WHEN HARRY HARRISON FIRST SAW THE WHITE PAPER for the criminal justice and public order bill at the end of 1993, he couldn’t believe what he was reading. Harrison was the 27-year-old co-founder of Nottingham’s DiY sound system, so-called house music anarchists, who were known for throwing joyful free parties in fields and forests, quarries and squats. Now those gatherings could be criminalised and, for the first time, the music he played was being legally codified as “sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”. “It was almost like a surrealist prank,” he says now. “I said: ‘Is this real?’ It was a crazy mixture of the sinister and the absurd.”
The 179-page bill was a hotchpotch of measures, from updating obscenity law and lowering the age of consent for gay men to restricting the right to silence when arrested and enabling the collection of DNA samples. Andrew Puddephatt, then director of the civil rights group Liberty, calls it “a Christmas tree bill. You bung a lot of different issues into one big bill as a way of securing parliamentary time.” At the time, Puddephatt described it as “the most wide-ranging attack on human rights in the UK in recent years”.
When most protesters talked about the criminal justice bill (CJB) they meant “part V public order: collective trespass or nuisance on land”. The notorious “repetitive beats” clause painted it as an anti-rave bill, but that was only the most eye-catching component. The new offences of aggravated trespass and trespassory assembly restricted the movement of travellers (a loose group comprising both ethnic Travellers and “new age” travellers), squatters, road protesters and hunt saboteurs, as well as sound systems. The CJB was an efficient means for John Major, the then prime minister, and Michael Howard, the home secretary, to appear tough on law and order, pacify rural Tories and restrict protest, safe in the knowledge that the groups affected had few friends among the press, politicians and public.
The more conspiratorially minded reading is that the government sought to nip in the bud a potentially dangerous coalition of young people who lived outside the system – but it backfired. By targeting so many groups, the CJB strengthened that alliance, turning loose connections into steel bonds. Overlapping with the growing movement against road-building, 1994’s anti-CJB campaign filled central London with ravers, turned city streets into art installations, occupied Michael Howard’s garden and made a battlefield of Park Lane. It was the UK’s most exciting collision of pop culture and protest since 1968 – young, creative, colourful, noisy – and its legacy is still with us 30 years
