To tell the travellers...

[Starbuck999]

By my parents house to please fuck off?

Story is, my parents and their neighbours all clubbed together to buy a lovely piece of land that their terrace of houses over looks. None of them are rich and it was a large buy for them all but they all keep is beautifully and it is a lovely view for them all to enjoy, it's only a small patch of land, not what one could consider to be a field even. i think they have (had) plans to make it a play area for all the local children, or a sports field or something similar.

4 weeks ago, overnight, a few caravans appeared. Of course the residents went to speak to them to say it was private land (which they already knew as there are huge "private" signs all round it and they actually smashed down a large section of the fencing to drive their caravans in.) But the travellers refused to budge. They were very matter of fact and reasonably polite about the fact that they would not be moving and they knew the residents couldnt do anything to make them move right away. Lovely.

Now, whilst I fully appreciate anyone's right to live how they want, surely it should not be at the expense of others. It must be wonderful to live such a free life, moving from place to place if that is what you choose, but how can you not expect to pay? Caravans sites cost say £25 a night, they should be paying to stay in one, or buy their own land and live there.

The field is now horrendous. More and more caravans have been moved in, I'd say there's no about 20. There are huge piles of broken up crates, broken buggies, televisions etc and massive piles of general hosehold rubbish and food waste in black bags that have been split open by foxes I presume all round the edge of the land. It's starting to look like a landfill site!

I don't have the full details but basically the residents have been told nothing can be done to get rid of them right away, it will take time through the courts. Then they will be moved on. That's all that will happen. Now If I parked my car somewhere illegal it would be clamped, towed and I'd have a hefty fine - why doesn't the same apply?

AIBU?

I will say again, travellers do not have more rights than anyone else.

People who are not travellers do this kind of thing to landlords all the time. They move into a house, don't pay the rent, cause damage, and cannot be moved out until the property owner evicts them. Sometimes they move in and pay rent to start with and then default, and sometimes they move in and never pay rent.

The number of cases of travellers being the culprit and needing a court order to evict are a minority of evictions. They are simply more visible because they are outdoors.

Travellers get short thrift in these parts-probably because the first thing most farmers do is build ditches or move boulders into place.
We are all thrilled by their common sense.

Local homeowners bought an area of land in front of their houses in my former village. They did so because the council weren't caring for it as well as they could and didn't want to live facing an eyesore. It does happen you know!

BTW, wild guess just to lighten the mood, Moondog, I reckon you might be Welsh, going on what you say of being proud of your minority language. :)

'mathanxiety
I think it's exactly for that reason that OP's cabal of concerned citizens bought this land in the first place. Fed up of those pesky 'criminal' travellers turning up and spoiling the view.

To save it from 'developers' my arse.'

Oh, PLEASE. Just bordering on nonsense now. They'd have dug ditches, spread muck and put boulders if that had been true.

I'm more suspicious that people are starting jumping on this issue in a recession. Lots of tenants and indeed people who have mortgages are going to default and effectively become squatters as they lose jobs. The last thing we should be doing at the moment is giving more rights to property owners to evict people quickly.

Some travellers speak a distinct language called Shelta, of which there are two dialects: the Gammon and the Cant. They are creoles but languages, yes.

There are a few travelling families in my mother's school, she works closely with the communities. They are a damn sight less criminal than some of the other families in her area. The kids are very respectful and polite.

I'm sure there are travelling communities that wreak havoc, it must be so given the extent of the hatred and venom that has been spewed here but whether you like it or not, travelling communities are an ancient and established ethnic group.

If they break the law, they should be treated as harshly as any other member of our society, but this thread is clearly tarring a whole culture with one brush and I do wonder if some of the posters have ever spoken to an actual Real Live Travelling Person.

They are languages. In Germany Jenisch is an official Sprachminderheit.

Travellers have had their rights stripped from them again and again. It is wrong to say they are not a minority.

The criminals (who I personally see as belonging to a particular group of Travellers) should not take land that is not their own. They cause problems wherever they go, as I said earlier in the thread.

But they are separate to the poor souls who were part of minority populations who were murdered in the Holocaust, those who underwent forced sterilisation in the USSR and those whose children were removed from them in Switzerland.

Neatsoda, why would travellers still be in wagons? It is 2010. It would be like people coming to my village and saying I wasn't interested in being Northern as I don't wear clogs.

Last post and I'm off to bed.

"Because the law lets them"

Well no, it doesn't "let" them. However the law around trespass to land is complex (far too complex for my half sozzled brain to remember) and is fundamentally a civil, not a criminal matter.

To evict someone takes a long time and costs money. The travellers rely on the slow cogs of local government bureaucracy to allow them to use the site for as long as possible before they can get turfed off.

Personally I'd like to see a wholesale review of the laws around this kind of thing to stop these people from inflicting themselves on communities in the first place, to make it easier and (more importantly) quicker to remove them and to have the ability to reclaim the expenses occurred in evicting them and cleaning up from these people.

However I'm not a politician.

there's a family of travellers at my dd's school - the mother is v nice though shy, children well behaved and always exquisitely dressed in a sort of 'Royal family in the 1960s' style. They are scrap metal and agricultural machinery dealers like lots of travellers and I've never heard any hint of a rumour that they're crooks.

just thought I'd stick that in, since we're getting anecdotal....

Oh don't get me started on Appleby Horse Fair Neat!

Grrr!

There are thousands of places to legally park your caravan in this country. I have just returned from one. It cost £10per night had hot showers and proper sanitation.
Am I missing something? Why don't they just stay at holiday sites?

Maybe because they don't want to pay?

'Oh PLEASE. Just bordering on thinly-veiled, still-allowed-to-be-racist-towards-travellers nonsense now.'

PMSL. Especially considering I haven't written anything racist. Of course, my experience of racism comes from the standpoint of being non-white. I can't just change my skin colour as easily as not going round camping on someone's land without asking and trashing it out.

Oooh neat, have you been in any largish city on a friday night?

It sounds somewhat similar.

Seriously, those British people are just vile.

And that is exactly what people said about new age travellers in the last recession, LTW.

As a a consequence we got the Criminal Justice Act, which was overwhelmingly used against people who fell behind with their rent.

Because in reality the laws you put in place against travellers can be used against anyone.

Even if they were allowed, I think the holiday sites might have issues about them bringing their horses onto the sites

Anyone see that 'My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding' documentary where they had trouble finding wedding venues because venues would often pull out when they found out they were travellers? It must be kind of annoying if you're one of the law-abiding traveller families....

MillyR - no, of course, I agree there's no reason why they should be in wagons, it was the charging people to look in them that sat weirdly with us. (Not that we particularly wanted to look.)

I guess what I wanted to say was that they certainly weren't 'joyously celebrating' their culture. I read people writing about 'travelling communities' and to be honest they seemed pretty cut-throat and not united by much except an existence outside settled and law-abiding life. Obviously, there will be exceptions to that.

But we did get a massive shock by how unlikeable they appeared as a group. And we'd gone to the fair with a very open-minded (in retrospect, naively positive) outlook.

Expat, the international community recognises racism as being about ethnicity, and not just skin pigmentation. Skin pigmentation was not the issue in Rwanda for example.