Register here - as a registered user you get more features and fewer ads.
I'm American. So naturally my view of these matters is colored by cultural associations. But if the posters above and "Andy" truly believe that this was the "most brutal police operation in the history of the Uk," my basic advice to all of you is, grow up. You've had race riots places like Brixton and Bradford, and you think this was "brutal?" Worse, you seem to think your behavior was fine by contrast.
Stonehenge may indeed belong to "everyone," but of everyone who visits, few evince any basic interest in keeping it clean and well-maintained. So the state stepped in and charged admission. Long ago.
Then came the hippies (and, I'd bet, later on what we used to term "beer hippies" over here, although we're being kind here). But "you guys" simply don't have the right to assert, however vaguely, half-formed notions of hippie-*****-traveller "culture over a bona-fide national treasure. Not even on, especially not on, the summer solstice. If you want to dance, beat (badly) on drums and dance while swirling scarves and smoking pot, fine, go do it somewhere else. Too much vandalism has been done already to archaeological sites, both in the US and elsewhere, in the name of "cultural gatherings" of this nature. Hippies, travellers (do you mean "Gypsies," by the way? here they're more likely to sell homeowners bad car or roof repairs than travel), whatever you call yourselves , your gathering of the tribes should never take precedence over the need for preservation of sites, so that all the rest of us can also enjoy them. Face it, too, large portable groupings of drug dealers and abusers are going to be a target everywhere. Maybe you shoul all just hang back and wait for the next international tour by whatever the successor band to the Grateful Dead is now called.
And I've read nothing in the accounts above or on Andy's web site that smacks convincingly of police overreaction, and believe you me, as an American I know a bit about that topic. There was some jostling, basically. But don't exaggerate for effect here, it doesn't work. I've also learned something else from the past, that any group with the name "People's" in it (as in the People's Free Festival of Albion) almost always has nothing to do with "the people" in general and much to do with one small, conceited interest group or another.
Something is not right. This message is just to keep things from messing up down the road