02.09.1999

Straw and travellers - New clampdown

Defend New Labour’s latest scapegoats

New Labour’s intolerance has been turned against yet another vulnerable section of the population. Travellers who take to the roads, living in buses and caravans where they can, are the latest people deemed socially deviant by home secretary Jack Straw.

They are not a homogeneous group. They include Roma from all over the British Isles, Irish tinkers, and new age travellers, each with their own characteristics and way of life. But what they have in common is an experience of prejudice and discrimination. Straw’s recent call for a clampdown - since repeated and defended - is merely the latest in a litany of anti-traveller antipathy that takes more or less ‘respectable’ forms depending on the political climate.

Straw told Radio West Midlands listeners: “There are relatively few real Romany gypsies left, who seem to mind their own business and do not cause trouble to other people. And then there are a lot more people who masquerade as travellers or gypsies, who trade on the sentiment of people but who seem to think because they label themselves as travellers that they have a licence to commit crimes” - as if crime were not against the existing law. Incredibly, Straw considers that, “In the past, I’m afraid, there has been rather too much toleration of travellers and we want to see the police and local authorities cracking down on them” (The Daily Telegraph August 19 and 20).

While offended by charges of ‘racism’, Straw’s agenda is clear. The state demands a crackdown on a whole section of the population - estimated to be between 100,000 and 200,000.  Gypsies and travellers generally are beyond the pale They do not conform to the 9-to-5 lifestyle that New Labour wishes us all squeezed into. There is also political mileage to be gained from picking upon a generally unpopular section of the population - because of their poverty they are associated with squalor.

In fact, despite Straw’s presumptions there is precious little evidence of local authorities having behaved particularly tolerantly toward travellers. Grudgingly providing sites under previous legislation, beginning with the Caravan Sites Act of 1968, councils were more than happy when this requirement was abolished a few years ago. There were never enough sites even when the legislation was bearing fruit; with its abandonment the situation could only get worse for travellers, whether they were Straw’s “real Romany gypsies” or not. Harried from pillar to post, travellers’ lives are continually under the shadow of being forcibly moved on and of being targets for physical attack. Refusing to positively advocate the rights of travellers - eg, comprehensive education, voter registration and adequate and high quality sites - local and now national politicians are playing to voters’ backward prejudices and fears. Interestingly, Tony and Ann Goss - of SLP witch-hunting fame - were amongst the local politicians to campaign against sites for travellers in Peckham, south London.

Tory shadow home secretary Ann Widdecombe was swift to congratulate Straw. Despite his clumsy presentation, she “would not quarrel with his remarks”. This bipartisanship is hardly surprising. It is certainly indicative of New Labour’s current approach. August’s disturbances in Dover, in which local youths and asylum-seekers clashed violently, are a direct result of the xenophobia and chauvinism generated by the tabloids, Straw and Widdecombe, who made a point of personally going to Dover soon after the disturbances. This was no casting of oil on troubled waters.

Roma constitute a fair proportion of asylum-seekers who have been housed in Dover, having fled the Czech Republic, Slovakia and, of late, Kosova. Dover’s Labour MP, Gwyn Prosser, refused to blame national chauvinism for the attacks on them. Instead he singled out “ultra-right groups” that had been “targeting Dover”, and “one or two Tory politicians” who had been “raising the ante” (The Independent August 23). Neither Prosser nor any other New Labour MP has condemned Straw’s statement stigmatising travellers. Travellers are in fact synonymous with ‘gypsies’ in many people’s minds. Moreover, a good number of asylum-seekers are indeed Roma (ie, ‘gypsies’), something the tabloids have not been slow to point out.

Straw’s remarks were made in the comparative safety of local radio. If he had made them at Labour’s annual conference/rally, he would have been in real political danger. Even New Labour’s delegates would have booed and hissed. That would not have looked good on television. So Straw’s decision to float the issue in the way he did was well considered and calculated. While the expression of such views might rouse a Tory Party conference to a 10-minute standing ovation, it is still true that New Labour has an altogether different social base. Nevertheless, when it comes to practice, Tory and Labour front benches are united against travellers.

While traveller organisations such as the Friends, Families and Travellers (FFT) support group pressed for Straw’s prosecution for incitement to racial hatred, there is no possibility of the criminal justice system being brought into action against him. The home secretary is one of the ministers (together with those such as the Lord Chancellor) who stand at the head of the administration of justice in the UK. And he was anyway no doubt thoroughly briefed beforehand by fellow lawyers concerning what he could say to stay within the law.

Travellers must have the democratic right to determine the kind of life they lead without interference and harassment. When travellers have attempted to formulate what they actually want, their needs have been distinctly modest: “All members of a free society should have the right to travel and the right to stop. Also that people have the right to a place to stay, without the fear of persecution because of their lifestyle” (FFT Aims).

But such elementary democratic demands are clearly too much for Jack Straw.

Jim Gilbert