The seeds of hate
Why is there such hostility to gypsies? Because, says Rod Liddle, the establishment is stifling free debate Illegal asylum-seekers can rest a little easier in their beds for the moment because right now the Fleet Street redtops have got it in for the gypsies instead. We haven’t quite got to the stage of Kill a Pikey and Win a Metro, but one assumes it is just around the corner. For the Daily Mail, in particular, the whole issue of gypsies — or Roma, or travellers, whatever you want to call them — unites a number of key themes: gyppoes are renowned criminals and probably never pay taxes or the council charge; they depress house prices when they move in next door; they’re dirty and they make a mess; they are the beneficiaries of fatuous legislation which favours them over ‘ordinary’ people; they are a bit thick and prone to violence; they get free legal advice, paid for by you and me, on how to move their teeming, thieving families into that nice fallow field down the road; John Prescott seems to like them; we’re not allowed to set them on fire in their caravans because that would be politically incorrect; they cock a snook at authority, ill-treat animals and give you cancer. Well, OK, I made the last one up. But the Daily Mail’s twin obsessions of falling house prices and the ever present threat of cancer fizzing away on a fuse in the middle distance means that the connection will surely be made sooner or later.
Of course, there is some truth in most of the prejudices I’ve detailed above. As we have recently discovered, gypsies do indeed get free advice from the Legal Services Commission about how to circumvent planning restrictions and avoid eviction from unauthorised sites. Gypsy children perform very, very badly at school in general and literacy rates among the multifarious travelling communities are, you have to say, on the lowish side, compared with that which pertains in, say, Paul Dacre’s family. It is John Prescott’s department that has custody of gypsies and it is upon his front door that the outraged folk of Middle England make their protests, usually in vain. Voice any criticism of the gypsies and you tend to get called a ‘racist’, despite the fact that, so far as I understand it, 90 per cent of those called gypsies do not constitute a separate race at all: being a gypsy is, in most cases (except for the Roma) not acquired through the genes.
Their caravan sites do indeed look a little messy, and as for the thieving and the violence and the non-payment of tax, well, I do not have the figures to hand, for which many apologies.
But it is this other issue — that they are the beneficiaries of fatuous or at least unpopular legislation which favours them over ‘ordinary’ people that I find most interesting. There is indeed a plethora of legislation, national and supranational, encompassing the 1968 Caravan Act, the European Convention on Human Rights and the 2000 Human Rights Act which protects ‘gypsies’ from the animus and loathing of Paul Dacre and, it has to be said, 70 per cent of the British people (at my estimate). You can, for example, call yourself a traveller regardless of whether or not you travel. If you have not even the slightest intention of wandering down to the shops for a packet of fags and a copy of the Racing Post, you can still qualify as a traveller provided that you can concoct a description of yourself as someone who would travel, were there sufficient incentive or reason to do so. Or you had a grandfather who travelled. Further, it is also true that local councils frequently ignore violations of planning orders by gypsies because these transgressions are considered less important than the needs or wishes of the travelling community to have somewhere nice to live. And the councils are encouraged to do this.
If you are a resident of Middle England who, for perfectly good reasons or out of paranoia, is worried about gypsies, everywhere you look you will find the dice loaded against you. In Kent, where there are an awful lot of gypsies, you’ll find that not only will the councils and the judiciary fail to work in your favour, but the BBC locally has a very active gypsy liaison unit and thus news reports will tend to reflect this fact. By defining ‘traveller’ as one or another race, it is possible to stymie discussions about the behaviour of the travelling community: all you have to do is shout ‘racist!’ and the argument is over. Indeed, you might even find yourself prosecuted for, um, pushing your point too far, regardless of whether or not by any sensible criteria the travelling community constitutes a separate race.
It is often said that a democracy should be judged by the way it treats its minorities; if this is so, then the protection afforded to travellers is wholly admirable. Clearly, travellers are not well liked up and down the land; without the sort of protection our courts and councils afford them, they would be persecuted. I suspect that if they were allowed to vote on the issue, people would not concede an inch of territory to travellers who wished to set up home. There would be no council sites with hot and cold running water. There would be no sites without hot and cold running water, for that matter. And gypsies who camped illegally would be bundled into the back of paddy wagons and locked up forthwith. This, I hasten to add, is just a guess.
But there’s another way of looking at it. Gypsies are yet another issue in which the entire establishment — the law courts, the councils, the government and our major political parties, a whole bunch of quangos and pressure groups, the BBC, most broadsheet newspapers, international law — is seemingly of one mind and the mass of the public quite clearly of another. The same might be said of immigration and particularly bogus asylum-seekers. It is precisely this dichotomy which makes the tabloid newspapers salivate: here is an issue where debate is stifled or dismissed but which thoroughly annoys Middle England. And so gleefully they go to town. And the level of vilification — hatred would not be too strong a term for some of the coverage — is itself all the more potent and unanswerable because the newspapers perceive a conspiracy in which the establishment is squarely on the side of the gypsies and therefore will not listen to the public. And on the other side rational debate is forgotten, because as far as the establishment is concerned the ordinary Brit possesses views of the travelling community — and illegal asylum-seekers — which are simply not publishable and should not be heard. Whenever legitimate arguments are so dismissed by our politicians, there is the potential for trouble.
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