The Travellers Who Won't Travel.

With the eviction of Dale Farm delayed until Friday (23/9/11) at the earliest I should take the opportunity to answer the question posed by many of the sort of people who leave comments on Internet news sites; Why don't the travellers want to travel?

The short answer is that they do. The long answer is a bit more complicated.

Travellers/Gypsies have been part of life in Britain for well over a thousand years and up until the 1970's they played a crucial role in connecting up settled, mainly rural communities. Then in 1979 Margret Thatcher was elected as Conservative Prime Minister and embarked on a radical shake up of the British economy. These reforms not only changed the fabric of the British economy but also the fabric of British society. It also created a huge number of mainly young unemployed people. With little money and few ties to their local communities many of these young unemployed adopted parts of traveller culture by buying vans to live in and travelled around the country is convoys. They soon became known as new age travellers

Eventually the Thatcher government realised that although there was no work for these people to do they weren't paying rent, buying gas or electricity from the newly privatised utility companies and weren't paying what was then known as local council rates. So the government decided to replace local council rates with a new flat tax called the Community Charge. As this new tax was to be paid by everyone registered to drive a car or registered to vote this new tax quickly became known as the Poll Tax. As a fixed rate tax to be paid regardless of earnings or housing status the Poll Tax disproportionately affected the poor, travellers, new age travellers, squatters and people who simply chose to live in shared housing with friends or relatives. So all these people grouped together to campaign against the poll tax leading to the 1990 Poll Tax Riot. More importantly though the campaign also saw so many British people simply refuse to pay the tax that it was impossible for the state to prosecute them all so the Poll Tax was abolished and Marget Thatcher was forced to resign defeated.

However the Conservative Party remained in power and quickly introduced what became the 1994 Criminal Justice & Public Order Act. This was basically a giant f*** you! to all the people who had brought down Thatcher and the Poll Tax. Among it's many provisions Sections 77-79 made it illegal for anyone to set up camp on common land which is something travellers and gypsies had been doing since the middle ages. Some travellers decided to ignore this new law while others tried to compromise by buying their own land and setting up a network of sites like Dale Farm that they could then travel between. The Conservatives were voted out of power in 1997 and this compromise worked well for the next 13 years.

Now the Conservatives are back in power and trying to introduce new laws on planning and squatting that will make life for travellers even more difficult while at the same time evicting sites like Dale Farm. So the message seems to be quite clear; There's no point negotiating or trying to compromise because Britain won't stop until this undesirable ethnic group has been completely eradicated.