LEAVE the Conservative Party and save your country!

morstar

Thanks for posting. It’s a view I have some sympathy with but ultimately can’t agree with.

It’s a Pandora’s box of where majority lifestyles dictate what minority lifestyles are allowed to exist.

We have motor vehicles and the roads are made to accommodate cars. It’s time to stop riding your bike, it’s a kids toy.

TheBigBean

A nomadic lifestyle with kids is tricky, but otherwise there is no reason why you should need an address.

rjsterry

surrey_commuter said:

Here is the Matthew Parris article in full. I could edit it but that would defeat the point.

Last month (it was reported) “the High Court . . . ruled that local authorities can no longer issue blanket bans on Gypsies and Travellers stopping on parcels of land”. The reporter called this “a landmark case which campaigners have hailed as a ‘victory for equality’”. The story appeared in The Guardian, illustrated by a sweet photograph of a gaily painted traditional horse-drawn gypsy wagon with big wooden wheels.

Most of Britain would see things differently.

A group of Travellers has taken over much of the central car park in my nearest town, Matlock. Because this is adjacent to both the railway station and Sainsbury’s townspeople observe Traveller life at close quarters, and I’ve walked through the encampment many times a week for ages now. A scattering of Portaloos and wheelie-bins have arrived, more caravans recently, dogs on chains, and a string of steel barricades: the town is facing a serious loss of amenity and people worry — reasonably or otherwise — about security.

Matlock does not want to present this face to tourists arriving by rail or bus. But it’s also fair to say these Travellers have done neither me nor anyone I know any harm. Public anger, though, is undeniable.

Our district council describes the core group (though further caravans have since arrived) as a “family [with] severe and complex welfare needs . . . joined by a related family who are in a similar position”. The council is caught between a statutory duty to provide a site for Travellers and intense local opposition to any proposed site.


So far, so familiar. But this episode has encouraged me to examine a real-life example of a national problem that troubles many of us and to do some research and hard thinking.

If you’ve time I recommend reading the House of Commons library’s 2019 report on Gypsies and Travellers — not because it will help you understand but because it won’t. Inquire, and you go down an Alice-in-Wonderland rabbit hole in which things that had seemed simple tangle into a mind-bending complexity from which you surface, gasping that it’s all just too complicated. You give up.

Even the vocabulary stumps us. There are Gypsies and Travellers and Irish Travellers and Scottish Travellers and boat-dwellers and Roma and New Age travellers, and much overlapping. Most are designated in law as an “ethnic grouping”. Many do in fact live in houses and don’t “travel” but reserve the right to travel as part of their “identity”. About 63,000 people in Britain, mostly in England, self-define as Gypsies and Travellers, but the real figure may be much larger. Some own the land they occupy; some are on “authorised” and others on “unauthorised” sites. During the decade to 2018 numbers increased by nearly a third.

These communities “experience some of the worst outcomes of any group, across a wide range of social indicators. The Equality and Human Rights Commission . . . has concluded that the life chances of Gypsies and Travellers had declined . . . The contributory factors . . . may include deprivation, social exclusion and discrimination” and “women’s equality” problems. A grim picture is painted of high mortality, morbidity and long-term health conditions, of low child immunisation and “poor health literacy” and the obvious difficulties with schooling.

SPONSORED


Emerge with me from the rabbit hole, breathe deeply and let’s take things back to essentials. The idea of Travellers’ human rights is rooted in the private “enclosures” (from the 16th century onwards) of once very extensive “common land” on which living and working had been quite normal. Whole swathes of people were dispossessed and, not unnaturally, the idea grew that they deserved special rights. Modern Travellers are the legatees of this idea.

There’s no doubt that travelling people are interconnected groupings with some common sense of identity, and cultures that share distinctive features and problems; nor is there any doubt that they face rejection and prejudice from the property-rooted majority. I won’t get tangled in the weeds of accusation and counter-accusation, but restrict myself to what follows.

One of my nephews is a “bargee” — he lives on his canal boat. He explains that though travellers on water are linked by some sense of community and communion with Britain’s canal network, nomads of any kind do not feel the connection with one patch of land that most of us do, because in their minds they are always ready to move on. We “somewhere” people see their (to us) careless treatment of land as uglifying and irresponsible. But their mindset has so much less sense of tether between person and real estate. With no common language (as it were), discussion and negotiation between the tethered and the untethered becomes almost impossible.

What have we here but the deathless conflict between the nomad and the pastoralist? Between (if you knew the rage of my late grandfather, of FW Parris: High Class Family Butchers, Sydenham) the shopkeeper and the stallholder?

And here, I’m afraid, this column must change key: from the reflective to the brutal.

There is simply no place for the true nomad in modern Britain. It isn’t their fault, it isn’t our fault, it isn’t the law’s fault, but life here involves having an address, being contactable, keeping children in school, paying tax on your property, accepting responsibility for a defined patch of real estate as proprietor or tenant. The way we live in this country is as cruel to the British Traveller as, in Algeria, the mosque, the walled oasis garden and the barbed-wire desert border-post is to the noble, blue-veiled Tuareg tribesman and his camels. I prefer the company of the man on the camel but I would have to tell him that his way of life is finished.

It cannot be otherwise. So we should stop forcing local authorities to create Traveller sites, phase out the “ethnic minority” rights of people who are not a race but a doomed mindset, prioritise with the utmost generosity the offer of social housing to Traveller families; and, to those who refuse it, begin a gradual but relentless squeeze on anyone who tries without permission to park their home on public property or the property of others.

This should be done with as much humanity as is consistent with telling a group of people honestly that their lifestyle offers them and their children no future, but their country wants to help them change it. Travellers are just people, just human souls like you or me; good, bad or indifferent, like you or me; and victims of their circumstances perhaps more than you or me.

There is a place for them but no longer for their way of living. Is there a party, is there a politician in Britain, with the courage to say so?

It's that blunt assertion without anything really to back it up that marks this out as just 'why can't they just be the same as us?' with a bit of patronising handwringing. I'm not sure the sub-editor was really that far off with the headline.

kingstongraham

TheBigBean said:

A nomadic lifestyle with kids is tricky, but otherwise there is no reason why you should need an address.

That's the bit I don't get - why is it anyone else's problem if people choose to live like that, as long as they do park on approved sites?

When travellers park on the local school playground or the supermarket car park, it's then a problem.

surrey_commuter

kingstongraham said:

TheBigBean said:

A nomadic lifestyle with kids is tricky, but otherwise there is no reason why you should need an address.

That's the bit I don't get - why is it anyone else's problem if people choose to live like that, as long as they do park on approved sites?

When travellers park on the local school playground or the supermarket car park, it's then a problem.

People don't object to a nomadic lifestyle what they object to is criminal behaviour

TheBigBean

kingstongraham said:

TheBigBean said:

A nomadic lifestyle with kids is tricky, but otherwise there is no reason why you should need an address.

That's the bit I don't get - why is it anyone else's problem if people choose to live like that, as long as they do park on approved sites?

When travellers park on the local school playground or the supermarket car park, it's then a problem.

I doubt he objects to continuous cruiser canal boat licences.

DeVlaeminck

kingstongraham said:

TheBigBean said:

A nomadic lifestyle with kids is tricky, but otherwise there is no reason why you should need an address.

That's the bit I don't get - why is it anyone else's problem if people choose to live like that, as long as they do park on approved sites?

When travellers park on the local school playground or the supermarket car park, it's then a problem.

Do people object to travellers who use official sites - unless they feel those travellers are committing crime?

kingstongraham

surrey_commuter said:

kingstongraham said:

TheBigBean said:

A nomadic lifestyle with kids is tricky, but otherwise there is no reason why you should need an address.

That's the bit I don't get - why is it anyone else's problem if people choose to live like that, as long as they do park on approved sites?

When travellers park on the local school playground or the supermarket car park, it's then a problem.

People don't object to a nomadic lifestyle what they object to is criminal behaviour

Did you read the article? "There is simply no place for the true nomad in modern Britain."

Dorset_Boy

Problem is that a lot don't use the approved sites, they park up on common or private land. They then leave the place an absolute tip which the local council or private land owner then has to clear up at a cost to either the CT payers or the land owner. The travellers don't pay a penny for the clearup.

Then there is the criminality aspect.

I'm sure people don't mind when they use official sites, so long as they remain law abiding in the daily aspects of their lives.

kingstongraham

Dorset_Boy said:

Problem is that a lot don't use the approved sites, they park up on common or private land. They then leave the place an absolute tip which the local council or private land owner then has to clear up at a cost to either the CT payers or the land owner. The travellers don't pay a penny for the clearup.

Then there is the criminality aspect.

I'm sure people don't mind when they use official sites, so long as they remain law abiding in the daily aspects of their lives.

The article says that there is no place for their lifestyle, and there should be no approved public sites.

It's not a hateful article, but I don't agree with it.

Dorset_Boy

I also don't agree that there should be no approved sites.
They shouldn't however be able to park up on public or private land, and certainly shouldn't leave places like a shithole which a significant number of them do.
I suspect the approved sites are better maintained.

DeVlaeminck

kingstongraham said:

surrey_commuter said:

kingstongraham said:

TheBigBean said:

A nomadic lifestyle with kids is tricky, but otherwise there is no reason why you should need an address.

That's the bit I don't get - why is it anyone else's problem if people choose to live like that, as long as they do park on approved sites?

When travellers park on the local school playground or the supermarket car park, it's then a problem.

People don't object to a nomadic lifestyle what they object to is criminal behaviour

Did you read the article? "There is simply no place for the true nomad in modern Britain."

Yes I read the article I thought we'd moved in to a more general conversation - my view is that it isn't so much the idea of a nomadic lifestyle people object to.

What Matthew Parris has written is something he can get past the editor of The Times and fulfill his contract for the week but I don't think it's really the true picture.

kingstongraham

Fair enough, but I'd have thought the fact that got printed in The Times might indicate a hardening of attitudes generally. I would not have been surprised if something expressing the same views a few years ago were blocked by their over zealous community police if posted in the comments section.

rjsterry

Dorset_Boy said:

I also don't agree that there should be no approved sites.
They shouldn't however be able to park up on public or private land, and certainly shouldn't leave places like a censored which a significant number of them do.
I suspect the approved sites are better maintained.

Sites - whether provided publicly or privately - need to go through the planning system, and if you think how upset people get about their neighbour building an extension you can imagine how many objections the applications receive. So the councillors duck the issue and on it goes.

TheBigBean

rjsterry said:

Dorset_Boy said:

I also don't agree that there should be no approved sites.
They shouldn't however be able to park up on public or private land, and certainly shouldn't leave places like a censored which a significant number of them do.
I suspect the approved sites are better maintained.

Approved sites need to go through the planning system, and if you think how upset people get about their neighbour building an extension you can imagine how many objections the applications receive. So the councillors duck the issue and on it goes.

Used to be a good way to get planning. Apply for some building or other. Locals complain, so application gets rejected. Then apply to become a traveller site, so locals really complain. Suddenly, all the previous objections fall away.

rjsterry

kingstongraham said:

Dorset_Boy said:

Problem is that a lot don't use the approved sites, they park up on common or private land. They then leave the place an absolute tip which the local council or private land owner then has to clear up at a cost to either the CT payers or the land owner. The travellers don't pay a penny for the clearup.

Then there is the criminality aspect.

I'm sure people don't mind when they use official sites, so long as they remain law abiding in the daily aspects of their lives.

The article says that there is no place for their lifestyle, and there should be no approved public sites.

It's not a hateful article, but I don't agree with it.

What: just because he prefaced it with a bit of handwringing about health outcomes and education?

briantrumpet

rjsterry said:

kingstongraham said:

Dorset_Boy said:

Problem is that a lot don't use the approved sites, they park up on common or private land. They then leave the place an absolute tip which the local council or private land owner then has to clear up at a cost to either the CT payers or the land owner. The travellers don't pay a penny for the clearup.

Then there is the criminality aspect.

I'm sure people don't mind when they use official sites, so long as they remain law abiding in the daily aspects of their lives.

The article says that there is no place for their lifestyle, and there should be no approved public sites.

It's not a hateful article, but I don't agree with it.

What: just because he prefaced it with a bit of handwringing about health outcomes and education?

I have to admit I was quite surprised by the pivot.

surrey_commuter

kingstongraham said:

surrey_commuter said:

kingstongraham said:

TheBigBean said:

A nomadic lifestyle with kids is tricky, but otherwise there is no reason why you should need an address.

That's the bit I don't get - why is it anyone else's problem if people choose to live like that, as long as they do park on approved sites?

When travellers park on the local school playground or the supermarket car park, it's then a problem.

People don't object to a nomadic lifestyle what they object to is criminal behaviour

Did you read the article? "There is simply no place for the true nomad in modern Britain."

I take it to mean that the days of a Romany tinker sharpening tools or seasonal agricultural labour no longer provide the funding to allow a true nomad to fund their lifestyle

kingstongraham

rjsterry said:

kingstongraham said:

Dorset_Boy said:

Problem is that a lot don't use the approved sites, they park up on common or private land. They then leave the place an absolute tip which the local council or private land owner then has to clear up at a cost to either the CT payers or the land owner. The travellers don't pay a penny for the clearup.

Then there is the criminality aspect.

I'm sure people don't mind when they use official sites, so long as they remain law abiding in the daily aspects of their lives.

The article says that there is no place for their lifestyle, and there should be no approved public sites.

It's not a hateful article, but I don't agree with it.

What: just because he prefaced it with a bit of handwringing about health outcomes and education?

Where do you think he is expressing hatred?

TheBigBean

surrey_commuter said:

kingstongraham said:

surrey_commuter said:

kingstongraham said:

TheBigBean said:

A nomadic lifestyle with kids is tricky, but otherwise there is no reason why you should need an address.

That's the bit I don't get - why is it anyone else's problem if people choose to live like that, as long as they do park on approved sites?

When travellers park on the local school playground or the supermarket car park, it's then a problem.

People don't object to a nomadic lifestyle what they object to is criminal behaviour

Did you read the article? "There is simply no place for the true nomad in modern Britain."

I take it to mean that the days of a Romany tinker sharpening tools or seasonal agricultural labour no longer provide the funding to allow a true nomad to fund their lifestyle

Why not be a website designer?

kingstongraham

Or whatever his nephew does?

DeVlaeminck

It's interesting reading ethnography about travellers and gypsies - it also helps avoid the the dehumanising affect of almost everything else you read about them (and in my case any personal experience of them) is negative.

One of their objections to fitting in with society is in general they don't like living by the clock - the 9 to 5. I suppose it's a desire to be in charge of their own destiny. Website designer would be a good fit I imagine - it could be done remotely from wherever they were living, they could work their own hours. Maybe in the future you'll have or knocking at the door offering to redesign your website or if you have any IT problems you need help with ?

It's possible that the association with crime has come because travellers have just adapted to the loss of traditional sources of income - crime suits people who want to earn good money, not be tied down, have relatively little formal education, see themselves as apart from mainstream society - it's a good fit with the traveller culture and where they find socio-economic change has left them.

Jezyboy

TheBigBean said:

surrey_commuter said:

kingstongraham said:

surrey_commuter said:

kingstongraham said:

TheBigBean said:

A nomadic lifestyle with kids is tricky, but otherwise there is no reason why you should need an address.

That's the bit I don't get - why is it anyone else's problem if people choose to live like that, as long as they do park on approved sites?

When travellers park on the local school playground or the supermarket car park, it's then a problem.

People don't object to a nomadic lifestyle what they object to is criminal behaviour

Did you read the article? "There is simply no place for the true nomad in modern Britain."

I take it to mean that the days of a Romany tinker sharpening tools or seasonal agricultural labour no longer provide the funding to allow a true nomad to fund their lifestyle

Why not be a website designer?

Would imagine that having no fixed abode would make the contracting part difficult? Plus the more relaxed attitude towards education might mean that they aren't au fait with web design.

rjsterry

kingstongraham said:

rjsterry said:

kingstongraham said:

Dorset_Boy said:

Problem is that a lot don't use the approved sites, they park up on common or private land. They then leave the place an absolute tip which the local council or private land owner then has to clear up at a cost to either the CT payers or the land owner. The travellers don't pay a penny for the clearup.

Then there is the criminality aspect.

I'm sure people don't mind when they use official sites, so long as they remain law abiding in the daily aspects of their lives.

The article says that there is no place for their lifestyle, and there should be no approved public sites.

It's not a hateful article, but I don't agree with it.

What: just because he prefaced it with a bit of handwringing about health outcomes and education?

Where do you think he is expressing hatred?

I can see he's pulled the 'I don't hate them, I just hate what they do' trick. I mean if you are saying a way of life should be banned because it offends you, it's at the very least deep antipathy.

TheBigBean

Jezyboy said:

TheBigBean said:

surrey_commuter said:

kingstongraham said:

surrey_commuter said:

kingstongraham said:

TheBigBean said:

A nomadic lifestyle with kids is tricky, but otherwise there is no reason why you should need an address.

That's the bit I don't get - why is it anyone else's problem if people choose to live like that, as long as they do park on approved sites?

When travellers park on the local school playground or the supermarket car park, it's then a problem.

People don't object to a nomadic lifestyle what they object to is criminal behaviour

Did you read the article? "There is simply no place for the true nomad in modern Britain."

I take it to mean that the days of a Romany tinker sharpening tools or seasonal agricultural labour no longer provide the funding to allow a true nomad to fund their lifestyle

Why not be a website designer?

Would imagine that having no fixed abode would make the contracting part difficult? Plus the more relaxed attitude towards education might mean that they aren't au fait with web design.

It is harder to do than it should be, but there are ways around most things. A company can just use an accountant's address or a mail forwarding address. The typical issues are around opening bank accounts, accessing GPs etc, but these are no different whatever the job being done.

webboo

Pedalled past the permanent traveler site on the edge of Bridlington yesterday. Are they related to MF because they seemed to have smashed lots of things up and then thrown it all over the fences.

pblakeney

It is an interesting prospect to consider. I've been weighing up the option of renting out the house on retirement and using the proceeds to fund an endless summer. I have no need for a permanent address and can do everything online. Authorities don't like it though and can make life difficult for medical care and legal stuff. Voting for example.

Pross

TheBigBean said:

rjsterry said:

Dorset_Boy said:

I also don't agree that there should be no approved sites.
They shouldn't however be able to park up on public or private land, and certainly shouldn't leave places like a censored which a significant number of them do.
I suspect the approved sites are better maintained.

Approved sites need to go through the planning system, and if you think how upset people get about their neighbour building an extension you can imagine how many objections the applications receive. So the councillors duck the issue and on it goes.

Used to be a good way to get planning. Apply for some building or other. Locals complain, so application gets rejected. Then apply to become a traveller site, so locals really complain. Suddenly, all the previous objections fall away.

This or I've even come across landowners allowing travellers to temporarily set up on their proposed site for a few months then it's 'we're trying to move them on but it's a long process, if we were able to develop the land it wouldn't be a problem'.

No-one wants travellers pitched up on semi-permanent sites near them and I can certainly understand that having had to go past two such sites on my old commute to work. I found the people generally friendly and they'd often say good morning as they were out tethering ponies on the verges but I know a few cyclists had issues of being shot at with airguns and the places looked like scrapyards (there was another site just off my commute route that is far worse).

I've actually done a few bits of work for traveller sites (I'm working on one at the moment) and my dealings with their representatives have been fine. They pay their bills on time (one wanted to hand me it in cash on a site visit and in the end I had to write their cheque for them as they couldn't read or write), I wish some of the blue chip companies we work for would be so quick!

john80

DeVlaeminck said:

Ok I think he says that there should be a squeeze on travellers pitching up wherever they want? That basically the nomadic lifestyle isn't tenable in 21st century UK and we should squeeze them out whilst helping them transition to settled status?

It's a difficult issue. The romantic idea of the traditional gypsy lifestyle surviving in the modern age is appealing. Should we not provide space for travellers to live their lifestyle.

The issue is where that lifestyle has become associated with criminality - I don't think even the staunchest defender of travellers could argue their massive over representation in the prison population is purely down to police persecution.

Is there anything romantic about living in a caravan, doing your business in the surrounding bushes and then being persecuted by the majority of people you meet. There are also not many examples of travellers with money that don't own a house. I wonder why that would be.

ballysmate

surrey_commuter said:

kingstongraham said:

TheBigBean said:

A nomadic lifestyle with kids is tricky, but otherwise there is no reason why you should need an address.

That's the bit I don't get - why is it anyone else's problem if people choose to live like that, as long as they do park on approved sites?

When travellers park on the local school playground or the supermarket car park, it's then a problem.

People don't object to a nomadic lifestyle what they object to is criminal behaviour

Nail, may I introduce you to head.
Having now seen the article, it doesn't seem to be the hateful diatribe I was expecting.