Yes
Many ironic remarks have been made about the case of the Dale Farm “Travellers who refuse to travel”. In Essex, a 400 strong community of Irish Travellers are fighting an eviction notice in a court case that is the culmination of ten years of legal battle. Or, depending on your perspective, a battle spanning hundreds of years for Travellers’ rights.
As many as 30,000 people in Britain today are defined as gypsies or Travellers, some with roots dating back to the 12th century. They regard themselves as a marginalised British ethnic minority. Apart from knowledge gleaned from that “accurate” portrayal of traveller life, ‘My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding’, and the odd grumble from surrounding country villages, many of us feel we know relatively little about them. As a result, this debate can feel like a politically incorrect minefield, packed with misconceptions and disgruntled locals.
According to some of the choicest comments in online newspaper articles, the Irish Travellers fighting for their homes are “parasites”, “Irish tinker chavs” and “filthy pikeys”. A major British newspaper spent most of an article poking fun at the “Dale Farm divas'” outfits, pondering sardonically “they were so dressed to impress that there was speculation they could be hoping to star in an offshoot of ‘My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding'”. With such flagrant prejudice against the Travellers, is it any wonder they have dubbed the council’s attempt to evict them ‘ethnic cleansing’?
This eviction case however seems not to be motivated by intolerance, but the sticky red tape of planning permission. Although classified a greenfield site, Dale Farm was originally a scrap yard, bought by the Travellers thirty years ago. Generally much of the land the Travellers buy follows this description: not a great site of beauty and disused.
As well as the pile of contentious planning and legal issues, you can add the further complication that half of the site has planning permission to build, unlike the other half. Here a human rights argument can be made as the eviction of half the site would mean the break up of the community. The council providing “alternative accommodation” would mean a loss of this communal and supportive way of life.
In 1968, local caravan sites were encouraged by law to support pitches for Travellers. However, in 1994 the Conservative Party repealed this act and Travellers were forced to fend for themselves. Traveller Jake Bower’s statement “it is pretty much impossible to get planning permission” is supported by the fact that 90% of planning applications made by Travellers have been rejected.
Gypsies and Travellers may get a bad press, yet this happens to noisy students and others alike. Their cultural heritage is no reason to discriminate against them, whether verbally or through cumbersome planning permission blockages. Travellers should not have to occupy land that is not lawfully theirs: yet they are forced to through lack of alternatives.
No
The simple and obvious answer to this question is no. Travellers should not be allowed to illegally occupy land because nobody should be allowed to illegally occupy land, nobody should be allowed to illegally do anything and if they do they should be punished. That’s the way the legal system in this country works and it applies to every single person who lives here, or at least that’s how it should work. Instead we get situations like at Dale Farm, a group of Travellers living and building on land without permission is clearly illegal, yet the local council have to fight an uphill battle just to enforce their legal right to evict them.
Arguments against the eviction say that forcing the Travellers to move would be some appalling abuse of their basic human rights, but as of 2008 more than 120 people are evicted from their homes every single day in the UK, and they are evicted without mass media coverage, without celebrities and politicians arguing for their right to stay and without throngs of protesters marching outside to defend their human rights. So why do Travellers deserve to be protected when the general public aren’t; do they have some kind of claim to the land that transcends the law? Or is it that Travellers are exempt from the rules of this country. It’s neither; they are just another group of people breaking the law and just like absolutely anyone else who commits a crime, they need to pay the price.
But what price is it exactly that the Travellers will be paying? From the way the media are carrying on you’d expect that the Dale Farm Travellers are threatened with being cast out onto the streets and forced to fend for themselves, which is absurd; the council are legally obliged to find an alternative site for any group before they can be evicted from a site so there will be somewhere for them to live legally.
The main criticism of relocating the Travellers is that it would mean they would be separated from their friends and family still living on Dale Farm which again brings up the question of equality. Nearly everyone will at some point have been forced to move away from friends and family, in fact most people reading this article will have when they came to university and as I’m sure many of you know it’s an emotional experience. However it is certainly not justification to break the law just to remain close to them and by no stretch of the law can moving away be described as a violation of human rights.
The law is absolute and applies to everyone. The fact that they are Travellers is completely irrelevant; everyone is equal in the eyes of the law and they should be dealt with as such (which does not have to mean some inhumane punishment). What we also need to realise is that human rights must also operate within the confines of the law – after all everyone has a right to food and water but that does not mean we can just steal it from shops if we don’t find it readily available at home.