Diggers 2012

Regular readers will have seen earlier postings on the new age traveller movement, as the press of the 1980s called them. Having spent two chunks of my life living on various sites alternative ways of living within and without mainstream society interest me greatly. During the years of high unemployment under the Thatcher government, young people took to the road to seek a more purposeful life. Within the traveller community is a peculiar spectrum from the idealistic, politically motivated to those who struggle to find a niche within conventional society. Though there are still many bands, particularly in the south west, Wiltshire, Somerset, Dorset areas, numbers have dropped since the eighties. The governments direct attack on the travellers through eviction from all but disputed land and clamp downs on in roadworthy vehicles forced all but the most hardy, the most keen and the most desperate off the road. The life expectancy of travellers is the lowest of any group, a common disinterest in documenting their history other than through oral history has left what records that remain written by a few who monopolise the history of what was a hugely significant social phenomena. The great traveller book remains unwritten. The attempts that exist have a festival DIY feel that whilst in some ways appropriate lack the discipline of academia. I was curious to see what would happen in our current economic climate. A highly educated unemployed with little to do and a stack of issues, a festival market where glastonburys aftermath have left landowners thinking any band in a muddy field will bring in money, a series of social fire points from the tuition fee protests to urban riots. It would seem the perfect climate for a new new age traveller movement to take to the roads. 'Hounded by bailiffs and police wherever they stopped, evicted wherever they stopped, they did not mean to settle here. They had walked out of the London to occupy disused farmland on the queens estates surrounding Windsor castle. Perhaps unsurprisingly ths didn't work out very well. But after several days of pursuit, they landed two fields away from the place where modern democracy is commonly supposed to have been born. At first this group of mostly young dispossessed people who call themselves the diggers 2012 camped on the old rugby pitch of brunel university Runnymede campus. The diggers were evicted again and moved down the hill into the woods behind the campus, pressed as if by the I electable force of history , ever closer to the symbolic spot. From the meeting house they have built and their cluster of tents, you can see across the meadows to where the magna carat was sealed almost 800 years ago.' George Monbiot Their aim is to build a community on abandoned land rejecting the corporate economy. To house themselves, to grow food. Sadly their crops have been destroyed twice already. They don't fear prison. What have they to lose? All they re offered is a life of debt, already owned by banks through education loans. The government has already slipped through a law criminalising he squatting of abandoned residential buildings. Thousands of people who have solved their own housing crisis will now be evicted as housing benefits are cut. The attack on the young is horrific. Recent generations have gathered or used more than their share and left a financial and economic mess for their children. The land, even disused land is guarded fiercely as is the rest of the economy. It's ownership nearly as secured as when the magna carat was drawn up. But there is no charter for the forest, the document appended to the magna carts in 1217, granting the common people rights to use the royal estates. To quote Simon Moore, one of the diggers,'those who control the land have enjoyed massive economic and political privileges. The economic relationship between land and democracy is a strong one which is not widely understood.' The diggers 2012 can be seen as the current manifestation of thread that runs through our history. The convoy, the new age travellers of the 1980s may have unravelled in their embracing of chaos yet young people are taking up the baton. To quote the diggers of 1649 'The earth is a common treasury for all...not one lording over another but all looking upon each other as equals in the creation.'