A candle-lit vigil was held last night for actor Corin Redgrave following his collapse at a council meeting held to decide the fate of Britain's largest Traveller community. Redgrave suffered a severe heart attack while pleading with councillors not to vote for the destruction of Dale Farm. The meeting was adjourned as Redgrave was taken to a nearby hospital where he remains in intensive care. He was said this morning to be in a stable condition. His wife, actor Kika Markham, who earlier in the day had welcomed Dale Farm residents to a meeting at the House of Commons, was later at the hospital where Redgrave was on a lifesupport system. That morning Redgrave had chaired a packed meeting in the Jubilee Room at the Palace of Westminster called by Peace & Progress to try and prevent a forced eviction. Lord Avebury urged that a moratorium on evictions be imposed by the government until land was made available for private and council-run caravan parks. "We need action right now to save Dale Farm," Lord Avebury concluded. "Eviction will solve nothing. Under the Homelessness Act Basildon will still have responsibility." Kathleen McCarthy, chair of Dale Farm Residents Committee, said the threatened eviction had little to do with planning rules and everything to do with prejudice and racism. "Just leave us alone to send our children to school," she pleaded. HUMAN RIGHTS IGNORED Vice-chair of the Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights Jeremy Corbyn said Travellers had been denegrated and vilified in a way that would never be tolerated in respect of other ethnic groups. He hoped that reasoned argument and protest action would lead to a victory of common sense at Dale Farm and an end to the spate of evictions around the country, which were giving Britain a bad name. The latest EU report was highly critical of the UK record on treatment of Travellers whose human rights were routinely ignored. Martin Collins, director of the Irish Travellers Movement, pointed out that Irish Travellers were taking the brunt of criticism with headlines in the press like "Stamp On The Camps". He said it was within the power of the Deputy Prime Minister to step in and resolve the issue of planning consent. Accusing the government of habouring a hidden agenda, Sylvia Done, of Traveller and Gypsy Affairs, said she feared Tory leader Michael Howard's plan for old army camps to be turned into concentration camp-like reserves for Travellers might still be on the books. Meanwhile, children were being severely traumatised by evictions and many had expressed their fears in painting depicting fires and caravans on fire. Nick Harvey MP likened the recent election tactics by the Conservative Party when voters had been egged on by racist statements against Gypsies to the situation in Germany during the rise of Nazism in the l930s. He was also shocked by the attitude of the Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott whose inaction was allowing the crisis to worsen. Even more alarming was a conversation he had overheard in which a "very senior politician" on the Labour frontbench had asked whether the UK could derogate from sections of the Human Rights Covention so as to avoid certain obligations towards Gypsies. It appeared some people in the Labour Party held views similar to Howard. CARAVANS BURNED Referring to the immediate prospects at Basildon, Grattan Puxon said if the council voted to attempt an eviction by force and bring in Constant & Co. that decision would be challenged in the courts. More than 40 Dale Farm residents had asked solicitor Keith Lomax to represent them in an application for a Judicial Review and an Injunction stopping Basildon from taking direct action. He described how Constant, a private security company specialising in eviction of Gyspies, had cut a swathe of destruction across Britain, destroying more than 250 private plots in the past two years. Old people had been assaulted, children terrorised and mountains of property, including caravans, been burned. "The campaign for Gypsy rights has never been stronger nor more united," Puxon said. "But if we can't together save Dale Farm then we have failed and this destruction will go on unchecked." Toma Nikoleaff, chair of the Trans-European Roma Federation pledged his solidarity with Dale Farm residents. He said he had been appalled to find that Britain was treating its Roma and Traveller minorities with such lack of regard for basic human rights. Wickford resident Ann Kobayashi said there was now a groundswell of support among local residents for the Dale Farm community. A growing number of people were saying they did not want to see the families simply evicted and their homes destroyed. Such brutality would cause untold harm and solve nothing. Twenty people at the meeting put them names forward to act as Human Rights Monitors in the event that Constant & Co are hired by Basildon to raze Dale Farm. The council have set aside three million euro for the operation. For further images: http://geocities.com/freedommarch2005/