FIT at menwith hill

Food, music, fun and FIT, Men­with Hill, 4th July Inde­pen­dence from Amer­i­ca Day

Anoth­er well attend­ed demo at Men­with, with blaz­ing sun, music, food and increased lev­els of sur­veil­lance.

There were maybe 100 or so attend­ing, along with stu­pid num­bers of police, includ­ing for the first time, mem­bers of the Met­ro­pol­i­tan FIT team. They were very cam­era shy, and only appeared briefly to pho­to­graph par­tic­i­pants as they set off for a tour of the base. I guess that they left the bulk of the ‘evi­dence gath­er­ing’ to North Yorks offi­cers, who were very busy through­out the day.

There was music on the day from seize the day, who played some crack­ing tunes. Bet­ter was the anar­chist punk band at the end who blast­ed the occu­pants of the base with a selec­tion of hard­core tunes as the sun set behind them, all cap­tured on film by the police!

Also for the first time was a vis­i­ble Anar­chist pres­ence on the day, with a red and black flag fly­ing in the Sun next to CAAB’s upside down Stars and stripes.

After a brief tour of the base the march head­ed back to the main gate where Lunch out Lils from Sheffield pro­vid­ed some excel­lent and much need­ed food!

One arrest on the day, Lindis Per­cy who was arrest­ed for breach of bail con­di­tions, i sus­pect for cross­ing the ‘yel­low line’ at one of the gates. i observed the Evi­dence gath­ers in con­ver­sa­tion with senior offi­cers at this point in the day, check­ing that they had evi­dence of Lindi’s trans­gres­sion on film…

All in all anoth­er well attend­ed demo — bet­ter that it was held in the evening i think a there did some to be plen­ty of new faces there.

As an aside i also noticed that a new wind farm is in the process of being con­struct­ed near Men­with. maybe coin­ci­dence but could also be an ensured pow­er sup­ply dur­ing the com­ing oil crash??

“In some cas­es, (a mil­i­tary) instal­la­tion can depend on near­by gen­er­a­tion, includ­ing renew­able ener­gy for its back­up ener­gy sup­ply where the util­i­ty has the capa­bil­i­ty of seg­re­gat­ing its ser­vice area from out­side influ­ences. This cre­ates self-sus­tain­ing region­al “islands” which should not be over­looked as instal­la­tions engage in emer­gency plan­ning to serve crit­i­cal instal­la­tion func­tions. Plan­ning must nec­es­sar­i­ly be coor­di­nat­ed with region­al ener­gy sup­pli­ers, trans­mis­sion com­pa­nies, and major ener­gy users.”