12 January 2025

It's taken me a couple of days to get to a computer, so some of you may have heard the story, but so what, it's fucking ace so I'm going through it anyway.

On Sunday there was a reunion rally at Newbury, commemorating the third anniversary of the destruction work starting on the road. On the first anniversary, what had been billed as a 'rally of contemplation and commemoration' spontaneously turned into the most unafraid and joyous piece of direct action I've ever witnessed, as the construction site was stormed, and £250,000 worth of destruction equipment was trashed.

Last year the police came in heavy - hundreds of them, helicopter, the works... for a group of about 20 local people. The police were criticised from all sides for that over reaction.

So on Sunday, around 200 people met in central Newbury, a wide mix of locals and travelling activists, young and old. I thought well, it's all people with kids and dogs and whatnot, this isn't really a fence-trashing sort of crowd, but that's cool... that we're hear, that we bear witness is good enough. There were a few police, and the usual unmarked car with people videoing us constantly. We walked out due west, hitting the route half way down, where Granny Ash used to be. As we got to the 2.5 metre, razor-wire topped fence, the crowd and its escort of two policemen turned north toward the planned rally at Donnington Castle. Almost immediately, one bloke scaled the fence and was running up the embankment that led to the road. "Come on," he shouted, "you'll regret it if you don't." And that was it. A piece of fence was pulled down and everyone, really everyone went through and over to the road.

"Don't go on the road, it's dangerous," shouted the policemen. Unsurprisingly, they were ignored. We took the road, both carriageways, and sat down. Glorious. So many old faces from the campaign... what an amazing place to meet up with people... hugging V with the central reservation barrier between us... bumping into Kartoon Kate in the northbound fast lane at Rickety Bridge... hilarious... it was like a Reclaim The Streets party, but with a broader mix of people, no lairy pissheads and no brain-numbingly loud techno. If only RTS's were more like this!

It was a bright, clear, sunny chilly day, and so it got cold if you stayed still. So we headed north slowly. We got to where Bog Camp used to be, and there's a padlocked gate in the fence. We stopped, with the thought that this is the way to Donnington Castle, but then again occupying the road is so much more potent... the police can't get a key for the gate, so one of them gets a shiny new pair of fence-clipping bolt-croppers and snips the lock! And we stayed on the road. And it got cold, so we carried on up the road!!

The police didn't like that at all, and brought in several vanloads of their ranks, overtook us and formed a cordon across the road in front of us. So we went up the embankments to get past. So they spread out, but their line was uselessly thin. They were shouting 'get back', but there was nothing they could do. We'd just run to either side of an officer, and one would get through. They gave up, went back to their vans, overtook us again, formed a cordon again, and we got past them again. So they got in their vans again, and the entire process repeated!

Then we thought, why not stop them overtaking? So we formed a cordon, got some roadworks signs as barricades, and we stopped them! It was like some playground game, we beat them in one role, we swapped sides, and we beat them in the other!

We moved on again, through the cutting that used to be the hill of organic farmland at Castle Wood (less than 0.4% of UK farming is organic, it's not land to lose lightly). We moved on, over the causeway running through the almost unrecognisable Snelsmore Common (a Site of Special Scientific Interest). And then Mary Hare came into sight.

The three trees are alive and beautiful. They look exactly as they did when I first saw them. And they are so far from the fucking road. The whole field is so fucking far from that road. There is no way any of the 13 trees in the field were ever in the way.

As we got to where Radical Fluff was, the police were panicking... any further and we'd be at the junction with the old road, we'd block all the Newbury traffic. So they brought out the helmeted, tooled up riot thugs. But it was OK, we'd closed the road for hours, the sun was setting, it was time to go anyway. We slowly walked back up the road to Donnington, putting rocks and heavy heavy iron drain covers and anything else into the road, ensuring that it'd stay closed for a long while after we left.

At Donnington Castle, as the sun finally set 15 or 20 miles away across the plain, George Monbiot gave a full-on, uncompromisingly righteous and incisive speech, saying that this was the place where the word was heard, this was a battle that we lost, but it was the one that turned the war in our favour. And despite all the authoritarian laws planned, we won't be stopped. If the Public Order Act and the Criminal Justice Act didn't stop us, then no abuse of anti-stalking laws will! Then Heather from Castle Wood gave a similarly heartening (albeit shorter and less I-do-public-speaking-every-day than George) speech.

Then I did one, saying that we mustn't con ourselves into believing that Newbury was a victory for us; it was primarily a victory for greed and corruption. The land is lost forever, once we lose these places we never get them back. We must hold on to our outrage as a motivation to propel us forward. But at the same time, we mustn't get lost in our outrage; our outrage is a reaction to the contravention of our love, our knowledge of what a beautiful planet this is. We must keep the connection with that positivity - we're not a negative thing, we're only seeking to negate the forces that are taking a sledgehammer to our only life support system.

And I said that we cannot hear too often or too clearly that direct action is not a last resort for when authorities fail us; we have a right to directly affect things that directly affect us. Leaving important things to other people is a last resort. And anyway, it's often the only way to be sure the jobs done properly; 'green' politicians like LibDems, taxpayer-funded protectors of our heritage like English Nature and English Heritage they've all approved Newbury, the most indefensible of schemes, taken the money and run.

Then Dave The Chef and Radio Nick served up free soup. A glorious day, and I didn't even see any arrests, although I heard there was one. ONE!

As we'd turned round at Radical Fluff to head to Donnington, a policeman said to a protester "I suppose you're planning on making this an annual event." The guy replied "Too right. See you next year."