To think that rights/wrongs aside, a council needing to make £300m cuts should focus it's funds somewhere other than evicting gypsies?

[Blubell]

I know there are massive fors and againsts in the Dale Farm evictions, and I don't want to start a big travellers debate, but in this time of austerity measures, and the fact that Essex council needs to cut £300m in 3 years, is evicting the site now, when it's a case that has been going on for 10 years really the best way to spend the little cash they have? Its been reported it's going to cost the council £18m to return the site - which used to be a scrapyard so hardly a place of outstanding beauty - back to greenbelt, how many carers, libraries etc will be lost to fund that? Just a thought.......

Racism, as pointed out is emphatically not just about personal attitudes and beliefs, it is also about social structures. Democracy can only work if minorities are protected or it's just the domination by the majority. Telling the Travellers they can goto Liverpool or get a council house is just forcing them to join the majority or be displaced. Survival of the fittest is exactly what is happening in a legal framework designed by the 'fittest'

Come off it Alice. Lots of people would like to live near people of their own ethnic or cultural background, and lots of people cannot.

And it is not racist to say that laws such as not stealing and insuring your car apply to everyone.

And indeed the planning laws.

Democracy can only work if minorities are protected

Democracy can only work if people obey laws even when they don't profit from them. It's no use every group sulking that they don't gain anything from this law or that.

As societies move forward they abandon old ways of living. In effect forcing new ways on everyone. No more caves, no more running naked after antelope and so on. I can't keep pigs in my flat even if my ancestors did. I'm forced to use electricity to heat the place when animal bodies might have done the job at one time. It's not fair!

They shut most of the mines and shipyards. There went a way of life that had been for many for centuries.

onagar Another example I like to cite: the coming of the digital camera has destroyed the jobs of the people (mostly women) who worked in film-processing labs. Too bad.

'Why is it ok to let these people continue to break the law? '

Ask the judge. Presumably he knows a bit more about the law than you do.

In fact, ask all the judges who have dealt with this case over the whole ten years of appeals, etc.

I just remembered "Big Yellow Taxi"

They took all the trees and put 'em in a tree museum
And then they charged all the people twenty-five bucks just to see 'em
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got till it's gone
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot

We built a densely populated, technological society and we lost out on some things. Open empty spaces, deep forests and so on. The thing is though that we all lost them and not just the travellers.
It isn't that we took away the open roads and empty spaces from the travellers. We all gave them up to make room for hospitals, Museums and Cinemas and the rest of us accepted that and moved on.

onagar I think it was a dollar and a half but I expect that's just inflation at work :)

I remember "a dollar and a half" too! :o I guess you're right about inflation

You are of course completely right in your own brutal way to say progress happens. History is full of examples the Highland clearances (aka the Expulsion of the Gael, 'Fuadach nan Gáidheal) and agricultural enclosure, the whole 'to hell or to Connaught' thing in Ireland, the Plantations of Ireland and the American colonies, the Irish Famine of the 1840s, the settlement of the North American continent and the incidental wiping out of indigenous cultures and peoples, colonialism all over the world, the modernising influence of the Conquistadors in South and Central America historical forces at work making the world a better place, moving us all on at a steady clip towards a bright future.

aliceliddell - serious question - what is stopping the Travellers from buying sites that would be likely to be granted planning permission?

mathanxiety as I said - not the same thing. You are trying to make it what we did to 'them'. This progress is what our society did for and to itself.

Unless you thought that the travellers were the indigenous culture in Britain?

Actually mathanxiety you have given me an idea. If these are Irish Travellers then they are the ones doing the equivalent of settling the North American continent at the expense of the natives (us).

I don't really see it that way, but since you brought it up :)

Then you should be dancing in the streets because of their fine example of progress in action.

'You are trying to make it what we did to 'them'. This progress is what our society did for and to itself.'

But surely progress for one is progress for all, right?

"But surely progress for one is progress for all, right?"
Hardly ever. In fact, probably never. Progress is change. Look at Andrewofogg 's example - " the coming of the digital camera has destroyed the jobs of the people (mostly women) who worked in film-processing labs. Too bad."

Yes and the hospitals that do everything from transplants to cancer treatment, fertility treatments to new hip joints are there for us all - including travellers. I imagine they use roads to get from place to place. We built them too you know. They don't grow on trees.

All the advances we have made are available to them.

you may as well give up. The reason you are struggling is because you are wrong.

Progress is change? Change is progress?

Onagar, you and your people have been busy, building roads and making great medical breakthroughs..

Who is this 'we' you speak of?

FFS it's like trying to argue with toddlers.

Considering the travellers frequent choice of occupation they might have built a few of those roads and hospitals

mathanxiety, I'm struggling to see what you're getting at with your last few posts. Could you elucidate please?

Damn we need a like button OpinionatedMum.

Onagar it must be just fabulous to find yourself on the right side of history.

If progress is not progress for all then is it really progress?

WYLI - judging from the info links ^ there seems to have been moving of goalposts, so 'likely' is variable depending who applies