The Traveller's Evictions Pt 4: This Sad Farce Unfolds

We were treated to a disgusting display today of the agents of the wealthy establishment using overwhelming force to move in on the shabby enclave of the Travellers - the gypsies who occupy the Dale Farm site in Essex, England.

As I write, a few protesters are still in place, chained to the underneath of vehicles as officers in full riot gear scrabble in the dirt to extract them. Many other who were cuffed to the scaffold at the entry gate were removed throughout the afternoon by police and bailiffs using a huge cherry picker and a crane complete with iron cage!

There looked to be in excess of 300 officers plus another 200 or so bailiffs. Police were seen using tasers and several travellers were taken to hospital, although the violence level was thankfully low...no police or bailiffs were injured by nightfall today (Wednesday, 19 October).

The whole affair is so patently ridiculous when you examine the situation carefully. The site is divided into two areas, one legal, the other "illegal." Note that the residents have actually bought the land on both areas. Much of the "illegal" area has sites which are legal and permissible; many of the travellers have also just moved laterally to the legal side, making that area badly overcrowded.

The eviction proceeded with astonished kids looking on; mothers and babies fleeing in terror; activists helping the travellers festooned all over the entrance to the site, chained to trucks, scaffolding and each other; news agencies from many places shoving microphones into any face that looks like it might have an opinion.

Dozens of emergency vehicles: ambulances, police cruisers, fire engines, "black Marias," (prison transport buses) and the bailiff's vans litter the streets outside the gate, while the whole was set off by fires burning inside the site and the cries of those being harried by the police.

Bizarrely, activists were calling Sky and BBC News all day and holding live interviews by cell phone! It is only too obvious that the newsworthiness of the event and the number of reporters and cameramen present are contributing to holding the government forces in check and having them stick more or less to their mandate.

This is costing upwards of eighteen million pounds! Enough to buy a decent house for all the families involved. But, hey! Can't do that, not fair to everyone else!

We had a saying when I was in the navy which says, more or less, this government wouldn't give you the cheese found under your foreskin! The British establishment has never understood generosity, except to themselves and those who prop them up (principally, bankers). Anyone reading just a few chapters of British history will be appalled at the meanness, cruelty and greed of the so-called upper classes; much worse in past time than today of course.

This has been called ethnic cleansing, and to an extent it is so. Too many ordinary British citizens see the Gypsies as trash to be driven around from pillar to post and not allowed to settle anywhere. Most who actually got to know them in their site at Dale Farm saw this to be patently untrue. They are just very poor and not terribly well educated and who have found it impossible to get good jobs or have any hope of getting on to this blasted "property ladder." Otherwise, they are normal families who love their kids and their aged; they shop locally and have helped the economy of the community in Basildon. Their kids all go to local schools and are doing as well as their peers. Yes, some are on welfare, but so is a big percentage of everyone else in modern Britain.

So what have the government achieved by ten years of persecution and denial, followed by this mad-hatter's tea party?

At least 23 people have been arrested; the land will never become green belt again: the irony is that although some of the residents can be evicted for erecting buildings on their land without planning permission, (retroactive planning IS granted to a large percentage of householders, but hardly at all to travellers), the officials and bailiffs cannot remove their fences round their land, nor the concrete pads and streets they have put down!

They can come back and sit on the cleared land they own and contemplate the arrant and criminal stupidity of this inflexible system that allows bankers to bankrupt a nation and walk away without penalty and just prepare to do the same again; the power-mad effete unwisely plunge the country into foreign wars; politicians who attempt all sorts of evasion when they are caught fiddling their own expenses for millions, while 80 marginalized and desperate folk are hounded from the only little piece of dirt they wanted to call their own - and it was dreary land that no one else wanted!.

The wealthy Cameron, and his Oxbridge gang of thugs, along with the local council chiefs in cahoots with the courts; and all who conspired to deny these poor wretches even a modicum of the goodies the uppah crust all take for granted, YOU STINK!!

Just see if you get re-elected, at least Labour left them in place and turned a sensible blind-eye, refusing to allow evictions.

Shakespeare called the law “an ass,” this is especially true here where a judge could have given the travellers further relief.

Human rights advocates throughout Europe are infuriated with this outcome and we have not heard the last of this business by a long chalk.

More if appropriate later.