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Travellers Resist Biggest Eviction Of The Homeless

Dale Farm Solidarity | 25.01.2011 22:25 | Dale Farm | Anti-racism | Repression | Social Struggles

They are the most politically marginalized people in this country and across Europe; marginalized in the UK in every other way too, having no legal place to live, unable to send children to school because of police move-ons, and even refused service in pubs and restuarants.

But Travellers today are standing up for themselves and nowhere more so than at Dale Farm, in Essex. Here a hundred families have been under siege for ten years, refused planning consent to live on their own land; though it's only an old scrap-yard converted into a mobile-home park.

Dale Farm Travellers are making a final stand against what they see as an act of ethnic-cleansing equal in its brutality to the clearances of Roma camps in Italy and France. They are asking for your help.

Newswire Links:
Defend Dale Farm! Help resist Ethnic Cleansing | Defence Planing | Imminent Eviction | Constant & Co. to make £2m | Evictions of traveler families at Hovefields site

External Links:
Dale Farm Blog | Essex University Human Rights Clinic



Basildon District Council, champion of the homeless when set up to house bombed-out East Enders, is today a Tory stronghold. And the Tories are bent on getting rid of the illegal Gypsies at any cost.

That cost increases monthly through small-scale evictions and huge legal bills. So far the council admit to spending £2m. But by the time the local government elections come round in May, that figure could have risen five-fold.

Tory council-leader Tony Ball has vowed to clear Dale Farm, which is the largest Travellers' community in Britain. And it will take the biggest eviction operation yet to achieve this, at a cost of a whopping £13m.

Essex police have applied to the Home Office for £10m special funding, just for the policing side, as they expect residents and their supporters to put up stiff resistance.

Already Essex University Human Rights Clinic has pledged to provide a team of legal observers. Meanwhile the Dale Farm Solidarity Campaign is pressing the UK Government to heed two UN requests that the eviction be called off pending provision of acceptable alternative accommodation.

Basildon has offered some substandard council flats to a number of families. But all have refused as the Travellers say they want to stay together as a community and will cling to their traditional way of life at almost any price. If they must move, it would be onto another piece of ground and not into social housing.

The Gypsy Council (GC) is urging Basildon to accept land made available by HCA, the Homes and Communities Agency (one quango not yet dismantled). The GC has itself put in for planning permission to develop a new caravan park on an HCA site for those threatened with eviction.

Within the next few weeks Basildon must decide which way to jump. Most believe that if Home Secretary Teresa May chooses to ignore the UN pleas and stumps up the cash for the eviction, Basildon will send in the bailiffs along with a small army of riot police.

If that happens they could be confronted by hundreds of desperate Travellers, and a good many supporters who believe that this is a case of establishment violence hiding behind a smoke screen of planning regulations - and must be challenged and defeated.

There are no legal vacant stopping places for Gypsies in Essex. Only a long waiting list. But Basildon is ready to drive families out on the road with nowhere to go.

Dale Farm Solidarity

Comments

Hide the following 8 comments

ok.

26.01.2011 02:06

yup, I am going to help with this.

No eviction, not on our watch.

fly poster


The deepest, self-loathing, racism

26.01.2011 02:31

'No blacks, no dogs,no Gypsies'
 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/no-blacks-no-dogsno-gypsies-860873.html
"Studies in recent years have shown that Gypsies and Travellers experience more racism than any other group in the UK, including asylum-seekers."


'Traveller's blues'
 http://www.firmmagazine.com/features/812/Traveller%27s_blues.html
"With the dynamic in Scotland inverted, and with the telescope reversed on barely a thousand and a half who live outside the norms of the remaining 5 million, surely an amenable solution can be found and exercised"

I am not a gypsy, Roma or traveller, but due to my experiences with activism I normally have to live out-doors, normally quite comfortably but sometimes dangerously. And I can say without a shadow of a doubt, things have been made much worse for the homeless of any creed by councils over the past twenty years. Country idylls have been closed off deliberately, but worse than that minds have been closed off. I am taking legal action against a national newspaper that prints racist, really undeniably Nazi, comments against Roma while publicly condemning racism. You can't be against racism and still condemn the Roma, logically, morally, you just can't. That's you once your home is repossessed.

Danny


Not only...

26.01.2011 09:16

"They are the most politically marginalized people in this country and across Europe"
Failed asylum seekers face the same prejudice, day-to-day difficulties in simply living, police harrassment and verbal and physical abuse.
Full support and soldarity to the GRT community, full support to our asylum seeker friends, full support to all those marginalised by an uncaring, excluding State.

anon


Best Regards To The Roma

27.01.2011 13:03

Britain is turning into a Fascist State... perhaps it always has been!

Now is the time for all people to stand together, we may have differences but we can work them out peacefully. I'm tired of the state bullying and pushing people around and saying they are doing it for the good of the public.

We need to work together on this... it has become clear to me that all political parties are corrupt and working hand-in-hand with the banks and corporations. They are more interested in profits than people.

BTW - What happened to all the beautiful forests and common land that once covered this land? Why have we allowed these scumbags to sell off our public land and property to their friends and legislate thousands of rules and regulations limiting our freedom to enjoy them?

Stop letting the crimiinal elite turn us one agains the other - Peace!

Klamber


Solidarity - but mind yer language

28.01.2011 22:19

Just a quick point - please be careful what language you use about travellers, those in Dale Farm are a mix of Roma Gypsies and Irish travellers. Calling them all gypsies is inaccurate.

Donnacha DeLong
mail e-mail: donnacha.delong@talktalk.net
- Homepage: http://donnachadelong.info


A little truth

14.02.2011 12:07

Try living next door to these filth, then you'd soon change your minds!

Buster


Next door...

23.03.2011 09:29

Yeah, I can imagine Buster, liing next door to the council/government scumbags, it would be terribly tempting to chant protest all night.

I know of, course, you were being racist.

These are desperate people doing desperate things to maintain their way of life. Travellers of all types appear to be more self sufficient, more sorted than Almost anyone. But they do not comply with the state ideals. The government want people in houses so they can keep a track of anyone it feels fit to, they want to ensure their tax is always paid and this is hard to enforce on people with potetially no fixed address. Treated line scum, travellers sometimes have to act even more defensively as their way of life is being exterminated. Don't think that if they couldn't get away with it, extermination wouldn't be on the cards. Dont trust the state to look after anyone.

Sam


Responsible for their own image

27.06.2011 15:29

I would ask watchers and bloggers reading this to consider one thing. Do you think that travellers/roma/Gypsies in some small way maybe to their own poor image? I have had many contcats with groups of travelling people in my professional and personal life and I must say 90% negative. Their lifestyle based around crime, ripping people off, fighting anyone who challenges them and totally disrespecting anyone who is 'Gorga' does them no good. i worked alot with trafficke women and found Roma to be heavily involved with it even trafficking their own young women into sexual slavery.
I couldn't careless what happens to Dale farm but I hope thta those evitced learn to live like human beings so next time there won't be massed support for their eviction by local working class people fed up with how how these animals behave.
I meant no disrespect to animals in my last comment.

Adam
mail e-mail: adampamment@yahoo.com