Synopsis

Street News unfolds as a diaristic record of various disparate protests that took place in 1994 in the UK, with handheld footage of various actions, featuring short interviews with the activists on the scene. The video begins with a clip of the Solsbury Road Protests in May 1994, in which young people occupied a field to prevent the building of the A36 motorway. In the next vignette, Jeremy Corbyn speaks to a small group of protesters outside Campsfield House Immigration Removal Centre in Oxfordshire in a pledge to shut down the immigration detention centre (Campsfield was only shut down in 2018). Thirty detained asylum seekers were on hunger strike, with some having been detained for almost two years. We see protestors banging on the green gates and attempting to climb over the fences.

On April 14th 1994, protestors gathered outside the Stationer’s Hall to protest the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), a free trade policy that effectively exploited Third World countries. On April 7th 1994, people intruded the Lloyds Bank General Meeting to protest the bank’s irresponsible lending policies to Third World countries. Lloyds refused to show protestors their environmental guidelines as protesters are seen being chucked out of the building. On March 1st 1994, Glaswegians disrupted a conference on super-quarries, with a sign reading ‘Mountains not Motorways’. In Faslane, Scotland on March 10th 1994, people blocked a lorry as part of the anti-Nuclear weapons movement. On December 12th 1993 in Brussels Belgium, activists invaded the European Round Table of Industrialists to speak against ERT, Europe’s largest multinational, the driving force behind the EC road-building programme. On March 9th in Wyndham, Norfolk, a man tied himself to a bulldozer, as construction began for the A11 bypass. A group of women offer flowers to road builders in peaceful protest.

Various intersecting concerns emerge across the nation: anti road expansionist projects, movements against neocolonial trade policies and laissez-faire globalisation, and protests against detention centres.