Corp Media Watch :: Sun Starts Hate Campaign Against Travellers
barn | 14.03.2005 14:22 | Anti-racism | Repression | Cambridge
The Sun started a campaign on Wednesday the 9th of March to "stop (the) Gypsy invasion". One front page was followed by another, which claimed mass popular support for their racist ramblings. By the second day the Daily Mail had caught up on this incursion onto their own home ground and come out with their own headline.
Previous coverage: [1] [2 | 3| 4 | 5 | 6] Recently activists from Cambridge have been involved in supporting the traveller commnity in Cottenham, where settlements are threatened by eviction. See reports [1 | 2] One site, Paynes lane has already been evicted. See photos [1]
Paines Lane evicted site
The Sun's first article was headlined "stamp on the camps". Had this been any other minority group, would they have got away with it? The Sun is calling for a repeal of the Human Rights Act so that Gypsies and Travellers won?t have the right to a home, but they claim this is not racism because they are highlighting 'good' Gypsies who apparently agree with them and live in a way they find acceptable. The Sun claims that Gypsies and Travellers deliberately flout planning regulations and get a special deal due to the Human Rights Act, which makes them "untouchable".
However, the reality is far removed from the Sun's version of the truth. For non-Travellers planning permission applications have a 12% chance of failure. For Travellers the figure is 90%. Therefore the community has no choice but to apply for permission retroactively, after they move on the land. At least then they have a few years to go through the appeal process (which they pay for). In case you are wondering why they don't live a travelling life, on the whole this has been made impossible due to the Criminal Justice Bill 1994. There is no where to stop anymore, and when they do stop they can be moved on immediately by police and bailiffs. Twenty years ago the government directed Travellers to buy their own land, after removing the responsibility of councils to provide sites. Now site after site is evicted, traumatically, violently, because of the impossibility of obtaining planning permission.
This is racism. Gypsies and Travellers are still the least literate, have the lowest mortality rates of any other group in Britain. Police regularly make brutal attacks on families and communities. Gypsy children are still beaten to death in racist attacks. Having headlines in some of the widest read papers in this county calling for attacks on the Traveller community is bound to be popular because they are the only people in Britain that it is still acceptable to be openly racist to. These articles will make a bad situation worse. For Gypsies and Travellers, to see these articles in the papers is a manifestation of the hostility they experience anyway, and they will stir up more hatred.
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