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.......

'At their own expense' - don't they own some of the Dale Farm land?

Has anybody ever considered that the travellers might want to live by themselves because of the racial abuse that they have suffered from the settled community.

Dipsy fair play to those who do and have been.

But some parts of traveller culture are unacceptable because they are incompatible with the way of life of those among whom they live. The culture of all transactions in cash and let's not trouble the tax-man; the early removal of girls from school; the appalling story told upthread or on another related thread of men refusing to let a male nurse near a woman patient who in consequence bled to death.

In any event all the Dale Farm residents on the illegal part of the site can be tarred with the brush of the illegal development and there is no getting round it. The real problem is that the mode of enforcing the planning law is far too slow. These retro applications should include a guarantee that if they lose they will vacate and restore the land, and that should be backed by an insurance bond so that the council can do it if they don't and quickly. No bond, no application.

Dipsy I ask you what I asked math: would you like to live near Dale Farm? If not, get off your high horse and support the poor sods who do.

They do own some of it but they have no planning permission. They should house themselves lawfully at their own expense. Does that make it clearer?

Oh no, Dipsy, they're not a racial group, which is why it's not racist to slag them or their culture off. You obviously haven't read the thread properly. I think they did become a racial group briefly, but only to be compared to the mafia.

I don't care whether they are a "racial group" or not - they are bound by the law and have no right to require that they be accommodated together with others of the same race. When the Afrikaners wanted that "right" they became the pariahs of the world.

Nobody said you had to like individual Travellers or their culture, Andrew

I cant answer that because I dont believe everything I read in the tabloid press but I know of traveller sites and Romany gypsy sites and yes ,I would live next to either of them.I take people as I find them,not as they have been portrayed by media moguls plying their trade to the masses.

I am not on my high horse about this as you so put it,but have personal knowledge of the culture.

Oh yes, the Afrikaaners who were sorely oppressed by the majority population's legal and judicial system.

Andrewwofgg, that is a very good point.
I never looked at it from that angle.

Speaking of nimbyism, am I the only one who was struck by AWA's massively contradictory posts about her pity for the unfortunate daughters of Traveller families who are denied a proper education and her tale of woe about Traveller children taking over 'her' school?

AliceLiddell, you are absolutely right in saying that when all planning is left to individual LAs or even smaller bodies, all you get is massive overspending and absolutely no cohesive or consistent or comprehensive plan for anything. Of course, if the taxpayers are happy to sacrifice millions of pounds and insist on doing their own sweet local thing just in order to keep Travellers out of their individual backyard, who is to say they are wrong or misguided or even really, really stupid...

Travellers 'have no right to require that they be accommodated together with others of the same race. '
Actually, since living communally or in larger family groups is an integral part of their culture or ethnicity, in accommodation that is mobile or capable of being packed up and moved, they do have that right.

Alice not all Afrikaners were rich and powerful under apartheid. There were and are dirt-poor Afrikaner farmers.

math Let's work this out. No doubt if a traveller family buys or rents accommodation big enough for the extended family - and with planning consent or housing already there - they have the right to accommodate themselves there.

What they don't have is the right to insist that neighbouring property be for those of the same background. We have never allowed racially restrictive covenants on freehold in this country (unlike the Americans who did) and such covenants in leases have been illegal and void since 1965. In that year it also became illegal to refuse to let on racial grounds - like all such laws it is incapable of 100% enforcement - and while oddly it is legal to refuse to sell on racial grounds it is illegal to advertise the intention so to do. Those laws are generally regarded as part of a civilised society which is trying to put racial discrimination behind it.

So tell me, please, how the "right" to live among those of your own ethnicity is to be enforced? Are this group to be exempted from this law too? If so, who else? If not, why should not neighbouring properties be let or sold to others?

As for the "right" you posit to live in mobile or similar accommodation; again if the planning permission is there, fine. But they don't have the right to move it to somewhere where there is no such permission, even if they own the land. Just like I can't.

No matter how dirt poor Afrikaaner farmers may have been under Apartheid they were a lot better off than non-whites. And of course there were some things money could not buy in SA under Apartheid, like justice, if you were not white. Intangibles counted for a lot in those days.

Since their traditions involve living with large extended family groups, in mobile housing or housing capable of being mobile, then they are entitled to be accommodated in that fashion - in order to accommodate those aspects of their protected ethnicity they do need a colony style settlement. You are welcome to move in beside them of course, assuming you have planning permission, etc.

A major problem that so many here seem unable to wrap their heads around is the planning permission, which tends not to exist when Travellers are the applicants, even when they own the land they want to develop. Objection to pp on thinly disguised racial grounds is the norm when Travellers make an application. Refusing pp on thinly disguised racial grounds is alive and kicking.

.

No math they are entitled to accommodate themselves lawfully in that fashion. Not to be accommodated and not unless lawfully.

Mr Justice Ouseley said yesterday: ?It is not always possible to get what they most want, especially when what they most want is to go on committing a criminal offence.?

Why are some people so dense and narrow minded that they don't understand that decent people dont like those who break the law, regardless of their race/colour/creed?

Because Cook, the law affects different groups in different ways. Planning permission is designed by and for the settled majority. Like law on NHS family planning affects heterosexual girls under 16 more adversely than boys, gays or lesbians. Same law, different effects.

'They are entitled to accommodate themselves lawfully' is a cruel joke. Planning permission that 80% of the general population can reasonably count on when applying is simply not available for most Travellers wishing to settle temporarily or otherwise.

Exactly, math

Forgot to congratulate Andrew on that class analysis of the SA apartheid system. If only you'd had Mandela's phone no, you could have saved them so much trouble getting equal political rights.

seriously why don't they go and live in Ireland. If they are Irish can't they set up sites there. Some of them do own property there. I know this probably sounds mean but isn't there more open countryside and land available for this purpose.

Is it because they get short shift there and they don't get support from the Irish government in the same way. We are an overcrowded Island

alice do you deny that there were and are poor Afrikaners? That is all I said.

No, Andrew, but their class did not negate their political and legal position, did it? That was determined by their race.
alemci why don't homeless people move to Canada? Lots of them must have relatives there. Because the issue is how we treat people here, not whether we should deport inconvenient people.

alice I was not there but I doubt if the dirt-poor Afrikaner farmer had much pull in Pretoria compared with e.g. the English-speaking white middle classes. The fact is that not every Afrikaner was a wealthy oppressor; that is what I said and it was right and I don't think you deny it.

math if non-travellers bought green-belt land and moved in over the Bank Holiday weekend with similar structures and then applied for retrospective p.p. they would not get it either. And rightly. The problem is not the law but the slow application of it.

Nobody has yet explained why applicants for retro p.p. should not be required to provide insurance bonding to guarantee vacation and restoration of the land if they fail. That would protect the payers of council tax.

They are called Irish Travellers to distinguish them from Scottish Travellers and New (Age) Travelers -- it refers to their (perhaps several generations distant) ancestral origin rather than necessarily their individual origins.

Andrewofgg -- did you realise that 'apartheid' is an Afrikaaner word? Did you realise there is a good reason for this?

The Afrikaner Party and the Reunited National Party, with major support from the Broederbond organisations, took power from the United Party of Jan Smuts in the 1948 elections, joined together, with D.F. Malan as PM, to form the first all Afrikaaner cabinet since 1910, and immediately began to implement drastic apartheid policies that far outstripped the segregation and discrimination against non-white people in SA had existed before then. Under the Afrikaner National party apartheid enabled the Afrikaaners to cement their control of the economy and the social system. The National Party, first under Malan, and then under J.G. Strijdom, who was succeeded by H.F. Verwoerd, then B.J. Vorster, P.W. Botha and then F.W. deKlerk dominated SA politics until the fall of apartheid. Note the predominance of Afrikaner names there. Your hypothetical poor, oppressed Afrikaaner farmer is starting to look like a very rare bird indeed.