Private Property and Public Order: The Hippy Convoy and Criminal Trespass

Abstract

The so-called 'hippy convoy', finally dispersed on June 9 after three weeks of panic over the supposed threat to private property rights, has placed on the agenda once again the question of the need for criminal trespass law. On June 4, after pressure from the National Farmers' Union, the Country Landowners' Association and west-country Tory M.P.s, and in a climate of outrage fostered by generally hostile media coverage of the convoy, the Cabinet decided to set up a Ministerial Committee to investigate the possibility of changes in the law Mrs. Thatcher telling an excited House of Commons at question time that the government would be too delighted to make things as difficult for the convoy as possible, and that if fresh legislation on criminal trespass is needed to deter hippies it will be introduced.' This will be the third official review of the field since 1945, a Law Commission investigation into squatting on residential property begun in 1974 having led to the partial criminalisation of trespass in Part II of the Criminal Law Act 1977, and a Home Office consultation paper of 1983 following Michael Fagan's trespass in the Queen's bedroom at Buckingham Palace having produced the ultimately abortive Criminal Trespass Bill 1984.2 The present calls for legal reform can be understood only in the broader context of a socio-legal analysis addressing three major questions: why have trespasses in the post-war period assumed the various forms they have; why has social reaction taken the form it has; and what have been the effects of this reaction and of any subsequent legal transformation?3 The social function of trespass law is to guarantee private property both by providing a remedy for interference with possession (through the ordinary tort action) and by enabling those with greater rights of possession to recover land from occupiers with lesser interests (through the action for recovery of land).4 Acts of trespass have assumed a variety of forms and been informed by a number of different objectives in the modern period. Squatting in domestic residential buildings, as occurred immediately after the second world war and on an increasing scale from the late 1960s, was undertaken with the obvious