Big Green Gathering Shutdown.

The Big Green Gathering (BGG) http://www.big-green-gathering.com is an environmental and sustainable living festival that has been held in Somerset, UK for 15 years. While the festival features some singing, dancing and possibly even laughter it is not a traditional music festival like Glastonbury or the V-Festival because the stages at the BGG are all powered by 12v solar power and are strictly silenced, by the sun, at midnight. The main entertainment at the BGG comes from workshops, exhibitions and market stalls that allow people to promote techniques for sustainable living including a field demonstrating organic farming methods and an equestrian centre. There is even a green business zone where environmental entrepreneurs who meet with investors who can held them develop the bright ideas into commercial ventures.

I know that this might make the BGG sound like the more rebellious and disorderly Climate Camp but the organisation of the two couldn't be more different. While the Climate Camp is semi-legal operating on a squatted site the BGG takes place on Fernhill Farm with the full permission of the landowner. The organisers also comply fully with the local councils licensing department spending around £150,000 obtaining all the correct permits and licenses. As part of this compliance the security and safety infrastructure of the festival is handled by Stuart Security, a well established events company who manage security at a variety of festivals including Glastonbury, T in the Park, the Reading festival, Womad and the Royal Bath & West Country show. In order to meet these costs the 15-20,000 festival goers all pay £120 for a ticket and the event is sponsored by a select group of financial service companies and green energy suppliers while one of the major stakeholders is AEG who own the O2 Arena. In short the Big Green Gathering is about as subversive as a traditional English country show of the sort that are dying out across rural Britain.

This mild and legal approach hasn't stopped the BGG becoming a target of the powers that be though. In preparation for the 2009 festival which was scheduled to take place between July 29th and August 2nd the organisers applied to Mendip Council who decided that they were happy with plans for the festival and issued a license on June 20th. Then on July 24th, five days before the start of the festival, Mendip Council, acting under orders from Avon & Somerset police sought an emergency injunction to suspend the license and stop the festival from happening. This is unusual because, firstly, the injunction was not just taken out against the company that organises BGG, which has limited liability, it was also taken out against two named directors of the company who have unlimited liability. This appears to be an attempt to discourage BGG from contesting the injunction by backing the named directors personally responsible for any legal costs incurred. It is also unusual because the main grounds for the injunction was that the festival organisers had not gained the correct permissions for road closures from the Highways Agency. The problem is that the organisers applied to the Highways Agency for these permissions back in May. The Highways Agency have yet to process this application.

After their legal team advised them of the potentially very high personal cost of contesting the injunction the BGG organisers felt they had no other option then to call off the festival and hand back the license at a multiple agency meeting on Sunday July 26th. Before this meeting had even ended the Chief Inspector representing the police got on his radio and gave to order to begin "Operation Fortress" a large an pre-planned police operation that involved setting up road blocks and vehicle check points to make sure that none of the festival goers who were already on route were able to gain entry to the county. During the meeting the same Chief Inspector told the BGG organisers that the decision to shut down the festival was a political one and the order had come down from the head to the constabulary. It was also inferred that the decision had been made by Central Government in London.

This coupled with the involvement of the Highways Agency makes it appear that the British Security Services have been involved in a high level conspiracy to not only shut down the 2009 Big Green Gathering but bankrupt the company that organises it by waiting until the site had been set up and all up-front costs had been paid before withdrawing permission. There are a number of reasons for why they may have done this;

1. They simply saw the words "Green Energy" and "Sustainable Living" and decided to shut down the BGG in a panic that it was part of the world wide conspiracy behind the Climate Camp.
2. They fully understood that BGG and Climate Camp are separate entities yet see the BGG as an "acceptable" approach to environmental problems. Therefore they shut it down blaming an association with the "unacceptable" Climate Camp in the hope of splitting the protesters off from the main stream and stop environmental problems being a political issue.
3. Again they fully understand that the two are separate entities yet see the BGG as unacceptable because it's professional and organised approach along with it's backing by not exactly anti-capitalist hedge funds adds credibility to environmental concerns making them more mainstream. Therefore the would prefer it if Climate Camp became the centre piece of the British Environmental movement by boosting its attendance because it organisational structure and more amateurish approach makes it easier to portray the environmentalists and their concerns as a fringe group of malcontents.

Which of these is the correct motivation depends on which agency was the driving force behind the shut down. If it was simply a police operation then the first reason is probably correct because the police only really act to prevent disorderly protest and have little interest in setting the political agenda. If the order came from higher up though then the other two options are the more likely although which approach will be followed up depends on other events over the next six to nine months which will be absolutely critical for the environmental movement.