Bonfire 2007 (3) The principle of the thing.

Categories: bonfire

Tags: politics, sussex, bonfire

Date: 08 November 2007 21:33:20

Thinking about it over the last few days, with and without beer, I now tend to agree with the idea that Bonfire is a practical demonstration of liberty. Despite the rather overblown flowery language some of the Lewes societies use on their programmes.

bonfire2007_4426 St Anne's Churchyard
Borough Bonfire 2007 bonfire2007_4427


Even - in fact especially - the burning of effigies of the living and the dead, offensive though that is. (This year Commercial Square burned a police superintendent on a rocket) It genuinely is a matter of free speech. If you are only free to say nice things you aren't free. Free speech is the freedom to say evil and offensive things. Who would object to you saying only good things? If everyone burned in effigy was either safely dead, or obviously evil, then someone somewhere would be controlling who we are allowed to insult or protest against. If you can't burn the Pope, who can you burn?

The same goes for meeting together in large numbers. Freedom of assembly and movement has to be the freedom to assemble in a way that might potentially worry or disturb some others. If you an only meet together in places where everyone agrees it is proper for you to meet, and in numbers that annoy nobody then you are not free to move and meet.

bonfire2007_4436 bonfire2007_4437
bonfire_2006_barrells2174 Borough firesite
bonfire_2006_before_cliffe2118 bonfire_2006_borough_fire_show2216


Burnings aside (and Bonfire is a memorial to real people who really were burned at the stake in Queen Mary's time) Bonfire is our carnival, our folk festival. For a value of "our" that is more or less limited to the people of the little blob at the bottom-right-hand corner of England between the Thames and the Channel, and most especially to those born or brought up in East Sussex. And its something we do in public, together. Not a display put on for us by local government or some charity or a private company (though all those are involved). Its not commercialised, packaged, or marketed (though plenty of people make a little money out of it, and why not?) Its something we do of and for ourselves.

And its something we increasingly DON'T do. Public bonfires are dying out, being replaced by managed and controlled firework displays. I love fireworks but they aren't the whole point of the thing, they are an added extra. Not that many people have bonfire parties in their own gardens any more. When I was a kid there were bonfires all over Brighton. Private ones in gardens - my parents had a Bonfire party every year when we lived in Woodingdean in the 1960s - but also communal ones. On open land outside the council estates, one more or less on the Downs, even one on the beach,. I think there was sometimes one on the Level. These were not, as far as I could tell, run by committees or some organised charity or other trying to raise money. None of your "British Lions" or Heart Foundations or whatever, worthy though they might be (I hated it when the Heart people hijacked the London to Brighton bikeride). They seemed to be mainly built by boys a little older than me nicking old furniture from dumps (and from the next estate's bonfires) And we stopped doing it. Sometime in my teenage, the practice died out.

Bonfire, 2006 Shaking hands with the bishop (Bonfire, 2006)
Someone blew something up... bonfire2003_1887
bonfire2003_1905 bonfire_2005_scared.0777


Which I think is why so many Brighton people go to Lewes, even those of us who no longer live in the South Country. Its the one place we can carry on participating in something we were brought up to and have been doing all our lives. Even if only by standing at the side of the road and cheering.

Talking of which, when one of the bands stopped outside St Anne's and played God save the Queen and some of the crowd joined in, a man standing next to me raised his fist and gave us a verse of the Internationale. And it wasn't even me :-)

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Tom Paine's House Cliffe banners 2006
Bush, Blair and the UN Tom Paine's House