sapphicruiseliners:

workingclasshistory:

On this day, 1 June 1985, British police brutally attacked people heading to Stonehenge in the “Battle of the Beanfield”. Police smashed the windows of vehicles the travellers and others were using, dragged people out through the broken glass, and beat them, breaking teeth, glasses and bones. They arrested 420 people, the biggest mass arrest of civilians in hundreds of years, systematically looted, smashed and burned travellers’ homes and 7 dogs were killed by the RSPCA. Authorities at the time were determined to destroy Britain’s traveller communities. This is a short account of what happened: https://ift.tt/2xylLRH
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If anyone wants to read about more about how traveller communities in Britain are currently marginalised and oppressed, I’m reading White Privilege: The Myth of a Post-Racial Society by Kalwant Bhopal right now and it has a lot of recent case studies and statistics about this because it was published in Feb 2018, so I’d recommend that

If you care about total accuracy, take note that when authors call events like this the ‘most violent’, ‘biggest’ etc. they usually forget about Northern Ireland. But still, yeah, this history matters.