CARRY ON CARAVANING
example to us all
IT'S time for the Five Minute Hate again, and this month's subject is that old favourite, gypsies. Bescarfed 'asylum-seek- ers' from Romania are running amok in our country, dragging their young down long escalators on the Northern Line, bay- ing for our loose change, and, what's more, having the cheek to claim that the only reason they've come here is that they are being persecuted back home.
Of course the Roma asylum-seekers are trying it on; who wouldn't if they were liv- ing as social outcasts in the poorest corner of Eastern Europe and heard rumours about the deep pockets and generous spirit of London Underground passengers? But the paranoia which they have generated makes you wonder whether we are really very different from those good Germans whose mutterings about 'the damned Jews' gave the Nazi boot-boys their inspiration.
Romany gypsies have been accused shock horror — of begging while on social security; as if no white Anglo-Saxon had ever been guilty of doing the same. They've been accused of doping their chil- dren in order to incite more pathos in passers-by; the evidence behind this being the discovery by British Transport Police of Roma women with half-empty bottles of Calpol about their person. There is barely a mother in the country who does not have Calpol in her bathroom cabinet — and often about her person.
In the village of Thrybergh, near Rotherham, a council tenant has demand- ed that the council come and brick up her windows to protect her from 180 asylum- seekers who may be housed in hostels there. If it is fear of being burgled rather than xenophobia that motivates her, then why, given that she lives in one of the most crime-ridden parts of Britain, didn't she brick herself up in her house years ago?
The sad fact is that this isn't just an iso- lated campaign against one group of asy- lum-seekers: we hate gypsies and we always have done. Even in the era of the Commission for Racial Equality, discrimi- nation against gypsies is tolerated. Why is it that a pub where I live in rural Cam- bridgeshire is allowed to get away with hanging up a sign saying 'No Travellers', when a sign saying 'No Pakis' would quite rightly land the owner in court? There is no doubt at whom the sign is aimed: it's the gypsies who each Easter arrive and set up camp on the byways to pick the daf- fodils, weed out the wild oats and do all the other menial agricultural jobs which farmers would be unable to get done with- out them. Gypsies perform a vital role in the rural economy, and yet we tend to ignore it, preferring to think of them as a bunch of thieving, scrounging layabouts.
It's probably true that crime increases when the gypsies are in the area, but no more than it would do if a mobile council estate were to be towed into the village each Easter. We hate gypsies because their itinerant lifestyle offends the sense of secu- rity which we think our home-owning soci- ety ought to give us. In other words, when you've paid your £300,000 for a cottage in a posh area on the understanding that you were getting away from the lower classes, you don't expect them then to arrive by caravan and set up camp on your doorstep.
Officialdom has been attempting to eradicate the gypsy way of life for over a century. When George (`there's a wind on the heath, brother') Borrow was romanti- cising the gypsies in the mid-19th century, the nomadic way of life was widely prac- tised. Borrow himself gained the inspira- tion for travelling during a childhood following his father, a soldier, from one army camp to another. While staying in Huntingdonshire he met and marvelled at a gypsy man who earned his living catching vipers in a large bag, with the aid of a tame and devenomised snake that he had per- sonally trained to dance in order to attract others. In doing so, he was performing a service valued by local communities and physicians alike — chemicals extracted from the venom were believed to benefit arthritics. Before the railways came, itiner- ant tradesmen, many of them gypsies, were the backbone of the rural economy, travel, ling with their wares from one fair to another. Their music and their dancing bears brought a cosmopolitan air to other- wise inward-looking places.
Then came the enclosures which did away with most of the commons and the heaths and with them the fairs. In the mid- dle of the last century the state planners tried to complete the eradication of gypsy life by taking gypsy children into care and not giving them back to their parents unless they took up the offer of a council house. Like most state-planning exercises, it was wrong-headed. We would be better off as a nation if more people were to fol- low the gypsies' example and take to life on the road.
Many of our social problems arise from a lack of mobility in the manual workforce: we've got too many people stuck in council tenancies or encumbered with negative equity in housing built to serve long-dead industries in the north, while in the south we have plenty of jobs and not enough housing. If Longbridge workers lived in caravans rather than in three-bed semis, they would be able to up and off to the expanding Honda plant in Swindon or the Skoda factories of the Czech Republic, rather than have public money showered upon them in an attempt to create employ- ment locally. It is no coincidence that industries which are quietly thriving — car- pets being an example — make heavy use of gypsy labour: they are able to call on a workforce which is fleet of foot. Others, such as soft-fruit farming in Kent, have withered partly as a result of a lack of gyp- sies: no one of fixed abode in the south- east can any longer afford to work for fruit-picking wages.
It is thoroughly illogical that we should be championing the eastward expansion of the European Union and its single market, while at the same time trying to block out a group of people who are trying to exercise one of the main implications of the single market: the right to travel to look for work anywhere in Europe. Gypsies embody the very spirit of the free market. Rather than scorning them, we should hold them up as an example to the house-bound unem- ployed who spend their redundancy money on double-glazing and then sit around moaning at the government for not bring- ing a job to their doorstep. As Lord Tebbit might have said: in yer caravan.
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