Rave On? Rave Off?

Mark Townshend's piece on the huge rave that took place in central London, Scumoween: The Squat Monster's Ball, published in The Observer, took me back twenty years to the so called Second Summer of Love, and the previous conservative administration's attempts to police youth culture by trying to clamp down on raves via the Entertainment (Increased Penalties) Act 1990 and the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. This is something that Steve Greenfield and I wrote about many moons ago in the New Statesman, although the piece we wrote now looks to be lost in the mists of time, written as it was in the days before everything seems to be available online. Townshend argues that there is a similar context at the present time to then - with both a recession and a regressive conservative government in place - and that perhaps the current climate will lead to more of these sort of events. Time will tell, now what about the return of political pop, and the halcyon days of Red Wedge etc...