Operation Netwing had been launched to investigate allegations of slavery at a Traveller site just north of London, run by Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Major Crime Unit, and aided by the UK’s Human Trafficking Centre.1 It followed many months of undercover work observing possible slavery at the site in Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire. By chance, Mary Ann McCarthy had moved to a site adjoining Greenacres, to avoid the mayhem of Dale Farm’s eviction day – and found herself caught in the eye of a harrowing media fire-storm.
Not all Travellers were as upstanding as Mary Ann and her five daughters. A small number were known to have committed crimes – including some very heinous ones. At 5.30 a.m. on 11 September 2011, around a hundred officers from the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Major Crime Unit executed search warrants on several residents of Greenacres, arresting four men and one woman on suspicion of slavery, under the Coroners and Justice Act 2009.2
Four men from one Irish Traveller family, the Connors, were charged with ‘conspiracy to hold a person in servitude and requiring them to perform forced labour’. They were Tommy Connors Snr (thirty years old), Patrick Connors (nineteen), James Connors (thirty-four) and James Connors (twenty-three). A fifth member of the family, thirty-year-old Josie Connors, was later charged with similar offences. They were all accused of keeping dozens of people – mostly alcoholic, drug-addicted and homeless men – captive at the site. The Connors controlled and exploited their alleged victims, verbally abusing and beating them, in order to take advantage of their free (or low-cost) labour on the site and various jobs, such as clearing rubble, prosecutors said. One of the alleged victims claimed the family had treated him ‘like a slave’. Another said the family lived in ‘luxury’ in contrast to his own horrible accommodation – the police called the conditions ‘shockingly filthy and cramped’. The men had been recruited from homeless centres, soup kitchens or ‘simply off the streets’. The case would be put to Luton Crown Court in Bedfordshire.
‘Men were targeted because they were vulnerable, and kept on sites like camps under orders not to leave. Their heads were shaved. They were paid little or nothing for their work. They were on occasions verbally abused and on occasions beaten,’ prosecutor Frances Oldham QC said. ‘They may not in the strict sense have been “slaves”, but they were not free men.’ She continued: ‘The evidence suggests that the Connors family made very substantial amounts of money through the exploitation of the servitude and forced labour of their workers.’3
The captive men had been moved around a succession of sites, before finally arriving at Greenacres Caravan Park, jurors heard. One of the men told police he regarded the site as ‘like a concentration camp’, the court was told. Some days the victims were given ‘no food at all’, nor were labourers allowed to leave work to get something to eat, it was alleged. The jurors were told that bedding was changed roughly every four months; the workers’ quarters were ‘smelly’ and the roof leaked; there were no shower facilities, and labourers were taken for showers at most once a week but sometimes only every few months; the area where they slept was ‘freezing cold’; they were at times given food so old that ‘flies were crawling over it’. One man claimed that the dogs at Greenacres were better fed than he was. Others described sleeping in a converted horse-box kitted out with eleven tightly stacked bunks, or a caravan ‘so cold and damp that mould grew’ in it.4
Some contemplated escape – and a few had succeeded in getting away in April 2011. But everyone lived under the Connors’ threat that they would be ‘pulled back’ and ‘cracked’ if they tried to leave Greenacres, according to testimony before the court. On 11 July 2012, four of the Connors – Tommy Snr, James John Connors, Patrick Connors and Josie Connors – were convicted of some of the slavery charges.5 In another case in 2011, sites in Gloucestershire, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire were also raided, and several people from another Irish Traveller family by the name of Connors, as well as others, were charged and convicted of conspiracy to require a person to carry out forced or compulsory labour between April 2010 and March 2011.6 Police maintain that these slavery cases are not linked.7
The story was covered with great gusto by the press, according to Jake Bowers, a well-respected Romani journalist. But the revelation was not entirely a surprise to him – most of all because, like any group, there are going to be a small number of individuals who take advantage of others if they think they can get away with it. ‘There are some extremely nasty people out there. When the slavery case kicked off, it didn’t surprise me … I’ve known for some time that people, particularly Irish Traveller families, have kept people as dossers’ – or more precisely, casual workers – ‘to do their bidding. It would [also] be unfair to say that it’s just the preserve of Irish Traveller families – a number of Gypsy families are involved in keeping dossers. But it ranges from the blatantly exploitative to something benevolent. It can be a kind of an institution – so it’s not that simple to write about.’8
Bowers’s assessment was borne out in observations by other scholars and activists. The Romani studies scholar Donald Kenrick has often encountered homeless people on sites that he has visited but in his experience they are not usually treated badly. ‘A lot of sites I go to, you interview the family, and then there’s John or someone,’ he explained. ‘They have picked him up on the way, and he’s also always part of the family. [The dossers] usually have their own caravan and are free to go and come; often they have no other family. They are picked up from dole queues and doss houses, or turn up by themselves, but most of the larger family groupings have got one or two attached to them. But it’s very unusual for them to be treated in that way, to keep them in a dog kennel.’ Similarly, the anthropologist Judith Okely observed in 1975 that many Gypsy and Traveller families in her study of the South of England had homeless work-mates living with them; again, she found no evidence at that time that they were treated badly.9
Deputy Chief Constable Janette McCormick, the lead officer on Gypsy, Roma and Traveller issues for the Association of Chief Police Officers, is keen to point out the complexity of the Greenacres prosecution. ‘This case does not mean that Irish Travellers as a community are linked with slavery and exploitation. There have been cases and we are now looking at the triggers for them, such as: “Do we have a closed community here?” “Are there vulnerable people who are ripe for exploitation?” If we focus on the race, rather than the triggers for the crime that have enabled it to happen, we further alienate the community,’ she said.10
‘We have identified groups of Irish Travellers and English Gypsies who are involved in serious organised crime. But that doesn’t mean to say that the entire community is involved in serious organised crime,’ she added. ‘There tends to be an association, in terms of both perception and reality, with some crimes, such as doorstep crime, because they lend themselves to travelling criminality. But that doesn’t mean to say there is a propensity for doorstep crime in that community.’
McCormick acknowledged that the difference is subtle but important. ‘There are some issues, say, around the top ten wanted list that we put out,’ she said, considering the fact that there are several Roma and Irish Travellers on it – more than one would expect given their numbers in the population. ‘Sometimes, people who travel are the hardest to arrest, and also in any enclosed community, such as the Irish Traveller community, it is hard to get the intelligence to arrest them, so they end up on those lists. Having said that, we get a lot of support in the community to arrest some individuals. It would be a huge leap to say there is … a propensity to … criminality among Gypsies and Travellers. It’s simply that anyone who is on the move is harder to track down, whether or not they have committed a crime.’
Gypsies and Travellers account for around 0.6% of the general population but at least around 1% of the prison population. This differential is not a result of a disproportionate likelihood to offend, however, according to scholars of the criminal justice system. Instead, it is a product of the way in which their offences are viewed by magistrates and judges – and how they may lead to a tendency to punish the lifestyle in addition to the crime. One study, conducted in 1994, found that Irish Travellers were largely over-represented in the criminal justice system because they were targeted for minor traffic offences. They were often held overnight so that the police could request bail restrictions from magistrates when the courts opened for business in the morning. The Travellers were then more likely to be remanded in custody.11
Research carried out by the now disbanded Association of Chief Police Officers of Probation, published in 1993, found that young Irish Travellers were also significantly over-represented in Feltham Young Offenders institution – a staggering thirty-eight per cent of all young people classified as white by the courts at the time of their imprisonment.12
Yet another study from Manchester found that many pre-sentence reports on Irish Travellers used discriminatory and racist language. ‘Irish defendants are more likely to receive custodial sentences than any other group even when they have committed the lowest rate of more serious offences,’ it also reported.13 Those who were deemed to be nomadic were seen as particularly suspicious. As Colm Power said: ‘nomadism (rather than transience), and the criminalisation of nomadism are barely recognised structural factors, though they underpin much of the negative stereotyping applied to Travellers.’14
Although it is reasonable to expect a bail address, there are culturally sensitive ways to address this – rather than banging up people who are inclined to claustrophobia inside four walls for offences that, for the rest of the population, would be dealt with outside prison walls. A devastating report by the Irish Chaplaincy in Britain, surveying almost one hundred prisons in the UK, noted that Irish Travellers in prison had difficulties accessing services, partly because of lack of literacy, experienced racism by some staff and other prisoners and had a lack of confidence in the complaints system. The study, Voices Unheard, was launched in 2010, to investigate the experiences of Irish Travellers in prison. Travellers in prison were commonly subjected to racist treatment from other prisoners and from some staff, but they were not specially monitored.15 There were also no official figures for Gypsies and Travellers in prison, despite the concerns about their ill treatment.
Strikingly, over half of all Irish Travellers in prison were there for property offences, compared to thirty per cent of prisoners from the general population. ‘All forms of theft tend to occur disproportionately in poor, isolated, socially disadvantaged neighbourhoods … In criminology, the rationale for this occurrence lies in “strain theory” which, put simply, suggests that a lack of legitimate opportunities to achieve material success will lead to criminal activity as an alternative method to achieving it,’ Voices Unheard explained. ‘[I]n Traveller communities, where employment is scarce and the prospect of moving out of poverty seems remote, one would expect to find higher rates of offences involving misappropriated property. This results from the fact Travellers have one of the lowest levels of legitimate opportunities, and therefore unlawfully obtaining the property of another becomes a conceivable means to success.’ While this analysis does not excuse any crimes, it does expose a powerful motivator for criminality. It is striking too that the Chaplaincy learned of few Travellers who had been convicted of crimes of violence, drugs or sexual offences, in comparison to the general population.
Many of the Irish Travellers in prison also had mental health issues of some kind, which, in many cases, were compounded by their incarceration, with nearly one-third reported to have learning difficulties and nearly two-thirds of female Travellers (and one quarter of all Travellers in prison) having mental health problems. These were staggering statistics. Why were so many disabled Travellers being imprisoned and why were so many of them being imprisoned for offences for which a member of the settled community would receive a non-custodial sentence?
In Ireland the Irish police, known as the Garda Síochána – ‘Guardians of the Peace’ – were dealing with increasing anti-Traveller racism, some of it tracing back to 1996 and the murder of three elderly people in a rural area. Other attacks on elderly people in rural areas were soon pegged on Travellers as well.
Irish journalists were not coy about the murder allegations, despite lack of proof. Jim Cusack from the Irish Times splashed: ‘At least forty elderly farmers were attacked in the West of Ireland during the autumn and in most cases, Gardaí believe, criminals from Travelling communities were responsible.’16 Kevin Myers, in the same newspaper, wrote: ‘A hugely disproportionate amount of rural crime is by a handful of Travellers … they have generated an atmosphere of terror in rural areas unlike anything Ireland has experienced since the 1920s. Rural life is being transformed and nobody dare speak the truth in public. In private, everybody acknowledges that certain Travellers are responsible.’17 Kevin Moore referred to police intelligence in his report: ‘Garda intelligence reports show that an estimated twelve gangs of Travellers and mobile traders – up to eighty people in all – are responsible for most of the murders and vicious attacks on elderly people living alone, in the past year,’ he wrote, then quoted an anonymous garda, who had told Moore that: ‘We will know that ninety-nine per cent of the time, Travellers are responsible for these crimes in the rural area. But you can’t always prove it and you certainly can’t say it publicly.’18
The worst comment, however, came from journalist Mary Ellen Synon, who wrote in the Sunday Independent that the travelling way of life and its culture was ‘the culture of the sewer’, describing it as ‘ungoverned by intellect’. She continued: ‘It is a life worse than the life of beasts, for beasts at least are guided by wholesome instinct. Traveller life is without the ennobling intellect of man or the steadying instinct of animals. This tinker “culture” is without achievement, discipline, reason or intellectual ambition. It is a morass. And one of the surprising things about it is that not every individual bred in this swamp turns out bad. Some individuals among the tinkers find the will not to become evil. For the poverty and brutal life of the Travellers’ camps does not force anyone to become a criminal: it simply presents a life in which virtue has no reward and lawlessness is acceptable. Every man in every tinker camp who becomes a criminal – like every man anywhere who becomes a criminal – becomes evil by choice. Crime is volitional. So consider what ought to be done with these breeding grounds of crime. Simple: stop petting tinkers and start treating them like all other citizens.’19 One Travellers’ rights group attempted to prosecute Synon, unsuccessfully, for inciting hatred.20
The country had been gripped by a moral panic. Many people at Dale Farm didn’t want to go back to Ireland, despite the exhortations of the English tabloid press, in the resulting blowback. Synon was not the only public figure to state that Travellers might be inherently criminal. One such even suggested electronic tagging for all members of the community. ‘In 1998, the Fine Gael county councillor John Flannery proposed that all Travellers be ‘tagged with microchips like cattle’ in order to monitor their movement. Travellers, he claimed, ‘expected everything to be done for them while giving little in return’, according to Irish authors Ronit Lentin and Robbie McVeigh.21 Other local councillors went further. One suggested mandatory birth control to limit the number of Traveller children.22 Another said that his area, Killarney, ‘is literally infested by these people’ – as if they were vermin.23
In Prejudice in Ireland Revisited Michéal MacGréil explained: ‘Irish Travellers are still seen and treated as a “lower caste”’ and attitudes towards Travellers have deteriorated since the early 1970s, soon after the start of the Troubles, with the rural murders simply providing a new flashpoint.24 He concluded: ‘Irish people’s prejudice against Travellers is one of caste-like apartheid.’25 In the mid 1990s, the Irish government set up a Task Force on the Travelling Community, including actual Travellers in the consultations. By 1998, the conclusions were clear: an equality law to protect Travellers’ rights to employment and access to services and goods needed to be created. However, in the law, which was immediately passed, Travellers were not offered protection on racial grounds, giving them less ability to fight back against much of the discrimination they experienced.26 By 2000, forty per cent of people in Northern Ireland said that they believed a Traveller lifestyle was invalid; fifty-seven per cent did not want Travellers to live in their neighbourhood – the quintessential Nimby position. A 2004 survey similarly found that ‘Travellers and asylum seekers are the minorities viewed most negatively by the majority population’, with the researcher reporting that attitudes towards Travellers were ‘more instinctive, more deeply ingrained and less subject to correction by liberal sensitivity’.27
By 2001, twenty-four per cent of all Irish Travellers in the Republic were living on unofficial sites – without electricity, refuse collection or running water. According to a survey commissioned as part of Traveller Focus week in 2001, although Traveller respondents said they were ‘satisfied with life in general’, and although conditions had improved, they still faced serious discrimination. Seven out of ten reported that they had been discriminated against by pub owners and four out of ten by owners of clubs. The authorities fared little better: thirty-eight per cent said that they had been discriminated against by gardaí, thirty-three per cent by county councils and twenty-six per cent by the Department of Social, Community and Family Affairs.28
This was the climate of fear and distrust that made the Dale Farm Travellers so desperate to stay put, even though they were not welcomed into Crays Hill. They were ‘unwanted economic migrants’ – perceived as being in England to make some quick money, legitimately or not; they were not ‘real Gypsies’. ‘The fictional didikois, renegades or ex-housed dwellers from abroad, alleged to be radically or ethnically closer to the sedentary society without any redeeming exoticism, are alleged to have the most “anti-social” behaviour,’ wrote Judith Okely in 1975. They are ‘a disturbing mixture of “us and them”, a reminder that Gypsies can cross racial and hence social boundaries. The alleged drop-outs are denigrated, because they have abandoned and rejected sedentary society of their own free will. The “foreigners” – also alleged to be “drop-outs”, usually from Ireland, are potentially the most nomadic, and considered to have the least rights in the locality.’29
This doesn’t mean, of course, that individuals from the travelling community never commit crimes. A small number do – including very heinous ones, as the Connors case had proved. And those were the stories that were making headlines as the Dale Farm eviction was reaching crisis point. In fact, some more conspiratorial voices even suggested that the arrests were timed to reflect a poor light on the Dale Farm Travellers – a charge vigorously rejected by the police.
The media, reflecting society’s values, all too often reports only one side of the story when it comes to crime and Gypsies and Travellers, observed Romani journalist Jake Bowers. ‘I think we need to say, “Every community commits crimes and is the victim of crimes,” but our society has only looked at one part of that with any enthusiasm. It has never looked at criminality within the community (and its effects on the community), [or] criminality experienced by the community. If it did that, it would find a community with lots of victims and some rogues.’
Some of this is a matter of historical accident. In the 1920s and 1930s, academics were keen to unravel the power of propaganda during the First World War. Their theory was that messages in the media were delivered with the effectiveness of a hypodermic needle (or a ‘magic bullet’, depending on the theorist) directly into the brain. In 1938, they were able to examine an isolated case of infection: Orson Welles’ Halloween radio broadcast of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. Here, they said, listeners accepted the ‘news bulletins’ of the programme as though they were fact, responding en masse to the information with panic, then outrage. The audience was passive and moved in lock-step. Although the theory was discredited by subsequent research, it remained (and remains) popular in the media itself, where commentators often directly link the increased popularity, for instance, of violent video games to episodes of aggression in children, such as school rampage killings.30
Another theory comes from Paul F. Lazarsfeld’s book The People’s Choice, about the 1940 presidential election. Lazarsfeld argued that peer-group influence was far more powerful than that of the media – but the media still had a role. He stated that so-called ‘opinion leaders’ interpreted for others the facts reported by ‘mass media’ in a process he called the Two-Step Flow Theory.31 People like Mary Ellen Synon take on an outsized voice in shaping how facts are understood.
This is why the routine use of certain descriptions is so troubling. Words such as ‘criminal’, ‘dirty’, ‘sponger’, ‘tax-dodger’ and ‘flooding into the country’ are often used; Roma are often labelled as ‘illegal’, or ‘prostitute’ or ‘beggar’, Irish Travellers as ‘unwanted economic migrants’. Even if the media doesn’t inject stereotypes directly into the brain, the public may read these reports as ‘fact’ and lap up the interpretations presented by members of Parliament, residents’ association chairmen, and other community leaders. Analyses by the MediaWise Trust and the Irish Traveller Movement in Great Britain suggest that such archetypal ‘brands’ are alive and kicking, even if they are no longer burned into the skin.
The MediaWise analysis in particular shows how certain language is inextricably linked in the mind of the public to Gypsies, Roma and Travellers. Starting with the arrival of some European Roma in 1997, the charity tracked words used in the major broadsheets – ‘invasion’, ‘tide’, ‘deluge’, ‘handouts’ and ‘scams’ were pervasive. This language, the report’s author, Mike Jempson, observed, helped to spur a British National Party demonstration at the international arrivals port in Dover. Asylum seekers were physically attacked. Under pressure, the government eventually restricted visas for Slovakian Roma. MediaWise took special interest in a campaign in the Sun and other newspapers in the run-up to the 2005 general election. The ‘Stamp on the Camps’ campaign used similar language, as well as terms like ‘living hell’ to describe the conditions of people living near Gypsies. It was also keen to push the line of ‘one law for them and one for us’. The heated rhetoric may have been connected to bullying of Gypsy children at school, suspicion at and around workplaces and an increased police presence at their sites, in Jempson’s view, a position backed by investigations conducted by the Advisory Council for the Education of Romani and other Traveller organisations. The human rights of Gypsies and Travellers are trampled over, Jempson observed, ‘too often with the complicity of media professionals’.32,33
When the Leveson Inquiry into the culture and practices of the British media was convened in July 2011, the Irish Traveller Movement in Britain decided to make two submissions – the first on how Gypsies and Travellers are treated in the press and a further one, during the second phase, which investigated the relationship between the press and the police. The twenty-two-page document listed examples of name-calling, unbalanced stories and unmoderated comment threads that put into question many newspapers’ objectivity. Bridget McCarthy, a member of the group, was quoted: ‘They [the press] say “Gypsies” and “Travellers” when they are speaking about a single Gypsy or Traveller … I mix with people from the settled community at all levels. When a big story about a Traveller doing wrong is in the papers and they say “Travellers are doing this”, I wonder about what the people I meet that day will be thinking.’
The testimony also made clear that the police and the media sometimes become enmeshed in a pernicious camaraderie when it comes to reporting criminal proceedings involving Gypsies and Travellers. The Irish Traveller Movement went so far as to call it ‘public lynching’. Their evidence involved coverage of the slavery raid at Greenacres and elsewhere in Bedfordshire; press releases from the Metropolitan Police regarding ‘Operation Golf’, the investigation and prosecution of ‘a Roma Romanian-based Organised Crime Network operating in London, Romania and elsewhere’; and a British Transport Police investigation into ‘Romanian metal theft gangs’ given the project name ‘Operation Leopard’.
The press briefings on these subjects amounted to an assumption of guilt, according to the advocacy group. On the day of the Operation Netwing raid, Deputy Chief Inspector Sean O’Neill suggested there were links between the Traveller families at the site and an alleged slavery ring in Scandinavia; the BBC picked up this line and reported on it as though it were fact, to the shock of the Irish Traveller Movement, which filed a complaint. In Operation Golf, the Met Police claimed that one thousand Roma children had been trafficked to the UK to commit street crime. One hundred and thirty Roma were arrested, but only twelve charged with an offence; only eight of those arrested were eventually convicted. No children were trafficked, but press releases, said the Irish Traveller Movement, ‘built an illusion that child trafficking was common among Roma’. Finally, when it came to the London Transport Police’s metal theft investigation, the newspaper headlines suggested that Romanian gangs were responsible, at a cost of £770 million per year to the British public. The reporting was based on an interview with Detective Sergeant Chris Hearn, head of Operation Leopard, who was quoted as saying that Romanian gangs were behind it, as well as ‘the high-street begging scams and other criminal enterprises’. The Daily Mail took his statement as inspiration, illustrating a story with ‘a picture of a Roma child begging’, according to the Irish Traveller Movement’s report. ‘This link to begging by DS Hearn and the Daily Mail’s use of a picture of a Roma child begging once again frames the Roma community as a criminal problem that needs to be solved,’ the group said.34
They concluded: ‘The Irish Traveller Movement in Britain (ITMB) are alarmed at the sensationalist and prejudicial nature of the police press briefings and statements about Gypsy, Roma and Traveller criminal proceedings. We believe that these briefings are encouraging reporting that both prejudices criminal trials of Traveller defendants and stirs up racial hatred towards the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities. We believe that the cause of this is the press’s need to deliver sensationalist stories interacting with the Police’s need to justify their particular operation by provoking media interest and coverage. This interaction – between the Police seeking publicity and the press seeking sensationalist stories – is driving a “race to the bottom” and means that a police statement or briefing will seek to “tick” news values and pander to the media’s need for moral panics and folk devils. This, we believe, has a disproportionate affect on the Traveller community, as most media organisations will always splash criminal proceedings involving Travellers.’
In 2010 the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance released a report on Gypsies and Travellers in the UK. They, too, concluded that the media were stoking the flames of prejudice – sending out what they called ‘racist and xenophobic messages’. ‘Gypsies and Travellers are regularly presented in a negative light in the mainstream media, and in particular in the tabloid press, where they are frequently portrayed, for example, as being by definition associated with … sponging off British society, making bogus claims for protection and being troublemakers.’ The commission was particularly troubled by reports that when Gypsies and Travellers were targeted in the media, it seemed to encourage people to focus on them for ‘violent attacks’.35
The power of the press cannot be ignored in the case of Gypsies and Travellers. Bridget McCarthy’s worries about ‘what the people I meet that day will be thinking’ were well founded, according to Rachel Morris of the Traveller Law Research Unit of Cardiff Law School. ‘As most members of the public don’t know any Gypsies or Travellers, their view of the communities is filtered through press reporting,’ she has written. In this way, ‘racist invective by the press infects society in a widespread way’ – rather than receiving an injection of belief from a hypodermic needle, readers were catching a virus that could ‘confirm existing prejudices and create new ones’. But, she said, the media also repeatedly report on Gypsies and Travellers as though they are all cut from the same cloth. ‘[The] print media commonly suggest to their readers, in their representations of Travellers, that this category of people routinely display certain negative characteristics not only typical of but essential to the group: that is, they represent Travellers in a stereotypical and prejudicial fashion. The relationship of the representation to the real is the same as it would be for any societal group: some Travellers are dishonest or law-breaking, some don’t clean up after themselves. The difference is that while some settled people also have those characteristics, other settled people are not assumed also to possess them, as is the case for Travellers.’36
When the Dale Farm eviction became a circus, it was not the only depiction of Gypsies and Travellers in the media. There was the Greenacres slavery raid, of course, but there was also My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, which had become a bona fide pop-culture phenomenon since it first aired in February 2010. Approximately seven million people tuned in each week.
Ask anyone in the street what the word ‘Gypsy’ means to them and they will almost certainly come up with My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding (and its spin-off, Thelma’s Gypsy Girls, which follows the so-called Gypsy dressmaker Thelma Madine). Big dresses, spray tans, skimpy outfits and make-up slathered on with a trowel became the emblems of Gypsies and Travellers as a result. There is, of course, a grain of truth in the images. Some young Gypsy and Traveller girls and women do like to put on the Ritz, gild themselves with tan and totter into town and back on high heels. But then, so do a number of young women from the settled community. And while some Gypsy and Traveller girls aren’t accustomed to the trappings of education and employment, this is a political issue as much as anything, with Gypsy and Traveller children lagging way behind in educational achievement, as borne out in statistics. Pinning a few radiant butterflies onto a board for the amusement of the public and claiming they are a representative sample may not be cricket, but it was the media conducting business as usual – especially the business of entertainment that had dominated much air time during the ‘reality TV’ boom.37
The coverage of the series was joyously voyeuristic, separating Gypsies and Travellers from ‘normal’ society. Here were the residents of a strange, unstable world in which girls could be ‘grabbed’ (forced to kiss) boys and would be married off young. After the big wedding day, the girls would be allowed to do nothing but clean; the boys in the series all seemed to be blurred out, giving the impressions that they were criminals, or at least didn’t want to be identifiable. In a recent advertising campaign for the programme, hoardings were plastered with ‘Bigger. Fatter. Gypsier’. They were eventually ruled ‘offensive and irresponsible’ by the Advertising Standards Authority, the industry’s independent regulator (supported by advertisers themselves – so not a whiff of government correctness involved).38
Many Gypsy and Traveller families felt the negative effects of these damaging stereotypes – and experienced direct action against them. In June 2012 Helen Jones, chief executive officer of Leeds Gypsy and Traveller Exchange, told parliamentarians: ‘Directly coinciding with the airing of the programme, we at Leeds Gypsy and Traveller Exchange have had ongoing hate crimes, including dog excrement being directed at our office. The office was subject to an arson attack in 2011 which destroyed one end of the building, the end most used by young people who rely on our service.’ Another Irish Traveller, named Tina Purcell, was living on a site in London. Her daughter, she said, had been bullied after the debut of the ‘Bigger. Fatter. Gypsier’ advertising campaign. ‘My daughter loved attending school but now she wants to stay at home. As soon as the poster went up outside her school her school friends were constantly asking her questions … “Is that your relatives on that poster?” “Don’t you wash?” “Why are you at school? You’re supposed to be at home scrubbing,” “Shouldn’t you be married by now? Traveller girls get married at fourteen and stay at home don’t they?”’39
Although Channel 4 has announced the series will not be renewed, many feel that the series has damaged their public reputation, perhaps permanently. Further spin-offs have not been ruled out, either, and rights have been sold in other countries, including the US, which saw My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding. A handful of weddings captured on an often judgemental reality TV camera were being dressed up as representing the entire community.
Dale Farm, of course, was another iconic example of the media coverage that Gypsies and Travellers have come to expect. The coverage had loosely divided into the two media camps, left and right, but the online comment boards for newspapers on both sides were, almost without exception, filled with vitriol and hostility towards Gypsies and Travellers – not just those at Dale Farm, but those anywhere in the UK. One online comment called for Travellers there to be gassed to death. On the day of the eviction the Daily Mail comments thread went wild. ‘A pox on these foul creatures. I just wish they and their like would disappear before it costs even more tax-payers money’ and ‘acting like feral humans’ and ‘I wonder if scrap metal thefts will go down in Essex … Get the taxman in to see how they can maintain there [sic] lifestyle’ and ‘Get out the slurry spreaders! It is a green belt after all, and we are obliged to look after our countryside! Then again, slurry might encourage them to grow!’ were among the sentiments given voice. Even a sympathetic piece in the Observer attracted abuse. Of five hundred comments posted, 150 were arguably racist, according to an analysis by the Irish Traveller Movement.
Yet, as the Irish Traveller Movement has pointed out, despite the fact that they infringe the Code of Practice of the Press Complaints Commission, it is difficult to lodge a successful complaint, because such comments are usually aimed at groups rather than at an individual. Third-party complaints, on behalf of groups, are hardly, if ever, heard. In his report on the inquiry into the media, Lord Leveson suggested that this should change – to an outcry from nervous editors. One MP even suggested that third-party complaints were actually hijacked by ‘sinister’ pressure groups, not realising, it seems, that if ‘sinister’ elements had infiltrated anywhere, it was on the message boards.40
What could be so sinister about a woman in a spectacular wedding dress, or a huddle of homeless families on a field plot? In The Road to God Knows Where, Sean Maher, an Irish Traveller who was raised roadside, wrote: ‘Well, the road was my home and cradle, as it was for my ancestors. I know it has a great and ancient history, passed down by word of mouth true and faithfully, completely unknown to the buffer and lost or ignored in the annals of Irish history.’41 His ode expressed the feelings of many Gypsies and Travellers about their way of life.
Still, the old ideas about vagabondage refuse to fade away, and any example that marks a Gypsy or Traveller as ‘abnormal’ or ‘criminal’ is seized upon, since the ‘unsettled’ threaten the control freakery of the modern nation state, in a paraphrase of the University of Leeds sociologist Zygmunt Baumann. ‘Each place is for the vagabond a stop-over, but he never knows how long he will stay in any of them,’ said Baumann. ‘To control the wayward and erratic vagabond is … a daunting task.’42
While the denigration of the nomadic lifestyle is not distinct to the Irish Traveller experience, it has become something of a ‘national obsession in Ireland’, in the words of scholar Jim MacLaughlin. Most people in the settled community in the country do not understand nomadism – travelling in the summer, stopping or settling in the winter – he found. Most didn’t want Traveller sites anywhere near them. ‘One local councillor recently suggested that “if Irish Travellers wanted their ethnicity, they should go and do it somewhere else,”’ MacLaughlin reported.43
Odd this, since nomadism has been the fundamental human condition for some 500,000 years (and then some), as the veteran New Traveller Tony Thomson has argued. Stopping-places were used for hundreds of years until they were enclosed by various acts of law, he has explained. ‘The traditionally used camping places … have witnessed nomadic dwelling for millennia. That they remain amongst the most beautiful places in the landscape surely offers us some lessons in the nature of sustainable development.’ Why then, he asked, is it the case that ‘[n]omadism is preconceived as something criminal or extraordinary’, when in fact it is ‘an instinctive response to environmental and social stress’?44
Indeed, sustainable nomadic living has qualities that the settled community could learn from. ‘Nomadic dwelling demonstrates an alternative relationship to land, and we live at a time when a re-evaluation of our relationship with land through the resources we consume and the lifestyle we lead is vital if human life is to continue.’ He goes on to make the point that the establishment response to nomadic communities – often calling them ‘hippies’ – reveals an ‘ideological dimension of the hostility’ towards nomadism. Caravans and other structures suitable for travelling, he argues, could provide cheap, sustainable homes in localities where people want to be, with a small footprint on the environment. Travelling is not an anachronism, but a pertinent response to the crisis of climate change. Seasonal work, and seasonal conditions, are well suited to life on the road, interspersed with months in one place.
So why do people distrust nomads so much? In his research on the inherent distrust of English Gypsies and Irish Travellers, Anthony Drummond set out a framework for understanding the problem. He argued that sedentary living – the ‘norm’ for most people in modern society – was not just favoured, but guarded, defended. To that end, the settled community would often pursue ‘active and intentional incitement of fear and hatred of nomads’.45 He could have been providing a case history of Meriden.