Political Activity
After recovering from stomach cancer, Eavis stood as a candidate for the Labour Party in the 1997 General Election in the Wells Constituency, polling 10,204 votes. In 2004 however, he suggested that disillusioned Labour voters should switch their vote to the Green Party to protest at the Iraq War, though he returned to supporting the Labour Party in 2010.
In 2005 Eavis was quoted in The Guardian as being a supporter of hunting. "I don't hunt myself, but I support the people who want to hunt. With all that's going on in the world, it was outrageous to ban it." In November 2006 he was appointed as President of the Somerset Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
In June 2011, Eavis was quoted as lamenting the decline in political activity associated with the Glastonbury Festival. Days later, however, a protest by Art Uncut at the Glastonbury Festival against U2's alleged hypocrisy on matters of taxation was stopped with force by festival security.
Eavis is scheduled to be guest editor of the Western Daily Press newspaper on Glastonbury's 'fallow' weekend Saturday 23rd June 2012.
Read more about this topic: Michael Eavis
Famous quotes containing the words political and/or activity:
“To say “I accept” in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration-camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas-masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press-censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films and political murder.”
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“The teacher must derive not only the capacity, but the desire, to observe natural phenomena. In our system, she must become a passive, much more than an active, influence, and her passivity shall be composed of anxious scientific curiosity and of absolute respect for the phenomenon which she wishes to observe. The teacher must understand and feel her position of observer: the activity must lie in the phenomenon.”
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