The build-up to and aftermath of Dale Farm had repercussions elsewhere too. Dale Farm had become a useful rallying call for other communities that felt ‘threatened’ by a proposed Gypsy or Traveller site. Here was the perfect cautionary tale – of what could happen if Gypsies or Travellers were allowed to ‘invade’ a community. Many local councils saw that they could come down harder, and faster, on unauthorised developments – and they did.
The most infamous example came in Meriden, a village some eight miles from Birmingham International airport, where a small number of English and Scotch Gypsy families had decided to move – without planning permission to do so – in April 2010. The owner of the field was Noah Burton. He had previously lived with his wife and her family on a stud farm for pedigree horses at nearby Balsall Common.
Noah comes from a well-liked and respected Romani Gypsy family, with roots in Wales, Scotland and the Midlands. One particularly famous member of the family, the legendary bare-knuckle fighter Uriah ‘Big Just’ Burton, had ‘kidnapped’ around seventy-five men in November 1963, in order to have their help in building a monument to his father up on a remote Welsh mountain. He freely admitted to his misdeed, saying that all of the men had promised to help him but some of them needed to be cuffed to honour their promises.1 (The real story is perhaps a little more prosaic; they were all well paid for their work and went mostly willingly, after a little grumbling.) Big Just Burton was much respected for his long fight to open up a private site in Wales in which many homeless people had sought sanctuary.2 He was also thought to be one of the few British Romanies to have operated any sort of kris, or Gypsy law – according to Noah, he was known to fine Romanies for misdeeds, then throw a party twice a year for all-comers (including the wrong-doers) off the proceeds.
Noah’s life, too, was more prosaic than that painted in the tabloids, where he was portrayed as the ‘Bin Laden of Meriden’. Noah took on primary responsibility for looking after his mother and siblings when he was just a teenager. He became a highly skilled restorer of antique cars and caravans, and travelled throughout Europe – sometimes going as far afield as Australia and the US – following work. He then returned to the Midlands, where he married Joanna, the daughter of Nelson Smith, of one of the most prominent English Gypsy families, and settled down to raise a close-knit family, of whom he is clearly proud. But when his twenty-year marriage broke up, with an elderly mother to care for and no home to go to, he took the fateful decision to occupy a field that he owned, but on which he had no planning permission to live. It was 30 April 2010, the Friday before the early May bank holiday weekend.
He never anticipated exactly how the decision to occupy the field would turn out. Looking back, he described the situation: ‘It’s been like World War Three here … I never ever realised how much hatred there is towards me.’3 He and the other families that moved with him onto the site claimed that they had been subjected to a number of incidents since they moved there: threats and intimidation wrapped up in a broiling dispute between some Meriden residents and the Gypsy families living on Noah’s field.
A group of villagers, led by David McGrath, a former Birmingham City councillor, and Doug Bacon, a former local police officer, were incensed that the Gypsies had occupied the site without planning permission. On camera they explained over and over that the site was part of the so-called Meriden Gap, a green-belt lung between the conurbations of nearby Solihull and Coventry. Many of the local protestors (plus some well-wishers, who travelled to support them from hundreds of miles away) were clearly fervent countryside lovers, and were deeply upset that the peace of the green belt had been disturbed in this way. Those sentiments were absolutely understandable – even to the families who had occupied the field and acknowledged that they had broken planning law. But it was the model of protest adopted by the residents that came into question.
It all started with the erection of two small camps, named ‘Nancy’ and ‘Barbara’ (after the owners of the land), which were set up to picket the site, night and day. Officially, the people at the sites were members of the Meriden Residents Against Inappropriate Development (RAID). RAID committed itself, according to its own website to ‘a twenty-four-hour, seven-days-a-week protest camp’ – the home page even included a ‘count-up’ of the camps’ time logged, to the day, hour and minute.4 In another entry on the website, campaigners pledged that they would continue what they called their ‘vigil’ to ‘monitor for illegal activity’.5 This constant and unprecedented surveillance both irritated and frightened the small number of Gypsies at Meriden, some of whom were children, older people and disabled women – among the most vulnerable.
At a planning meeting of Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council in February 2012, RAID’s ceaseless monitoring came up – somewhat inadvertently – for discussion. The meeting’s ostensible aim was to decide whether the council would take enforcement action against the RAID encampment, which, like the Gypsy camp, was flouting green-belt rules. David McGrath, RAID’s chair, explained to the planning meeting that he had handed over their photos of Noah’s field to the council.
David Bell, one of the councillors, said that the monitoring had been a help. He claimed that the ‘RAID camp has been the eyes and ears of the council’, going on to say that the organisation was ‘helping our officers to defend our green belt’. He went on to praise RAID members. ‘How would the council monitor that land twenty-four hours a day? Residents are doing the job of the council,’ he said. ‘If the decision went against the applicant [RAID], if they don’t monitor the site, what’s the outcome? … How do we support the residents to monitor the site to make sure that no further illegal acts take place?’6
Council officials appeared somewhat discomfited by the notion, so eloquently expressed by Councillor Bell, that local residents could monitor other residents. Later, the director of public communications explained that councillors expressed their own views, rather than council policy.7 Indeed, the council’s lawyer made it clear that the council itself had the authority to collect evidence through its own monitoring. Councillor Ryan expressed what many of the settled community were thinking: ‘We talk about the “Big Society”, so why can’t we engage local people in monitoring? … They [the RAID members] have been good citizens … They are trying to defend against illegal actions.’
The planning meeting voted, reluctantly, to expel the RAID camp, but the ‘localists’ were the winners of the argument that day. One set of residents – the ‘legitimate’ – were permitted, even encouraged, to police unwanted groups, just so long as they had permission to be on the plot from which they were doing their monitoring. It wasn’t the surveillance that was a problem; it was the encampment on green-belt land.
The RAID group was considered by many local people as heroes campaigning against criminals; the real picture was far from simple. The Gypsies at Meriden do not have criminal records. They pay tax like other local people too. But their very identity was seen by some as suspect, with or without evidence against them. This didn’t seem right to those living in Noah’s field. When Senga Townsley watched TV footage taken from inside the RAID encampment, she saw what appeared to be TV monitors trained on the site and complained to the Information Commissioner. They felt that their right to privacy, which is enshrined for all citizens in Article 8 of the Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights, was under risk of infringement.
In fact, the RAID camp was enjoying a lot of positive publicity – not least from the Conservative Express, Sun and Daily Mail, which regularly sent their correspondents up to camps Nancy and Barbara to keep tabs on progress. It was the Daily Mail that dubbed Noah Burton the ‘Bin Laden of Meriden’, in two separate headlines. The Telegraph called him the ‘Gypsy King’ of Meriden; The Times, a ‘Gypsy fixer’.
In some ways these were just more in a long line of unfriendly depictions of Gypsies to add to the history books. But the residents of Meriden – on all sides – were only at the beginning of their suffering.
The real story was much grimmer for the Romani Gypsies on the site. And RAID was also attracting its fair share of criticism – not least from some former members.
One prominent former member, who did not wish to be named, had been much involved in setting up the RAID group and was initially supportive of their stated desire to protect the green belt.8 But the person soon became disenchanted with the results. The atmosphere in Meriden had darkened, the former member said, as villagers took up positions on either side of the fence. There was absolutely no evidence to suggest that RAID members themselves were responsible for any of the racist incidents that then followed, the person was at pains to state, but follow they did. Racist graffiti with the words ‘Fuck off gipsie [sic] scum’ appeared on a railway bridge not far from Noah’s field; the perpetrators were never found.
The Gypsies were also threatened on Facebook, with one local teenager posting: ‘Sixty farmers with shotguns will sort this lot out.’ The Gypsies at Meriden were worried and referred the matter to West Midlands Police, which confirmed that the threats had been published on Facebook. The police then asked the Gypsy families to accept an apology rather than take any formal action against the teenagers who had been involved. The Gypsies agreed to the plan – an ‘olive branch’, as Noah Burton put it, somewhat wryly, before adding, ‘It didn’t work.’
Racism is particularly problematic in the nation’s rural areas, and Gypsies and Travellers come in for more than their fair share of prejudice. It is often denied to be happening, because both English Gypsies and Irish Travellers are white (and therefore often invisible) victims of this racism. ‘We are easy targets,’ said Noah. ‘Who stands up and talks for us? By nature we hide ourselves, we go through life not telling people who we are, because then we don’t get work, but because we hide ourselves we don’t have a voice.’
Noah and the other Meriden Gypsies call RAID a ‘vigilante group, harassing people looking for homes. They can bang on about the green belt, they are not even considering the sites, they are not asking if it is suitable, ah, it’s been proposed, how do we stop it? Encouraging them out there, keep encouraging them to string it along, to let that momentum build up.’
It seemed patently unfair to the Romani Gypsy community that no prosecutions had been filed in the racist attacks that they had reported to West Midlands Police. The hate crime prosecutor for the West Midlands, Rosemary Thompson (who has since retired), said there was a rationale behind the authorities’ response. ‘I have no doubt … that the communities have been subject to harassment. I am, however, concerned that we might end up concentrating on the issues around planning and the civil law context of this agenda which the [Crown Prosecution Service] would not get involved with. It is difficult, as we certainly want to give the community the confidence to report hate crime and also the confidence in our organisation to treat their cultural differences sensitively. I have given this some thought. In terms of race hate crime, it is easy to prove when a criminal offence such as assault has been committed and in the process of which the person is called a derogatory term in relation to their ethnicity. However … the criminal offence of harassment is much more difficult and very often it is one person’s word against another. There is certainly not an easy solution.’
In 2007 Neil Chakraborti and Jon Garland compared the levels of rural racism in three counties, including Warwickshire, through a series of focus groups conducted over a four-year period. (Before 1974, when it became part of the metropolitan borough of Solihull, Meriden had been situated in the county, so it was an apt point of comparison.) Chakraborti and Garland found that the rural ‘village’ was a romanticised concept, considered by many to be a close-knit community. ‘The key components of that notion [were] familial ties, long-term residency (including the ability to trace one’s ancestral roots back several generations) and a low turnover of population.’9 People reported feeling guarded towards ‘established minority ethnic groups’, but their sentiments were much more open when it came to Gypsies and Travellers. It ‘was acceptable to express hostility and to use inflammatory language towards Travellers and Gypsies; indeed it appeared that these groups were regarded as “fair game” for vitriolic abuse, in much the same way that asylum seekers have also been scapegoated by sections of the public and tabloid press in the last decade’.10 Villagers said they felt a need to fit in; those who didn’t were marginalised.
This chimes with the experience of Barbara Cookes, a retired farmer, and others in Meriden who decided that they were happy to accept the Gypsies as their neighbours and are now ostracised by some in the community. A former RAID member, Barbara had initially allowed group members to use her land as one of the first locations for a protest camp (the eponymous Camp Barbara), but as she got to know the Gypsies – many of whom had lived locally for several generations – she changed her mind about which side she was on.
Her first reaction to the ‘Gypsy invasion’ had been one of hostility. She recalled: ‘On the last day of April, I saw Noah and the others going past on their homes on wheels. I was a little bit put out; after all, I can’t get planning permission for my two log cabins. The farmers were there in half an hour, saying they would stop it at all costs.’11 Soon the protestors were encamped on her land, near the illegal site, and her feelings about both sides in the dispute started to shift. ‘We had Camp Barbara here, we had three gazebos, it got on my nerves a bit. People bought food and drinks and it became quite a campsite, but I had an ill neighbour; the camp was here for eleven weeks.’ She insisted that they go, finding the noise of the protestors, some of whom liked a drink and a bit of a party, excessive.
As she came to know her Gypsy neighbours, her attitude towards them changed too. ‘I find them very friendly, really, I can’t knock them; if I wanted a good turn doing they would do it … I was down the lane with my dogs, and along came Noah in his pick-up truck. I introduced myself, “I’m old Barb from the barn,” and he said, “Yes, the only smiling face around here.” People at the camp asked me why I spoke to him, but I was always taught to speak to everybody – everybody has a heart. They thought I was being too friendly to them, but I wanted to get to know him and his relatives.’
Seeing the human side of the Gypsy families had cost her dear. In the summer of 2012, the Townsley girls, Dana and Susie, had washed up for hours and helped her make tea at a village Open Gardens day in aid of Cancer Research UK. Some in the village liked the girls – but not all approved of Barbara’s choice in helpers. Over the past year, she said, ‘People we have known for many years will try and get past me now without a wave, they go straight by.’ Recently she had been plagued by silent nuisance phone calls but this had not shaken her conviction that she had done the right thing in seeing the Gypsies as human beings, as neighbours – even as friends.
The graffiti, the Facebook threats … one prominent former member felt that RAID’s presence was inflaming a tense situation, though that person continued to stress that there was absolutely no evidence that RAID members were responsible for the attacks. Looking back over the first two years of the campaign, the former member said, ‘It was like a Wallace and Gromit angry mob here; there was a lot of passion.’ Some people in the village, he was sure, had started to resort to dirty tricks. ‘For a fact I know that there were four occasions when rubbish was dumped around the village. I was well against that. It was blamed on the Gypsies. There were things some people were trying to do, make the Gypsies responsible for.’
Information obtained through Freedom of Information requests to Solihull Council seems to bear out his allegation. One email, sent by Keith Portman, the police officer responsible for keeping the peace between the two groups in Meriden, to officials at the council, states: ‘I am receiving numerous phone calls from the Gypsy’s [sic] and various support networks regarding alleged racist abuse and threats; residents obstructing the entrance to the site, fly-tipping house bricks … there are clearly increased tensions in both communities. There are a pile of house bricks dumped at the side of the road under the road bridge in Eaves Green Lane, where the racist graffiti was written. Not sure who dumped them but suspect it was a resident with the intent to either blame the Gypsy’s [sic], hence the racist graffiti, or to be used as a road block in the event of work on the site.’12
David McGrath, the former Birmingham city councillor who had become a leader among the villagers in their struggle against the site, countered such suggestions. In an emailed statement, he said: ‘In the email to which you refer, Inspector Portman states he is “unsure as to who dumped the bricks” and then gives a view as to who may have done so. Meriden, like many rural areas, is subject to fly tipping and had the Insp[ector] had evidence to support his personal view, I have no doubt he would have acted upon it.’13
In 2010, Senga Townsley, a young disabled woman, also came to stay on the field with her Scotch Gypsy family. Her close-knit family had worked their way down from Scotland, with her father, William, trading antiques, and working in scrap and tarmacking, and her mother, Susan, keeping house. They had worked mostly in the north of England, but had sometimes travelled further afield, once as far as Canada, where Susan recalled, smiling, ‘there were nae problems being Gypsies there, they called us barn painters’.14
But as laws governing travelling became stricter in both Scotland and England in the late 1980s, the life became more difficult for them. Noah and his family had been friends for decades, Senga explained, and his support and accommodation became more and more vital to them. ‘When Noah got married to Joanne, we started to overwinter in Trevallion [the stud farm that Noah’s father-in-law owned]. When he got separated, that affected way more people than just him. When Noah got separated, he already owned the land at Meriden but he had never thought of pulling on there.’
The Trevallion stud farm was no longer somewhere the Townsleys could stay over the winter, and the pitch they had in Doncaster had been rented out. Senga had to move into a house in Doncaster for six months with her sister, Susie, her main carer, but found living ‘in bricks and mortar’ difficult – not least because her physical disability meant it was hard for her to go up and down the stairs. The Townsleys were all but homeless, as was Noah’s extended family – his elderly mother and his brothers, Jim, Pinkie and Dean.
Senga recalled that another friend without a site had said two years earlier, ‘I’m going to “Gypsy war it,”’ a phrase she had never heard before. She was then told that it meant moving onto a piece of land without planning permission. She had told her friend at that time: ‘You don’t want to do that, it causes real trouble.’ Two years later the Burton and Townsley families were in the same position. ‘Noah said, “I’ve got this land, this is what we have got to do, we have to pull on. We need to do it on the bank holiday.” So for me to sit here and say we didn’t know what we were doing would be a lie, but we didn’t understand the ramifications of it. We just knew that is what people did – the mechanics of it, they said this is what we are going to do. I didn’t have no clue about this. My dad knew, but we didn’t really know.’ They planned to do it on the early May bank holiday weekend, but her parents, fearing trouble, asked Senga and Susie to stay put in Doncaster.
Senga’s mother, Susan, had never done anything like this in all her life as a Traveller. ‘I was nervous, but we never thought it would be like this. We thought it would be like this – you just pull on, you get your electric, your sewer, the water sorted out and then you fight the council. No one ever mentioned fighting the residents,’ said Susan.
It did not go as planned. Senga remembered that, ‘Mum rang us up and she said, “You won’t believe what it’s like. We tried to pull on – some old man blocked us. It’s really bad.”’ RAID chairman David McGrath was called back from his holiday in Torquay, Devon, at a time when he was recuperating from a grave illness, exacerbated, he felt, by the stress of the situation at home. He said at the time: ‘We had unpacked the suitcases and were about to go out for a meal. But when we heard what was happening we repacked the cases and came straight back.’15
It was a terrible time for everyone caught up in the Meriden encampment, on both sides. Local housed residents complained of sleepless nights brought on by worry over and conflict with their unwanted new neighbours. As for the Townsleys and the Burtons, the stress of the move and the fierce reaction among some of the local people had also made William Townsley, the father of the family, seriously ill. ‘It was like the perfect storm,’ his wife Susan recalled. ‘First Noah and his marriage falling apart, then William falling sick, Senga and Susie stuck in Doncaster – all those things came together at the same time.’
When the day for their ‘Gypsy War’ arrived, Susan had called her daughters in Doncaster. ‘We were only supposed to stay in Doncaster for a couple of nights till it got settled,’ Senga said. ‘But then I got a phone call from Mum saying, “Dad’s in hospital. Don’t panic, but he’s got heart pains.” We jumped straight in the car and drove down. If we had been planning to do this in any way, we would have known what we were doing! We didn’t even know where we were going, but eventually we found the field, and saw all the people standing outside. They all had cameras. We asked the policemen where our father had been taken, but nobody knew. Eventually we found him in a hospital in Solihull, and after the visit we came back and stayed in the trailer with Mum. It was really scary as we were at the top end of the field, where they could take photos of us.’
They decided to stick it out during the furore, thinking it would last just a few days. ‘We honestly thought, In a few days it will be over. The day after my dad got out of hospital, we had to drive back to Doncaster to get our stuff, and we heard on the radio that there were fears for our safety. But we decided that we would pick our stuff up and do it together: “we will have to commit to it”. We thought the tide was turning. We thought it would calm down after a few days and then we can get on with our lives.’ Two years later, the protest camp was still watching over them. ‘It’s been heightened sometimes [but] there have been months when we’ve barely noticed each other,’ she said.
Life for Senga had been particularly hard, as she was targeted both for her disability and because she is a Gypsy. ‘I was called a cripple once, when there was a problem with pizza being delivered and RAID wanted to stop the delivery. Someone shouted, “You pikey cripple,” and I was really upset. The police were nice, but there was nothing they can do, as it’s our word against theirs. They have also been saying that I put on show for court, and that I’m putting on my disability, they say I’m making it all up.’ Senga’s situation was very real, however. She was diagnosed with cerebral palsy when she was just a few years old. Sometimes she walks with sticks and sometimes she uses a wheelchair, depending on her level of pain, or how far she must walk. And she had moved to Noah’s field specifically because the Doncaster house had proved impossible. Still, some residents claimed that she was taken to court merely to curry sympathy.
At the encampment, life was easier for Senga in some ways. Her family were able to build an accessible utility room where she could shower and wash in privacy. But trying to get on and off the muddy site with walking sticks made it difficult on occasion for Senga to get to work, particularly in the winter, when her sticks would sink several inches down in the muck. Sometimes she had to be supported by another person to get to and from the car in order to get to her job. The local council had denied permission to put down any hardcore for paths.16
But settling in Meriden was better than being homeless, she said. ‘If you are in one place it makes things like getting exercise easier, it keeps weight down. But walking here is difficult because it’s muddy and walking sticks and mud don’t mix.’ She knew that if she could settle in one place, she could manage her condition much better. ‘It would be easier if we could just get settled. I’m not saying I would never travel, but to have a permanent base and then be able to get pain management and physiotherapy, that would make day-to-day living easier for me. Disabled people can have a good quality of life, and I could improve mine if we stayed. As it is, I don’t really know how to manage my condition; I don’t know if I am doing good or bad.’
The insults she had endured hurt a great deal because of her deeply seated veneration for the older generation, a traditional custom among the Romani Gypsies. ‘It hurts more here because the people who are doing it are older. When we have suffered abuse before – I have been called “dirty pikey” loads – you genuinely don’t take any notice. But it seems worse because the people you are dealing with are older and more educated; you feel that people of a certain age should not do that. It shouldn’t become personal [to them]; elderly people don’t normally react like that. It’s like being hit by a brick. You don’t know what to respond, we don’t know what to respond – we need to get on with people, we need to integrate.’
Somehow, though, life has slowly improved for the Gypsies in Meriden as they have made more contacts, including with neighbours like Barbara. ‘Some of the people in the village are really nice,’ said Senga. ‘In the beginning it felt horrible going anywhere in the village, you didn’t want to make eye contact, but now you feel so comfortable except when you drive by that one bit. The local shops are friendly, it’s such a shame … The minority has got smaller and smaller, even some of them at the protest camp are friendly’ – with Doug Bacon singled out for praise by the Townsley family for trying hard, both in public and behind the scenes, not to make the campaign against them personal. ‘It is a very small minority who want to make it an attack: if they discredit us, make us look bad, they will get rid of us quicker … They want to poke you so much you will react, but it takes a lot to make us react.’
‘People say stuff like “it’s no smoke without fire”, but why did people hate black people?’ she asked. ‘We have a lot to be blamed for – we have isolated ourselves. The only thing that makes the news is if we pull on somewhere. Everyone thinks we don’t pay taxes, for the large majority, it’s not true. It is a fact that property values drop, they work hard for their mortgages, I get that, I feel bad for that, [but] it’s not our fault and it’s not their fault … It doesn’t have to get personal. We do pay taxes. I work for a living – everywhere I have been settled I try to work. I always work when I can. We don’t even have a speeding ticket! People print that we are thieves, not citizens – this is our country and … we have a right to have somewhere to live; that’s what has to change. People don’t want you to exist: the Gypsy problem should just go away; we should just live in a house. Cultural exceptions are made for other people. We just want a chance to live somewhere. We just want a fair chance … We need somewhere to live, so our children can go to school, go to the doctor. No one has ever monitored my condition. That’s all we are asking.’
Members of Meriden RAID insisted that their campaign was not against Noah Burton, Senga Townsley and the families on the site. They were simply trying to defend the green belt. In the beginning they were successful. Solihull Council turned down a planning application made by the Gypsies for eight pitches on the field in July. But the Gypsies appealed against the decision, and tensions in the village remained high.
In September 2010 RAID members travelled with their local MEP, Nikki Sinclaire, to the European Parliament and to the European Court of Human Rights on a ‘protest coach trip’ in hope of securing support and funding. Sinclaire, a great supporter of Meridan RAID’s campaigning, was quoted on the group’s website: ‘there seems to be no balance regarding the rights of the long-term local residents affected by the development. It is obvious to everyone that in this instance the settled community of Meriden has had its right to a private and family life fundamentally breached by this unethical attempt at development. Not only that, but the planning system and laws put in place – many of them influenced by Europe – leave people feeling powerless and frustrated – and actually encourage this type of thing.’
David McGrath also noted the importance of the trip. ‘This is a big thing for us – we have worked very hard to organise this and we feel passionate that every decision-maker in the country will hear about how places like Meriden have been the victims of bulldozers and barristers – aided and abetted by a crazy planning system that gives special rights to some and not others,’ he said in a statement published on the RAID website. He continued: ‘This is an attack on our rural way of life and we will fight to change things at every court in the land. It is also a breach of Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights (a right to a private and family way of life). Gypsies and travellers are given a bad name by a few who refuse to come to the table, engage with communities and play by the same rules as the rest of all of us’.17
The RAID contingent picketed the European Parliament with banners proclaiming ‘We have human rights too’ and ‘Protect the Meriden Gap’. They were dismayed to find that not everyone agreed with their point of view – and, indeed, some forces were unwelcoming of their bid to have their case heard. French riot police and parliamentary security staff asked them to remove their campaign T-shirts and tracked their movements inside the Parliament building.18
The following March, Solihull council started a full planning inquiry into the proposed site, although Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government Eric Pickles reserved the right to step in and overturn any decision made by the planning inspector if he did not agree with it.19 RAID campaigners gave evidence, saying that the site had caused a rise in traffic accidents and that it was ‘inappropriate’ for the families to be on green-belt land. Johnny Howorth, the Guardian film-maker, recalled giving evidence at the public inquiry. ‘I will always remember a few pensioners, who were vehemently opposed to the Gypsy families staying at Meriden, mouthing swear words at me when I was giving evidence. I have never experienced anything like that. The Gypsies were always keen for me to hear both sides of the story – but some people in Meriden RAID immediately thought I would take the Gypsy side if I talked to them.’ He was partly motivated to give evidence by an incident that had occurred outside the council planning meeting in July 2010, when the Gypsies were having their application heard. One RAID member, who appeared to realise he was on Howorth’s screen during filming, accused Howorth of ‘being with the “Gyppos”’ and then tried to bat his camera away.20 The planning inspector, Phillip Ware, upheld the denial of the planning permission.
On 25 October Pickles upheld Ware’s decision. He also refused permission for the Gypsies to stay at the site temporarily, saying ‘the harm is too great’. He cited a ‘serious loss of openness in the Green Belt which would be exacerbated if other elements of the proposal were undertaken’ and the danger to highway safety and to trees. He also cited the ‘limited likelihood of peaceful and integrated co-existence’ in Meriden – something that both sides, at this point, could agree on, at least. Pickles insisted that he had given ‘some weight’ to the immediate need for Traveller sites in the district, the lack of a suitable alternative site, general health needs and continuity of education for the Gypsies, ‘but added that such considerations did not outweigh the harms’.21
In the winter and spring of 2012, most members of Meriden RAID became wary of taking much of a stand in public. Requests for interviews were routinely referred up their hierarchy to vice-chair Doug Bacon or chairman David McGrath. This meant it was all but impossible to ask ordinary members of Meriden RAID for their views about the controversy. McGrath and Bacon, in turn, made appointments (with regard to me, working at this time for the Guardian and for this book) on a number of occasions, then abruptly cancelled them. They gave reasons for their new shyness: one was Johnny Howorth’s evidence at the public inquiry; others included the pressure of work and the perceived bias of any media team that thought it important to talk to both sides in the story; another was, ostensibly, and at very short notice, to avoid ‘prejudicing’* any court appearances (although in Basildon all sides freely gave interviews in the run-up, during and after court appearances).22
* The concern about court appearances being ‘prejudiced’ by these interviews was raised by David McGrath in a written response to questions that he provided on 6 March 2012, after several interviews were cancelled. He requested that this statement be reprinted in full, without editing of his responses. The statement is reprinted in the appendix.
They did not always cancel their conversations with the press, however. After planning permission for RAID’s makeshift shelter was refused on 1 February 2012, David McGrath insisted to me that his vision was one of ‘ethical localism’, whereby local residents can resist ‘inappropriate development’. He was encouraged by the success that RAID had made in creating a localism movement, which he said now numbered around ‘forty or fifty’ groups. These local organisations would be ‘professionalising’ similar protests around the country.23 But the roll-out of the RAID model, and its potential commercialisation, alarmed other people in Meriden.
A few miles from the village, in Hockley Heath, Solihull Council identified a possible site for development for Gypsies and Travellers. The local residents’ association hastily constituted a group, called Hockley Heath Residents Against Inappropriate Development, and approached Meriden RAID for help. This help, according to the association’s website, came at a price – the association said that it had engaged McGrath and Doug Bacon as ‘consultants’ who would assist them in their campaign against the site going forward as development. The website asked for funds for local residents to meet the bill of the two consultants, saying that £4,560 had been raised already, ‘just over half the bill’.
In a written statement, McGrath explained: ‘This money will be paid to my company and from this will be deducted the services of a planning consultant, researcher and ecologist. Residents in Hockley were concerned that they should have a professionally prepared response evaluate [sic] a proposal to locate a traveller site in Hockley Heath. The reports identified clear planning reasons why the site would be inappropriate. Solihull Council also carried out its own independent survey and also concluded that the site was inappropriate.’ He added: ‘Meriden RAID raised and spent over £67,000 engaging the services of planning consultant, highways consultant, ecologist etc. Meriden RAID cannot pay for other groups. Local groups must raise funds in the same way and pay for the expert analysis.’24
The Hockley Heath group also approached the local parish council for funding to help pay the bill. The council decided to meet over £6,500 of the costs run up by the residents to oppose the proposed Gypsy and Traveller site. The decision to meet the bill was problematic. According to Barbara Cohen, a lawyer specialising in equality issues and former head of legal policy for the Commission for Racial Equality: ‘Under Section 149 of the Equality Act 2010, parish councils, which are listed as public bodies, have to have due regard to the need to foster good relations between people who have a protected characteristic (in this case Gypsy/Traveller) and those who do not. The parish council must take equality issues into account. So if a parish council has made a grant to a community group which might exacerbate poor relations between Gypsies and Travellers and others it is arguably that they have failed to comply with its equality duty under the Act.’25
After being challenged about the legality of this funding decision, Hockley Heath parish council asked Warwickshire county solicitors for advice. It soon issued the following statement: ‘Hockley Heath Parish Council is aware of its obligations under the Local Government Act 1972 and the Equality Act 2010 and believes that it has acted in accordance with its legal obligations at all times. Hockley Heath Parish Council does not have any further statement to make at this time.’26
With the story out in the community, residents in nearby areas began reporting payments made by other parish councils to Meriden RAID. In nearby Berkswell, people had also turned to Meriden RAID for ‘consultancy’ when Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council had threatened the community with a proposed site. As in Hockley Heath, they too had been persuaded that the parish council needed to cough up. It pledged a hefty £10,000 towards a ‘fighting fund’ to keep out the Gypsies; in the end it had only paid £3,600 as of 21 June 2012. Part of the fee covered a ‘survey’ conducted by members of Meriden RAID of land that was being considered for a site. The owner of the land in question was at first involved with the fledgling residents’ committee, but was cut out of the loop around the time that Meriden RAID became involved. The parish council never asked her about her own plan for the land – which was to withdraw it from discussion. After the site had been withdrawn, the survey’s results were still lodged with the borough council. Yet the report had not been shared with the land’s owner, despite her repeated requests – and Meriden RAID or other ‘consultants’, she claimed, may well have trespassed on her land without permission to carry out the survey. She decided to lodge a formal complaint with Solihull Council about the situation.
But Berkswell was not the only community looking to RAID for advice. Residents in nearby Balsall Common also solicited funding from their parish council to oppose the site.
Parish councils had once represented the cuddly side of politics – paying for street lamps, mowing the village green and providing floral displays for events like the Queen’s Jubilee. Many still devote their energies to such worthy projects. But now they had been co-opted as the front guard of localism, the push to devolve power down to the lowest level – and some councils had started to make increasingly questionable political and legal decisions. The money paid by Hockley Heath parish council for ‘consultancy’ work to defend the village against the Gypsy site risked running foul of the Equality Act 2010, under which councils were required to foster ‘good relations’ between different ethnic groups.
The issue of parish councils shelling out for these activities was brought up at the Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council’s cabinet meeting in November 2011, but no action was decided. The money for Hockley Heath’s ‘consultancy’ was paid directly to David McGrath’s company, Mr McGrath confirmed.
Funding is important, of course, but so is the proliferation of the groups throughout the country. One group, in Yorkshire, attracted much local interest as its chair, Neil Whitelam, stood in the general election of 2010 as a British National Party candidate for the Holderness constituency. Since then, he has said that he holds no political affiliation to the BNP, but the RAID website in Holderness talks of ‘nationalist’ members of the community fighting against a ‘fully fledged Gypsy site’ in the area.27 Such language alarms many Gypsies and Travellers. As for Meriden RAID, David McGrath said in a statement that the group ‘utterly rejects racism and we have consistently made our view on this matter clear’.28 Both he and Doug Bacon have made strenuous efforts throughout their campaign at Meriden to make it clear that they completely repudiate racism against Gypsies and Travellers. They also state unequivocally that they believe Gypsies and Travellers have a right to appropriate accommodation.
Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council asked the residents supporting Meriden RAID to take down their encampment by the end of April 2012. Instead, they remained, and even fortified their presence. By the end the RAID encampment looked rather like a bunker from the Second World War. The Burton and Townsley families were supposed to leave Noah’s field at the end of March 2013. They had been under the kind of pressure and, on occasion, subject to racism that would break many people – and on many occasions they responded with a degree of empathy towards those who stood against them. On some occasions they had to admit that harsh words had been exchanged, words that some of the families on the site said they now regret. And sometimes this empathy has been reciprocated by members of RAID, raising the hope that perhaps, if the Townsleys and the Burtons could find a home nearby, there could be some form of reconciliation in the future.
Still, as of that decisive March, they had only secured a home for something short of three years. In early April 2013 they started to sell their belongings and move off, a small community splintered for the lack of accommodation. At the time of writing, one of their group had already been moved on by the police twice from stopping places. None of them – women, children, older people and disabled people among them – had anywhere secure to go to.
The battle in Meriden would soon be over. But the model was spreading, nonetheless. Local people were learning how to put up an active resistance to new Gypsy and Traveller sites, using as many legal loopholes as they could find to the sites being taking a foothold. The battle at Meriden may be over, but the war had only just begun.
The Meriden group became a standard-bearer for localism, organising a conference in January 2011 of similarly minded people from around the UK that ‘attracted some seventy-five delegates’, according to an article for the Institute for Race Relations by Ryan Erfani-Ghettani. ‘Using the Localism Act, local “residents’” groups are emerging to fight, usually successfully, against Traveller and Gypsy attempts to establish legal sites – and all this despite the fact that local authorities have failed to provide the necessary statutory pitches … Groups have been writing to each other to offer campaigning strategies, sharing tactics and forging coalitions. A legal infrastructure appears to have developed, and action groups are claiming to have access to a shared network of planning and legal experts … Localism has put the power back into communities in one sense – the power to buy expertise.’29
Since the war over the green-belt land in Meriden began, many residents’ groups battling such sites, and aping Meriden RAID’s tactics, have appeared, including in Leicester; Crewe and Pickmere in Cheshire; Attleborough in Norfolk; Newent in Gloucestershire; Stanton Wick in Somerset; Stanley, Wakefield; Penderry in Swansea; Flackwell Heath, Buckinghamshire; Tonbridge, Kent; Windsor in Berkshire; and Aldebury in Wiltshire. Though some councils try to do the right thing, they are often opposed by and prevented from doing so by local people – more and more often, doing so using tax-payers’ money. Local district and metropolitan boroughs pay up, as is their duty, to identify sites for homeless Gypsies and Travellers, using tax-payers’ money. Then parish councils (which are funded with a precept through local councils) are being systematically used by local residents’ groups for funding to oppose such sites – the efforts, all funded by tax-payers’ money, often cancelling each other out.
This is, to some extent, understandable. Many residents’ associations, as in Meriden, have raised tens of thousands of pounds from their own members in order to oppose Gypsy and Traveller sites that they fear will have an impact on their local area and that they feel are being imposed on them from above with little consultation. It is not surprising that they are trying to find someone else to pay for that, after they’ve spent so much themselves. The planning system is pitting local settled people against local Gypsies and Travellers – devolving conflict down to the local level, between putative neighbours, where it has the potential to become personal, even bitter. But the system is, if anything, even less fair to Gypsies and Travellers, who – whether homeless or housed – are often paying taxes that go to fund ‘consultants’ who come up with reasons why the Gypsies and Travellers shouldn’t have anywhere to live in their parish.
Eric Pickles and other champions of the localism agenda may not have meant this to happen, but Gypsy and Traveller families have been set against their neighbours, who are, all too often, banding together to deprive them of a legal place to live. Meriden has become a template of how residents’ groups can use planning, the legal system, public opinion and the media to fight against Gypsies and Travellers, with the effect that these nomads are left with nowhere – legal or illegal – to live.
Noah Burton and the other Gypsy families at Meriden had almost exhausted their funds to fight for the right to a home. The local residents had also been fundraising continuously to wage their expensive legal battle to keep the Gypsies out of their back yard. Meriden RAID were also in breach of planning law for many months in their makeshift shelter – and when the Gypsies eventually moved off, they still had nowhere legal to live. Localism has not solved the problem for either side.30
As former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott said, in a clear critique of the policy of localism: ‘It panders to the worst kind of Nimbyism, and the worst kind of prejudices that people can have. This is a housing problem, after all, and it needs sorting out.’31