleasure?”

Even so I think we as ravers could maybe have made a bit more of those good times than just getting bang into ketamine which is what essentially happened… (or was it really a “bread and circuses” type thing, being given enough rope to hang ourselves?)
March 20, 2007 at 12:13 am

#882101
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globalloon

@globalloon

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oh they love asbos, don’t they?

there’s been general fall in tolerance of all things deemed anti-social… free parties are feeling that

one possible cause of the current anti-social behaviour witch-hunt is that people are more ‘upwardly mobile’ … there’s less division between working and middle classes than even 20 years ago. a lot of people work really hard to try and attain a better financial situation / education than their parents would have had access to… and when they get there they defend it harder than the old school hand-wringing, liberal middle-classes

maybe

whatever, the raver is rarely painted as a robin hood folk figure of fun, more likely as a alcohol-fuelled and drug-crazed danger
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