Dale Farm's Day Has Come.

08:00 today (19/9/11) marked the official start of the operation to evict people from the Dale Farm site in Essex, UK. However as of 11:30 very little has actually happened and if previous traveller evictions are anything to go by this operation will take at least a week rather then a day. At the moment the council employed bailiffs - Constant & Co - main strategy seems to be to create divisions between residents of the site and activists who are helping to barricade the site in order to trick the residents into removing the barricades on the pre-text of allowing officials onto the site for negotiations.

The only major development so far is that most of the British media have finally stopped referring to Dale Farm as an illegal site. What actually happened was that the residents brought the land from the council on the understanding that it would be granted planning permission. They then built on the land and applied for planning permission all of which is entirely legal.

The problem only arose when the council then refused to grant that permission on the grounds that the site is on environmentally protected "greenbelt" land. However in the 30 years before Dale Farm was set up the site was used as a scrap yard/industrial site and is heavily polluted as a result. The local council made no attempt whatsoever to evict the scrap yard meaning that the land really should no longer be classified as greenbelt. Also just because land is classified as greenbelt doesn't automatically mean that the council is unable to grant planning permission. For example Essex County Council have recently given a property developer permission to build 900 new homes on a greenbelt site near to Dale Farm.

So the only illegal thing about Dale Farm is the council's refusal to give it planning permission and it seems the only reason they're refusing is because they don't like the ethnicity of the people living there.