woah! hadn’t thought of that, and to be honest, i don’t think (hope?) that this is something we should worry about. while you raised the imortant point about the lack of police, and that they can’t deal with us all, which makes me think there must be some prime times to rave when there is no chance of getting busted (when the footie’s on etc);

i do think it would be really hard for the cops to manufacture conflict between the groups.

while there is tension between the hunters and ravers traditionally, i think that if there was gonna be a problem whith hunts near raves (or vice versa) then we would have encountered it by now. it would be impossible for the fuzz to direct us toward each other, not to mention highly unlikely.

after last season, it will be interesting to see how the police deal with us. fingers crossed!

I don’t think they would stir up conflict, just perhaps try to make use of whats already there.

Even the cops would not want to be dealing with shootings, but there are hotheads on all sides of this conflict who would enjoy a fight, even amongst ravers….

Then again knowing the make-up of the hunts its probably only going to be the middle aged lot perhaps demanding in stronger terms the cops clamp down on raves as “well you lot have stopped our hunt, and these raves are also illegal”.

I would expect a lot of young people in the countryside would actually prefer the raves – (a lot of our crowd actually live in rural areas!)

One thing we do need to be aware of is that most cops in the SE now can communicate with different force areas instantly on their new airwave radios – and get backup from other divisions and forces within half an hour (or travelling time) – this is already being made use of for the policing of animal rights protests, and when rave crews cross borders… and the budgets for this are there (its just that the senior cops have to squeal a bit to get the money transferred from HM treasury to local force budgets!)