Anti-Gipsy is the last socially acceptable racism. Even regular commentators on this blog chip in on Dale Farm posts with “They fly tip and make a terrible mess” “They nicked stuff from my local pub” “They just laid a quarter of an inch of tarmac straight on the soil” and other ethnic caricatures. “They” steal children too, no doubt.
Watching the violent ethnic cleansing in Essex live on TV this morning was a heart-wrenching experience. Councillor Tony Ball, leader of the authority conducting the ethnic cleansing, a Murdoch star, explains that his action is popular. I have no doubt it is. It would be popular in Basildon if the council hung a black man from the council flagstaff every day. No doubt the smug little bigot is a happy man this morning.
Those who justify breaking up family homes, destroying a community and disrupting childrens’ schooling, on grounds of narrow legality and planning law, have to answer this narrow legal point too. The attack (for such it was) on Dale Farm this morning was carried out by riot police with no participation of bailiffs. At least two female inhabitants, both travellers and permanent residents at the site, have needed hospital treatment. The police smashed down fences, both internal and external to the site, which the High Court had specifically said were on the site, legally owned by the travellers and could not be destroyed by the bailiffs. Where does that illegal act of destruction sit with the narrow legalistic defence of this racist attack?
Murdoch News this morning gave the gist of the police’s legal defence. Police had “Intelligence” of a “stockpile of items to be used as weapons”. They therefore had had to storm the camp in the interests of public safety. This necessitated the breaking down of the High Court protected fences as an emergency measure to save lives. All of which is a transparent pretext, a flouting of the law by the police much worse than any law the travellers’ flouted, because the police breaking of the law resulted in violence and injury. The weapons stockpile of course does not exist.
Let me state once more the key facts. Although situated in a greenbelt, every inch of the travellers’ site was brownfield land, previously occupied by a scrapyard. Satellite photos prove that the travellers did not expand at all onto green land. The reason they did not have planning permission is that multiple applications for planning permission have been rejected, and the reason they have been rejected is that Basildon Council are racists. A nice Tory builder would undoubtedly have been allowed to shoehorn countless houses onto this ex-scrapyard. The travellers do own all the land they were on.
What harm were they doing? None. What was their crime? Their ethnicity. All the else is legalistic camouflage of the type that states have used to pursue ethnic cleansing everywhere. Ethnic cleansing is always enforcing the law in the eys of the state which carries it out. That is rather the point.