Insulate Britain UNHINGED M25 Protests: Making Case To Criminalise Gypsies & Targeting VICTIMS

Ian Collins Talk Radio 22 Sept 2011
Insulate Britain UNHINGED M25 Protests: Making Case To Criminalise Gypsies & Targeting VICTIMS


Priti Patel’s demonisation of Gypsies is an attack on the vulnerable for political gain
George MonbiotThis article is more than 1 year old
George Monbiot
A government proposal threatening to confiscate the homes of those suspected of trespassing will fuel prejudice and bigotry

A Gypsy caravan in Wharfedale, Yorkshire
A Gypsy caravan in Wharfedale, Yorkshire. ‘The government’s proposal criminalises the use of any place without planning permission.’ Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
Wed 13 Nov 2019 12.16 GMT

This is how it begins: with a theatrical attack on a vulnerable minority. It’s a Conservative tradition, during election campaigns, to vilify Romany Gypsies and Travellers: it tends to play well on the doorsteps of middle England. But what the home secretary, Priti Patel, proposed last week is something else. It amounts to legislative cleansing.

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The consultation document she released on the last day of parliament aims to “test the appetite to go further” than any previous laws. It suggests that the police should be able immediately to confiscate the vehicles of “anyone whom they suspect to be trespassing on land with the purpose of residing on it”. Until successive Conservative governments began working on it, trespass was a civil and trivial matter. Now it is treated as a crime so serious that on mere suspicion you can lose your home.

When I say “you”, obviously I don’t mean you, unless you are a Romany Gypsy, a traditional Traveller or a New Traveller. If you’re on holiday in your caravan, it does not affect you. It applies only if you have “intent to reside” in your vehicle “for any period”. In other words, it is specifically aimed at travelling peoples. It is clearly and deliberately discriminatory.

It’s true that some people have sometimes behaved appallingly, damaging places, leaving litter and abusing residents. But there are already plenty of laws to prosecute these crimes. The government’s proposal, criminalising the use of any place without planning permission for Roma and Travellers to stop, would extinguish the travelling life.

The consultation acknowledges that there is nowhere else for these communities to go, other than the council house waiting list, which means abandoning the key elements of their culture. During the Conservative purge in the late 1980s and early 1990s, two thirds of traditional, informal stopping sites for travellers, some of which had been in use for thousands of years, were sealed off. Then, in 1994, the Criminal Justice Act repealed the duty of local authorities to provide official sites for Roma and Travellers.

Priti Patel
‘Priti Patel is beating up a marginalised group in full public view, to show that she sides with the majority.’ Photograph: Wiktor Szymanowicz/Barcroft Media
Over the past few weeks in Grimsby, Lincolnshire, local people have been debating the merits of the council’s proposal for an official transit site for travelling people. According to one councillor, there have been threats to stone, bottle and petrol bomb anyone who uses it, if planning permission is granted. For centuries, Roma and Travellers have been hounded from parish to parish, suffering prejudice and bigotry as extreme as any group faces. Now the government is stoking it.

Patel’s proposed laws belong to the most dangerous of all political categories: performative oppression. She is beating up a marginalised group in full public view, to show that she sides with the majority. I don’t know whether she really intends to introduce these laws, or whether this is empty electioneering. In either case, she is playing with fire. Already this month, three caravans in Somerset have allegedly been torched by suspected arsonists. Travelling peoples have been attacked like this for centuries, and sometimes murdered. In 2003, a 15-year-old Traveller child, Johnny Delaney, was kicked to death by a gang of teenagers in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire. One of them is reported to have explained to a passer-by, “He was only a fucking Gypsy.”

I asked a traditional Traveller how Patel’s legislation would affect her. Briony (not her real name) told me she had ploughed her life savings into her motorhome, which she parks out of people’s way, beside roads within easy reach of her children’s school. She has good relations with local people, many of whom know her and see her as part of the community. But none of this will help.