BARBELITH underground
 

Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.


Underground > Switchboard >

Travellers and Traveller Rights.

  
 
macrophage
19:17 / 29.08.05
I travelled New Age style, and I have lived on Sites (both illegal and legal park ups) with both New Agers, Romani's, Gypsies, etc. We all got a bad press somehow because we represented a lifestylism so alien to Housey Society. I have lived with Caraven Dwellers, Horse Drawn Types, Barge Types, Bender Tent Dwellers, etc.

I have stayed on legal site's that always got closed by the Authorities. I was wondering what people think of Travellers and their various and colourful Groups and Packs that they have.

I have endured attacks from farmers and heavies to get us to move on. I have endured shitty council underhand tactics. I have endured even crapper Media tactics.

In some instances we had to move every day (no fucking joke). What do people think of travellers? I'm now settled down but I'm going back to the old road life, I miss it and have a huge void in my psyche now, I just can't enjoy house and city life.

Not alot of people liked us, some did but that's the Way of The Road.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
15:19 / 30.08.05
That's a very loose question and I'm not sure people really have a response to it, are there any specific things you want people to respond to? Police tactics? The issues surrounding illegal park-ups? The differences between travelling cultures? What are you trying to draw out with this thread?
 
 
macrophage
19:41 / 30.08.05
I just wanted to pre-empt a debate and some rapport about what others thought of travelling cultures.

General schemata really. Everything.

When I lived on the road we received alot of Abuse from others down to the fact we were different. People loathed us they thought we were the biggest scroungers around, yet we were working for a living.

We would have the council come down straight away when we 1st parked up, usually to do a head count, see if the kids needed schooling. In some instances the kids were bombarded with illogical racist abuse. Im some cases we were hounded from area to area. People think it is an easy life but you have the council, landowners, envoirenment health, baillifs, lawyers, police, etc down your necks.

Sometimes you would have Newspapers that would come down and interview you and then take everything out of context, as they do.

Now the Authorities have been trying to implement Static Sites which just amount to trying to catch the spirit of Travelling and what it is all about. You know with the Council Run sites, which are damn hard to get on. As they are trying to clamp down on Free Moving and Transient Travellers.

Having been on an Legal Site that was privately owned we had to goto court, they threw us out, shame. The only good thing is they declared us Gypsies by Legal Decree, which is good for council related blue ribbon when they come down to see you again on another newer site. You are far more Grounded then.

I just wanted to find out what folk thought about Travellers, what are their beliefs - do they support or condone it as a valid way of life?

When you travel it sets you apart from alot of the locals, generally you get on with it. Life is life.

I've never seen anything about travellers and wanted to kick start some lively debate.

In this day and age when everyone goes on about political correctness, alot of rights for travellers have went down the pan. This isn't right - what legalities if you think if any should come into play?
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
19:48 / 30.08.05
Ah - if this is a bout politics and law, it's probably a Switchboard thread. Let's see if anything can be salvaged.
 
 
Jack Fear
21:16 / 30.08.05
I just wanted to pre-empt a debate...

I do no' thin' that word means what you thin' it means.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
21:31 / 30.08.05
People think it is an easy life but you have the council, landowners, envoirenment health, baillifs, lawyers, police, etc down your necks.

I doubt you'd get many people on barbelith foolish enough to think that travelling was an easy life. There's been some debate on the board about labels applied to travellers of all types before and there's a general recognition that they're a minority who continue to experience prejudice that is not publicised enough.

Here are some links that people might want to discuss in this thread. The first is from April this year and concerns a notice asking people to move on from a site in Eckington.
The second is an Indymedia article from August 2004 concerning the treatment of travellers by Epping council.
The third presents the hard facts, it's part of the Commission for Racial Equality website and includes this statement: Criminal justice agencies do not ethnically monitor Gypsies and Irish Travellers, so accurate statistics are not available. It makes for interesting reading...
 
 
Jake, Colossus of Clout
02:40 / 31.08.05
I travelled New Age style, and I have lived on Sites (both illegal and legal park ups) with both New Agers, Romani's, Gypsies, etc. We all got a bad press somehow because we represented a lifestylism so alien to Housey Society. I have lived with Caraven Dwellers, Horse Drawn Types, Barge Types, Bender Tent Dwellers, etc.

Those bender tent dwellers sound like my kinda guys.

Seriously, though. Your posts didn't make everything exactly clear to me, but I don't think that you can really expect people to be okay with you camping illegally. I assume that refers to you camping on someone's private property without their permission. If that's the case, I have no sympathy at all.

If I was a farmer, I might have a large amount of property that I may not be using at the time, but I would still be royally pissed off if I went for a stroll and found a group of people camped out in one of my fields without asking permission. If they had asked, I may very well have said "sure, go to it," but the key there is asking. If you camp out somewhere, knowing full well that it's against the law, you can't really get too cranky about it when someone comes to roust you.

Many of your points were vague, and I'm not sure if I addressed exactly what you're getting at, but I'd welcome clarification.
 
 
illmatic
07:45 / 31.08.05
This thread has some relevant stuff in. The gist of what I had to say there was that travelling has got a lot harder the UK since the CJB, perhaps not as hard for the Romany communities as opposed to "New Age travellers" (hate that phrase), as it was pretty much an attempt to wipe out travellers as a lifestyle. You can relate the establishment dislike of travellers to stuff like the peace camps at Greenham Common and so on, which in turn links in with things like the Miners Strike.

I don't think anyone on this board would be stupid enough to express predjudices against travellers of either type, or to assume it's an easy life.
 
 
Jack The Bodiless
10:35 / 31.08.05
You don't think anyone on this board would be stupid enough to express a prejudice against a specific part of society?

Are you shitting me?
 
 
illmatic
11:38 / 31.08.05
My bad.

I was thinking in a kind of obvious "[insert group] are cunts, stink of shit and deserve to be shot" sort of way.
 
 
macrophage
17:09 / 31.08.05
Well the CJB the Criminal Jusice Bill along with the Public Order Acts did manage to largely attack travelling under the umbrella of clamping down on raves, though that was the Media Infection Hook the Spindoctor's were implementing.

I have been on loads of site's where we got sectioned under the Criminal Justice Act, it just means they (the Rozzers) can move you quicker than what the landowner can. Hence if you want a safe time you park on council land illegally as they tender to some rights for you. Similarilly with the Public Order Act and the Highway Act dicates that if you are over three vehicles in a count you could get moved and if you can't move they'll impound your home.

If you park up the first thing the Old Bill do is a Vehicle and Caravan Count, if it precedes 11 or 12 they can do you with Public Order and move you usually next morning or sometimes quicker than that. We used to travel under a set limit so as to not get moved all the time.

As for Worcestshire I have stayed on one of the site's at Bredon, at the picnic car park. That was a nightmare we got evicted but had help from the Gypy Liason Team, that lasted about 4 weeks. Our legal site had flooded due to the Weather and we went back to our legal site when we got kicked off.

As for buying land, they like to put it around that it's the best to do BUT they like to kick you off your land alot. This happens alot with Gypsy Families. It's hard to get Planning Permission, and if you do, the authorities prefer sites that are off the beaten track. Now what's the point of buying marked land going to the expensive bother of connecting to water, electricity (costs upto one and a half grand), etc when you can only spend half of the year there - it's ludicrous. You have to remember alot of Parish Councils are a bit like Over the Top.

The laws are barbaric but I think you should have bits of land that can be allowed to become semi-static, that is not static sites in the sense of legalities but safe havens for harassed travellers. Static sites are fine but the Waiting Lists are terrible, and alot of Family Politics may pervade them. Some travllers will remain transient - they will travel where they get the work.

There is nowt worse than parking up to goto work and having the man in the form of the police, the council, the bailiff, etc. take that away from you.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
18:51 / 31.08.05
Now what's the point of buying marked land going to the expensive bother of connecting to water, electricity (costs upto one and a half grand), etc when you can only spend half of the year there - it's ludicrous.

Could you explain why this should be the case - are you prohibited from being there permanently and have to move off for half the year to demonstrate that you are still "travelling"? Also, could you give us a bit more on the nature of the static site?
 
 
Jake, Colossus of Clout
19:02 / 31.08.05
How do they kick you off your own land? Sounds like things are a bit different in the UK than they are over here.

Also, it sounds like you Brits have a different definition of a bailiff than we do. In the US, he's just a cop who keeps the peace in the courtroom, makes sure nobody attacks anybody else and such. There are far more worthy targets of indignation than that guy (if they have the same job),IMHO.
 
 
macrophage
21:28 / 31.08.05
There exists an exploitable loop hole within British Law that if you buy land just to pitch a Caravan/Trailer as opposed to a Holiday Home then if the authorities get complaints they can and will evict you for a short while until it blows over. I knew of a family that it happened to in Leicestershire. Now if you invest time and money into a project like this you'd expect the same legal rights as someone who buys up land to build a house there.

A Static Site unlike a Camping Holiday Site which is for Tourers and Holiday Makers, is a Transit Site where you pay a rent and possibly have a Lease or some sort of an Agreemnet. Usually supplied by Councils but I think there are some big Gypsy Families who actually own big Transit Sites.
 
 
Jake, Colossus of Clout
21:41 / 31.08.05
In the US, certain areas are zoned to deny trailers, but that's usually a residential area that doesn't want the "white trash" stigma associated with them.

I don't think we have any laws comparable to what you're talking about.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
13:59 / 02.09.05
The links I posted above actually relate to macrophage's last post.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
15:36 / 02.09.05
Jake- in the UK, the bailiffs are the guys who come round and take your stuff if you've defaulted on a payment, or actually do the physical evicting when you;re being evicted. So a fair bit more worthy of indignation than the guy who stops fights in court! I never knew it meant something different over there (unless that's another part of the job the same guy does... hmm. Maybe I should google...)
 
 
Jake, Colossus of Clout
17:05 / 02.09.05
Stoatie- Over here we have Sheriff's deputies for those dirty jobs. The bailiff is an in-court position. Many of them are quite pleasant, actually.

Nina- I've read your links, and all I can say is that there seems to be a large amount of institutional prejudice against travellers. I know next to nothing about British law, and this, especially, is alien to me. In the US, typically, an area is either zoned for something or it isn't, and you know ahead of time what the specifications are when you buy the property. People tend not to get ousted from their property five years down the line, just because the city council thinks it should be that way. So this still makes no legal sense to me, except as a form of legally-sanctioned prejudice.

This quote was telling:

The majority of Gypsies and Travellers, living on authorised sites or houses, do abide by the planning laws

90% of Gypsy and Traveller planning permission applications are initially rejected compared to 20% overall (2).

As a result, some Gypsies and Travellers, certain that their applications will be initially turned down, set up sites before obtaining – or even applying for – planning permission.

Is there any reason why their applications are rejected 70% more often than average? Just bigotry?
 
 
macrophage
21:32 / 03.09.05
To state it simply the rules are made by people who are in the majority and are brung up in houses and live in houses.

People who make laws I reckon are probablly the most trad and conservative of people.

I don't think law abiding should even come into it, we all need places to live and to stop at.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
01:15 / 04.09.05
Totally.
As far as prejudice goes- read the papers. There's an awful lot of really unpleasant hatred towards the travelling community- the Mail's obviously the worst offender here, but it's pretty common elsewhere. Almost every week the Mail or the Express will run a shit-stirring story about it- one last week had a woman claiming the final straw for her in taking her child to a different school was when she (the girl) came home and said her best friend lived in a caravan. I shit you not- this was painted as a perfectly reasonable reaction, and we were supposed to feel sorry for this woman. Aside from any issues on politics and prejudice, I'd imagine the kid wouldn't be too happy about being separated from her best friend.

So. The right-wing press's attitude towards this is more frightening that it seems on the surface. The criticism levelled against travellers a lot of the time is that they don't work and are poorly-educated. A fuck of a lot of the time that's not even true anyway, but truth's kind of beside the point here.

BUT... it's an outrage if they start sending their kids to school.

SO... what solution is being suggested, if not proposed outright? (here's a clue... think of Lord Rothermere and his praise for Mr Hitler's Economic Miracle...)

I'm overstating a little here, obviously. But only a little. Remember, kids... the Mail has prior form in these kinds of things.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
01:26 / 04.09.05
I don't think you're overstating at all. Spending my adolescence in Hertfordshire the prejudice against all kinds of travellers was utterly horrifying. I can't count the times when someone claimed that a "sofa had been dumped in their front garden" and that's why they didn't like travellers. Dig a little deeper and you find the person had been told the story by their mum who had heard it from someone else etc. There's this urban myth in England that people travel around the country throwing things onto people's lawns and that's a good reason to hate all travellers, gypsies and nomads regardless of their background, personality or attitude. It's an ingrained prejudice and most people don't even bother to think about whether there's any reason for it, they just see some kind of intrusion onto their land (even if they don't have any). It's disgusting.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
14:51 / 04.09.05
No, that's not an overstatement. Like Nina, I've often lived in areas where travellers used to stay now and again and the loathing directed againt them is just unreal. The prejudice against travelling people is real, insidious, and is inculcated from earliest childhood. (I remember vividly at the age of about four that one little girl on my estate wouldn't speak to me on the grounds that "You're a gypsy. I've seen your Mum." It seems funny now... until you reflect on all the people who really are travellers, and whose children have to face that kind of thing and far, far worse.) The likes of the Mail feed on this kind of prejudice and constantly disseminate it.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
20:19 / 04.09.05
When I was a kid in Somerset, most of my family's friends were vicars and farmers. One of my dad's best friends, a farmer and a lay-preacher, came in for all kinds of criticism because he let travellers (about whom there was much folk-devilry being paraded in the local papers) use one of his fields, and left an open offer for them to come to the church at the edge of his land (of which my dad was the vicar). Which seemed to me at the time the action of a Christian, (the way I understand Christianity, anyway) and still does.

But apparently that was WRONG. No-one ever explained why, but what seemed an obvious course of action was... unpopular. I remember going to dinner with some other friends of my parents, and hearing all the "you know, this afternoon, one of them pissed in the freezer in Tescos!" stories... which, like most urban myths, are identical from place to place, and were never substantiated.

The guy who had let them use his field? He never had any complaints. Said they seemed a nice bunch of people. Of course, the local papers never interviewed him...
 
  
Add Your Reply