Please ban the racists

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Permalink Reply by Protheroe O'Shea on October 28, 2017 at 13:07

Read the book

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Permalink Reply by L F T Snowflake on October 27, 2017 at 12:37

"It is not a coincidence or racism that drives people voice their grievances, it is through experience."

Indeed so, as I shall later outline. 

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Permalink Reply by L F T Snowflake on October 28, 2017 at 8:50

About six Sundays ago I attended a presentation by the ITM who are referred to here. Being the open minded liberal that I am, I listen respectfully to them making their case and at the end I gave what I could spare in furtherance of their cause.

The following Sunday I visited a local branch of the major children’s charity I used to volunteer for to discover that it’s site had been occupied by Irish Travellers who’d broken into their building and stolen all their equipment. That equipment was paid for by fundraising done by the charity’s volunteer leaders. It is now incapacitated and it will take them year’s to recover.

This is the third time I have seen this happen in my career volunteering with this charity and on two occasions in that career I’ve have been a live in property guardian in order to prevent occupation by Travellers of their site’s, the most recent of these being the four years prior to returning to this area in 2010.

And for fear of someone crying ‘BUD DATZ WACYZUM INNIT BWUV’ I had better not talk about the other branch of that children’s charity whose jumble sales - which represents the bulk of their fund raising income - are regularly targeted by gangs of shoplifters! I’ll just publish the date of the next sale when I know it and you can go and see for yourself who they are.

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Permalink Reply by Michael Anderson on October 28, 2017 at 11:24

Your experience, and that of the charity, has been terrible and I hope those responsible are brought to justice.
I think one of the things I have difficulty with on this thread is extrapolating negative experiences to an entire culture or race.
As an example, when I was growing up there was a large family on my estate who had one boy who was responsible for a lot of antisocial behaviour and criminal activity. After a while, there was an assumption that he and the entire family were responsible for ALL criminal activity and antisocial behaviour which was patently not the case. By default every family member, every visiting relative, was viewed like that. They were easy to target because on this massive estate, of maybe 5,000 properties, they were the only non-white family.
If the only contact someone has with Travellers is negative, it’s too easy to extend that perception to every Traveller, all of the thousands one has not met or never will.
The occupation of parks and other sites is wrong but I think that there is perhaps some responsibility that needs to be shifted to the authorities that have a duty to provide managed sites (which incidentally are charged for, they are not free). You only have to look at the well managed, long estatblished Traveller site in Camden Town to see how successful a well managed approach to the needs of the Traveller community can be.

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Permalink Reply by maggie on October 28, 2017 at 11:55

In Haringey, as far as I can find, there are only two council sites for travellers with total capacity for 10 caravans/ trailers in the whole of the borough.

In recent years Haringay Council closed two sites with the loss of space for 22 trailers; they promised in return to open up four new sites but after years of commitments there have been no further sites opened.

As you say Michael the travellers on these sites pay rent, they also pay community charge and for all the services that they receive. The sites are regulated and if there were more council run sites then there would be less unregulated parking.

The other side (and few people realise this from some of the comments) is that the overwhelming majority of 'travellers' are living in houses. In Haringey 410 'travellers' live in houses, fairly equally split between Roma and Irish travellers, and Haringey has nearly the highest rate of housed travellers in London. I'm not sure if this is policy or result of not providing sites for trailers but the result is that there is a high rate of depression amongst housed travellers being split from their community and culture and an inability to work which being mobile enabled.

You are right Michael about extrapolating experiences to an entire culture or race; my experience from having a Roma family on an allotment plot near me is that they are caring, warm and generous, though we disagree politically on Brexit.

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