[travellers] newts and 2.5 million pounds

The thing which caught my eye in walking past the kitchen bench today was the front page headline in the local rag: “Traveller Camp held up by Newts.”

It didn’t register at first and I thought it had to be something to do with Ken [rats with wings] Livingstone but at least it promised to be funny. When I mentioned the issue in conversation, the answer came back that it was to do with gypsies.

It said that the Council authority had been delayed and “that as part of their site investigations, a newt survey must be carried out first.” Reading on, the article said that “for the past six months, the Council has been paying to clean up and collect rubbish from a little known accepted encampment … an unauthorized site the Council is letting the Travellers use.”

Gypsies.

Slowly the story came out about the situation in Britain - how they squat on available land, often private or how they go to these sites, get evicted but the eviction doesn’t take effect for some days and they trash the site and the area before moving on.

I was amazed that the Council were even contemplating the £2.5 million super-site for the Travellers and yet I can see the thinking – make it desirable enough and they might stay there and leave other places alone. Also, as a person who has been going from place to place in the past few months, there is some sympathy for them.

“No, no,” I was told. “You had no choice – they prefer it.”

Well, I don’t know if “preferred” is the correct word but I’m in no position to argue. And another thing - being always moved on is pretty dire but if half the tales of their shocking behaviour are true, then I can see why people don’t want them anywhere near.

Wiki has this to say about them:

Travellers refer to themselves as "Pavees", whereas some English people often refer to them with the derogatory terms "Pikeys. Under the government's "Gypsy and Traveller Sites Grant", designated sites for Travellers' use are provided by the council, and funds are made available to local authorities for the construction of new sites and maintenance and extension of existing sites. However, Travellers also frequently make use of other, non-authorised sites, including public "common land" and private plots, including large fields.

One of the main bones of contention seems to be that they are issued with eviction notices but have some days to move on. During that time, they allegedly trash the site and the general area, which costs the local council a packet to clean up [£14 500 is one estimate by a local councillor]. They do sometimes buy land and then build on it, requesting retrospective planning permission, so the story goes.

In this difficult economic climate as well, spending £2.5 million on gypsies would be a little hard to justify to the local ratepayer, methinks. One Councillor said:

“Police have said that they would move them on if there was somewhere to put them but there is nowhere.”

Look at the National Geographic video on the Travellersgives a bit of an insight into these itinerant people. The authorities and the hostility of local residents are one thing but they have other issues as well:

The health threats to them in some ways reflect their traditional semi-nomadic way of life, with members of the community 10 times more likely to die in road accidents. These, at 22 per cent, represented the most common cause of death among males. Infants are 10 times more likely to die before reaching the age of two, while a third of travellers die before the age of 25. In addition, 80 per cent of travellers die before the age of 65.

On the other hand, travellers are less at risk of dying from heart attacks or strokes - though this is largely because so few of them reach the age when they are likely to die from such causes. Suicides are also more common than among the general population.

They are a dilemma. In a society where family, home ownership, job, and car are the aspirations of most, the fate of closed society which bucks conventions and does not abide by conventional behaviour, in majority terms, is always going to cause fierce resentment with that majority.

They’ve been the first victims of despotism before and in a militaristic state with a culture of criminalization of the ordinary citizen, who would raise a voice in protest if the gypsies were “spirited away”?

Once again I have no answers. They move onwards and onwards, never stopping until they move full circle and then they move on or are moved on again. Is there any end to it?