Politics &...

NO, not that. Not Party politics. The politics of everyday life, of joys and pains.

In 1994 I decided it was time to go out and party. Been in front of the screen too long - I was spending too much time on mailing lists. I soon discovered, though, that the best parties in London were all bound up with the road protest movement and the campaign against the Criminal Justice Bill.

"We wondered where all the old hippies had gone" was my less-than encouraging introduction to the CJB gatherings. It's hard, not saying "We tried that back in 19seventymumble and it didn't work," when it can and does work this time...

It's no surprise that there was a connection between the CJB and the best parties, because a large part of this extraordinary piece of legislation was specifically designed to outlaw that subculture that likes to dance in fields to what the Act charmingly terms "sounds including a succession of repetitive beats".

It also created yet another ground on which it is illegal to be a gypsy in the UK - a fine sop to that most profound of racisms, that deepest fear of the Tory backwoodsmen that their daughters and sons will run off with the raggle-taggle gypsies - or with the "New Age Travellers". And, just to make sure that the less-anti-libertarian Members of Parliament would imagine the local paper headline "MP votes against kiddy porn crackdown" before deciding which Lobby to go into, the Act incudes possibly the world's first anti-virtual image law.

The fact that in targetting the ravers the government attacked the brightest, the most creative and the most caring section of a generation will have... interesting repercussions in terms of the credibility of conventional, Party politics.