Manky, do you know how much the NHS spends every year on obesity and smoking-related problems? Do you know how much is spent every year on maternity services for people who have chosen to have babies? You do realise you are subsidising a lot of 'lifestyles'? In the case of the Travellers and Gypsies, their culture is not a lifestyle choice though. It is their culture. O?Leary v. Allied Domecq (2000) was heard by the Central London County Court. It established that Irish Travellers are a racial group under the RRA.
Your local council would clearly be wasting a lot of your money hounding you about a hypotthetical satellite dish on the side of your house. Why not take up that issue with them instead of taking out your frustrations on the Travellers? If you don't like what the council might do if you were to put up a dish, then take it up with the council. If you feel it is unjust that you should be forbidden from doing something to property you own, then how is it fine to prevent Travellers from doing something to property they own? Is your house the physical structure more important than the quality of life of those who live in it? Are the people of Britain owed the sight of your house, pristine and untouched, whenever they feel like it, no matter how much you would like better TV reception? Do you honestly support the amount of time and energy and money the council would expend trying to take down your hypothetical dish?
There is a very strong whiff here of people feeling they are being squeezed on every side and hemmed in by ridiculous regulations that their LAs seem hell bent on enforcing, in contrast to what is perceived to be favourable treatment of a 'non-deserving' group. This huge overinflated sense of umbrage is a bit like seeing a 5 year old tantrumming about an older sibling getting to stay up later than him.
As far as experience of Travellers, I grew up in Ireland in a suburb where an unauthorised camp was in existence for years, close to the home of a cousin of my dad's and his family (right outside their gates in fact, basically stretching along the side of the road for quite a distance). My relatives provided water for them and provisions for the elderly. The Travellers used to collect the dole and children's allowance at the post office and then would get directed next door to the little shop run by the postmaster, who would hold out his hand for their cheques at the door and then hand them a shopping basket. Easy money. In addition, there was a campsite, a bit like something out of The Grapes of Wrath, where down on their luck people drifted through, some settling for a few years, some for a few weeks, with the occasional Traveller family too. There were lots of vagrants in the locality always. The campsite has now been demolished and the site developed, increasing the residential density/traffic about 20-fold. The Traveller encampment eventually got squeezed out of the area as million Euro style housing development reached the formerly quite countrified neighbourhood.
My dad spent years working in educational administration and local politics and frequently dealt with Traveller issues in the educational realm as well as issues of trespass/land use. A cousin of his worked in local government; her job involved a lot of dealing specifically with Traveller women and children. A cousin of my mother's was a district midwife in a country area and delivered hundreds of Traveller babies over the course of her career, in tents and (spotless) trailers and the occasional old fashioned covered wagon. She commented on the cleanliness as it was sometimes a different story in some of the farmhouses she attended. My grandmother arranged for a Traveller woman who was a regular at the farm to wetnurse one of the twins of a neighbour whose baby was in danger of wasting away. The family stayed nearby for months instead of moving on with their group. Granny provided dairy produce and bread for the family as well as the odd chicken. My grandparents employed the odd Traveller for seasonal farm work but by my late teens the need for intensive manual work on the farm had evaporated as they had switched to predominantly dairy from a mixed farming operation by that stage.
If by my 'personal experience' of Travellers you really mean willingness to spew forth the sort of stereotypes and racist caricaturing that so many seem to be comfortable with piling on on this and the many other threads about Dale Farm at the moment, you will be disappointed.
Their separate ethnicity and all that that entails has been recognised by the government and until very recently their housing needs were accepted (at least on paper) to be different from people from mainstream society. The Basildon DC 'offer' of council housing is disingenuous in the extreme and nothing more than a cynical PR exercise on their part, grandstanding for the benefit of those ignorant of the Travellers' culture and its protected status, as is the option of moving to allegedly available sites near Liverpool, uprooting children from school, and separating families (scoff if you like but Travellers live in extended family units, not middle class nuclear units). It is also a calculated and sly way to incite hatred of Travellers who are perceived to be receiving favourable treatment from the more deserving members of the population, committing the most unpardonable of British sins, queue-jumping. Disgusting, cynical move.
From this article go ahead and roll your eyes
'Pickles has already announced the reversal of previous efforts to provide "pitches" within all local authorities, abolishing the regional planning bodies which were to oversee provision of registered sites for travellers and ease the tensions caused by Gypsies being forced to camp illegally.
The grants that had been made available to councils to provide sites have also been slashed, although an estimated £18m a year is being spent on evictions....'
Apparently ethnic cleansing will be carried out therefore, no matter how much it costs, with taxpayers braying their approval of each new hounding out or their dismay when the Travellers inevitably show up on each new doorstep. If this is what British society wants, then British society is guilty of a horrible crime.
Not to mention a self-inflicted bankruptcy.
Also from the article '..Hostility from local communities is high. The Equality and Human Rights Commission Scotland is so concerned at the way many local newspapers are presenting issues with Gypsies, and the racist remarks left on their noticeboards, that it is contacting media outlets "to remind them that moderation of online comment boards is crucial in order to prevent the incitement of racial hatred".'