In 1997 a Labour government was elected. At Stringfellows night club, ashen-faced Young Conservatives watched the results come in: their party had lost power for the first time in nearly twenty years – for many, the Conservatives had been in power for their whole lives. As the mood in Britain changed, so did the soundtrack. DRream’s ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ became the anthem of Tony Blair’s new Labour government. The question would be, Better for whom? As a way of making a swift point of their answer, ‘New Labour’ began a campaign to rebuild Britain’s battered public sector and welfare state. But over the next five years, they did little or nothing to help Mary Ann McCarthy and the other families at Dale Farm. Making things better for Britain’s nomads, it seemed, was a policy step too far.
In the first years after the turn of the millennium, the rhetoric against Gypsies and Travellers was becoming hostile – including in Parliament. Numerous debates were held – including seven debates and written questions between November 1999 and March 2000 alone. In one legendary 2002 debate, Conservative MP Andrew Mackay, who would later step down from Parliament after being embroiled in the parliamentary expenses scandal of 2010, referred to the Gypsies in his Berkshire constituency: ‘They are scum, and I use the word advisedly. People who do what these people have done do not deserve the same human rights as my constituents going about their everyday lives.’1
It wasn’t just the Conservatives who were making it clear that the Gypsies and Travellers who had come to live in Britain were unwelcome. Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, launched a wide-ranging attack on what he called ‘fake’ Gypsies in an interview for BBC Radio West Midlands. ‘There are relatively few real Romani Gypsies left, who seem to mind their own business and don’t cause trouble to other people,’ he said. ‘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 therefore they’ve got a licence to commit crimes and act in an unlawful way that other people don’t have.’ Straw later wrote of Gypsies going ‘burgling, thieving, breaking into vehicles, causing all kinds of trouble, including defecating in the doorways of firms’.2 He differentiated between ‘real’ Gypsies – people, it seemed, who were never seen, living on air like the fairies and leaving their neighbours in peace – and ‘fake’ Travellers. And just as it had been forty years earlier on the outskirts of Birmingham, it was the Irish Travellers who were coming under scrutiny. As Straw peddled his views on the radio, Patrick Egan and John Sheridan were buying up the land that would become Dale Farm, and starting to raise a fuss among the villagers of Basildon.
It seemed to many in the Gypsy and Traveller community as though old Victorian morals were being resurrected under New Labour. They had saved up money – a lot of money – to buy the pitches for their homes, and now many, particularly the women, were desperate to settle down and make some kind of home. New Labour might as well have ‘reinvented the Victorian concepts of the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor’, in the words of Irish Traveller scholar Colm Power.
In May 2003 Gypsies and Travellers were horrified when a fifteen-year-old Irish Traveller boy, Johnny Delaney, was killed by two other teenagers – motivated, it appears, according to witness evidence, by hatred for his ethnicity.3 It was a grievous, unprovoked attack, but unlike the murder of Stephen Lawrence, a black teenager, almost exactly a decade earlier, it did not cause a national outcry. The people at Dale Farm took note. Even more frightening, however, was the rejoicing found in many newspapers when Tony Martin, who had shot a young English Gypsy in the back as he was running away after a bungled burglery, had his sentence reduced by the Court of Appeal in July 2001 and was set free in 2003.
Just four months later Gypsies and Travellers were left reeling in horror when residents attending the Firle Bonfire Guy Fawkes celebrations in 2003 burned a caravan with pictures of Gypsies inside painted on it.4 The vehicle’s number plate read ‘P1KEY’. The caravan was at the centre of a dispute with Travellers that had started earlier in the year. They were further dismayed when the bonfire participants were to some extent excused by their local MP, Norman Baker, at the time a member of the parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights, who said the Sussex residents were upset because ‘itinerant criminals’ had damaged local land and property; a degree of anger was understandable, he explained.5 The organisers, Firle Bonfire Society, denied any racism was involved, and in a statement published on the group’s website, the chairman, Richard Gravett, said their intentions had been ‘misunderstood and misrepresented’. Their target was not Gypsies, but local authorities, ‘whose lack of action had caused so much frustration locally’.6 (Baker later worked hard with all sides to try and increase understanding of diversity issues.)
Around the same time that the Firle Bonfire Society was putting flame to Gypsy effigies, the National Farmers Union produced a report entitled Britain’s Rural Outlaws, in which they described Gypsies and Travellers as ‘well equipped, extremely organised and above the law’. The issue was urgent: ‘the problem of illegal Travellers is now so bad that the majority of farmers have been affected in some way’, the NFU said. The complaints were warmly praised by Conservative MPs.7
But the Commission for Racial Equality was not going to let that be the last say in the debate. Its chairman, Trevor Phillips, said the burning was a clear example of incitement to racial hatred, a crime carrying a maximum sentence of seven years. ‘You couldn’t get more provocative than this,’ he said in a piece for the Western Morning Press. ‘The UK for Gypsies is still like the American Deep South for black people in the 1950s.’ The next year he appointed the first ever Romani Gypsy commissioner, Charles Smith, to the commission, with the aim of creating a strategy specifically to combat discrimination against the communities.8
Inside the Gypsy and Traveller movement, some remained furious that some of the New Age Travellers had brought the fury of the public, the press and Parliament upon them. Why should it be illegal for them to use their traditional stopping places? It was the New Age Travellers who were the problem, and for that reason, many wanted nothing to do with them. Indeed, New Travellers had been forced to form their own advocacy groups, the most influential being Families, Friends and Travellers, which had become a registered charity in 1999. (FFT is now much respected, and supports Gypsies and Travellers from all backgrounds and ethnicities.) ‘It was left to the New Travellers to conduct their own campaigns,’ Lord Avebury, who had championed the Caravan Sites Act in 1968, said. ‘They didn’t form part of any of these movements really, so it was seen as a separate issue, because the definition of Gypsies and Travellers for certain purposes is an ethnic definition, although in planning terms it is a bit ambiguous.’ Government officials began to suggest that the various travelling communities be classified. As Lord Avebury said, ‘There is talk, as you know, of harmonising the definitions, so they are the same for planning and other purposes.’ The confusion in the settled community about those adopting the convoy way of life ‘wasn’t helpful’ to Gypsies and Travellers.
Meanwhile, in the Commons, there was both progress and backsliding. In 2002 and again in 2003, the Conservative MP for Bournemouth East, David Atkinson, introduced the Traveller Law Reform Bill as a Private Members’ Bill – with the best of intentions, but obviously in hopes of generating debate rather than of changing the law. The bill called for the reintroduction of a statutory duty on local authorities to provide sites for Gypsies and Travellers – including New Travellers.
Atkinson and Lord Avebury helped to mobilise the Gypsies and Travellers as one combined movement. An umbrella campaign group, the Gypsy and Traveller Law Reform Coalition, was formed to support Atkinson’s bill. This was soon followed by the establishment of the All-Party Gypsy and Traveller Law Reform Group. Still, New Labour was too nervous to adopt the Traveller Law Reform Bill as draft government legislation. Instead, the government continued to pursue their own ‘bi-partisan approach’ to the Gypsy and Traveller accommodation problem.
In 2005, Tony Blair met John Baron, the local MP from Dale Farm, to discuss the situation there, and New Labour ministers made noises about the need to control anti-social behaviour around Gypsy and Traveller sites. They were willing to make one small concession, however: they would issue new guidance to force local authorities to strengthen their policies around identifying suitable sites. There was good practice embedded within this policy reform – but it did not please everyone. For instance, in the Housing Act 2004 the government required local authorities to tackle the reasons behind unauthorised encampments and establish an inventory of pitch needs. This enraged many local Conservative politicians, particularly when the government issued the first directive based on the new guidance to Brentwood Council, which was in many ways ‘next door’ to Basildon, with its largest Traveller settlement in the nation.
Brentwood Council had been avoiding identifying alternative sites for Gypsies and Travellers through what was known as a ‘criterion-based policy’.9 It had been challenged four times by local Gypsies about this stance. Essex Conservatives were further irked when a Brentwood Gypsy Support group, first founded in 1987, was re-formed to take up the fight. The Brentwood Gypsies were pursuing new sites with energy under the aegis of Thomas Acton, who had become such an influential figure in the activist movement, alongside Grattan Puxon and Donald Kenrick. For years Acton had charted the social, political and artistic growth of Britain’s Gypsies and Travellers from his post at the University of Greenwich. He had also watched the rise of Roma activism in Europe.
That one small Labour initiative spelled the end of bi-partisan strategy towards Gypsies and Travellers. Essex Conservatives had friends on high. Eric Pickles, the Brentwood and Ongar MP, was a rising star in the Conservative Party and by 2002 had been named the Shadow Local Government and Regions Secretary.10 He had long campaigned against what he saw as special privileges for Gypsies and Travellers, and now he had the ear of the party elite. Gearing up for the next general election, set for 2005, the Tories, led by Michael Howard, took up the Gypsy and Traveller ‘problem’ with fervour. Public opposition built up, as the tabloid press came in line as their loud hailer.11 Howard took out full-page advertisements on the matter in every national Sunday newspaper: ‘I believe in fair play,’ he said in the adverts, claiming that in Britain there was ‘one rule for Travellers and another for everyone else’. He criticised Travellers for using human rights laws – something that many Conservatives deplored (and still deplore) with a passion – to use their right to family life to protect their right to live on illegal sites.12 Howard went on: ‘I don’t believe in special rules for special interest groups.’ But then, in an almost farcical turn, he proposed a ‘Gypsy law’, which would make trespass a criminal rather than a civil offence, and promised that he would give police new powers to evict illegal occupiers fast. He pointed to the example of the Irish Republic, where a similar measure had led to a drop in illegal sites. Of course, after the Irish law had passed, many Travellers had moved to the UK, looking for a place to live. A law like that would leave the McCarthys and Sheridans at Dale Farm with nowhere to go.
Labour could have backed down, but instead it found new courage. By now the government was coming under increasing pressure from the Commission for Racial Equality, where Charles Smith had recently come on board and soon began to push the cause of Gypsy and Traveller rights. There were complaints to the Metropolitan Police and other forces that the media campaign may constitute illegal incitement to racist violence.13 In May 2005, New Labour won the election, but with only sixty-six seats – a far cry from the huge majorities of 1997 and 2001. They were still in power, but they needed to find a way forward on the issue. Demands were now also coming from the European courts, after the successful win of Connors vs UK, which observed that Gypsies and Travellers, as a vulnerable ethnic minority, needed ‘special consideration’ for their needs before eviction proceedings were taken.14 For his part, Pickles was promoted to Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party.
John Prescott, by then Deputy Prime Minister, recalled: ‘As early as 1997 I had Rodney Bickerstaffe [general secretary of the trade union Unison], saying to me, “Here’s a job you need to do.” I also knew from my own constituency that there was a shortage of sites. And then there was Dale Farm, and I knew that the temporary stay there wasn’t enough, we needed to get all councils to provide spaces for our mobile populations. A lot of people in those communities wanted their children to have an education. So I got on with it, I was the planning minister so I had authority to do it, I couldn’t be challenged on planning.’
Prescott had some sympathy with Basildon Council, feeling that it had provided more places for Travellers than other, neighbouring councils, such as Brentwood. ‘They had a legitimate complaint, but we needed to try and solve the problem properly. I had John Baron [the local MP] coming to me, saying, “Let’s send in the troops, move them on.” I didn’t think that was the way to solve the problem. This was a housing problem, and a job that needed to be done.’
So Prescott, along with a junior minister in the Department of Communities and Local Government named Yvette Cooper, started to take soundings among Gypsy and Traveller organisations about the possibility of reviving the policy of forcing local authorities to provide sites. The new plans would be consummated in Circular 1/2006, released in February of that year. Maggie Smith-Bendell, a Romani Gypsy, was one of those consulted by the government’s Gypsy and Traveller Unit. ‘We had many more meetings before the new circular came into force, but finally it did,’ she said. ‘There would be no more retrospective planning applications … This new guidance gave councils no quarter and had to be abided by. The only things that worried me were that there was still a shortage of suitable, affordable land, and that the opposition of local communities seemed to be stepping up all the time.’15 It had taken New Labour three terms – nearly a decade – to get to this point, despite the fact that the party had opposed the repeal of the Caravan Sites Act 1968.
Gypsy and Traveller advocates were delighted, nonetheless. Circular 1/2006 didn’t just require local authorities to allocate sufficient sites for Gypsies and Travellers, it budgeted around £150 million over five years to pay for the process. It also emphasised that action should be taken only where unauthorised sites were the source of anti-social behaviour. The first step would be to commission ‘Gypsy and Travellers Accommodation Needs Assessments’ (GTANAs) in local authorities across the country. At the same time, the Equality and Human Rights Commission published a report, ‘Common Ground’, arguing for an assessment of Gypsy and Traveller pitches.
Progress was slow, but a few families started to win planning appeals under the new guidance. A small number set up their own new, private sites, although local people often objected vociferously to these sites being built in their back yard.
Around this time, another nomadic enemy was appearing in the sightlines of Middle England – Roma from the 2003 EU Treaty of Accession countries, including the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. Romanians came later, starting in 2007, when the nation joined the EU. They were even poorer than the Czech and Slovak Roma. Some of these new migrants made their way to Govanhill, in the south of Glasgow, and there are now thought to be around fifteen thousand Roma in Govanhill.
Govanhill is one of the poorest areas of the city. Over the past century, it has received several waves of immigrants – Irish, Pakistani and Somali being the most numerous among the newcomers. But the rapid arrival of Roma from the Slovak Republic, where many had been deprived of the right to citizenship and had experienced persecution and violence, was particularly difficult for the already stretched local services to accommodate. In the span of three years, around 2,500 Roma had arrived. ‘The people on the ground hadn’t really experienced it – I mean all the services on the ground,’ said Chief Inspector Steve McAllister of Strathclyde Police. ‘We had previously seen an influx of asylum seekers in the north end of the city, and initially that was managed really poorly, then we got a grip on it in terms of support, which helped integration. But the Roma exercising their rights as EU nationals under European migration rights just turned up.’16
McAllister described policing the subdivision as challenging. ‘I’d say that at least forty per cent are non-white, and out of the remaining sixty per cent a substantial amount are from a minority group. It sometimes feels like the current situation in Govanhill was created as a malevolent social experiment to see how the service providers would cope.’ There were unmistakable social and cultural issues at the outset, McAllister said. ‘The Roma came with a different, al fresco lifestyle, with large family groups and singing and dancing in the middle of the night.’ The people who had for years made their homes in Govanhill were disconcerted by such behaviour. ‘On Allison Street [the centre of Govanhill] it can be like walking into a different country in the summer, with around four hundred, five hundred people out in the middle of the street … mainly young men. They are usually just shooting the breeze, but if you are a middle-aged white female and you have lived all your life in Govanhill, then you turn into a corner and all you see is foreign faces, your natural reaction is, “I don’t like this.”’ He estimated that in about twelve blocks of the town’s housing, some forty different nationalities were represented and fifty-one languages spoken.
In March 2007 violence erupted on Dixon Avenue, also near the centre of Govanhill. It had apparently started when some local white youths racially abused several newly arrived Roma teenagers; some locals said that the violence had been building for a year previously.17 All sides agreed that things were calmer now, but McAllister reported that (unfounded) rumours about criminality in the Roma community still swirled. ‘It almost became acceptable to blame the Roma for all the ills of Govanhill, with some of the rumours being utterly ridiculous, relating to baby factories and children being sold on street corners for prostitution, and people buy into these rumours. You know it’s rubbish but there is a lot of very negative mood music and we spend a lot of time at public meetings challenging them.’ The crime rate, police confirmed, had in fact gone down since the Roma came to town.
McAllister pays tribute to the strength and vibrancy of the communities, which are somehow managing to come together despite their extraordinary diversity. The Roma, for their part, have started to settle. ‘You don’t get any really significant issues with racism. There were complaints about the al fresco singing and dancing, and the people out on the streets, but they have reduced. Having said that, the Roma community have moderated their behaviour. They accept now that it’s not really the thing to do at 1am in the morning, out in the back court.’
The real problems came from their living conditions. The Roma were almost immediately preyed upon by slum landlords and gangmasters. Many found accommodation in overcrowded housing; they had little access to public funds. ‘They often live twenty to a household, that’s almost all they can club together to afford. They have almost no recourse to any type of means, they are almost destitute but they would prefer to be destitute in this environment as opposed to Romania or Slovakia,’ said McAllister.
Alan McDonald, the housing manager for Govanhill Housing Association, said that when the Roma arrived in Glasgow, they were poor and very disadvantaged. ‘So not only did we have large numbers of Roma settling in the area in a short time, but they were the new kids on the block. They always, incorrectly, get the blame when things change. They were coming from really poor housing, where there were often no windows in the buildings, no proper sanitary systems and there was a completely different approach to policing then. They were afraid of us, of officialdom, they thought we were going to persecute them.’18
Officials from several of the local agencies visited the housing in which the Roma had lived in Slovakia before emigrating to the UK, in order to understand the conditions they had fled. ‘In Slovakia they house the Roma within purpose-built accommodation, and then forget about them,’ McDonald said. ‘Most don’t have functional toilets; in one settlement there was a common toilet and washroom block, with a police station on its upper floor. The waste disposal systems in that settlement was a skip, and what apparently happens is that they put the rubbish in and it rots away; the skip is seldom emptied … Little or no running water. They do have electricity, some of them, and some residents burn the timbers, including part of their building’s doors, windows and other fixtures to keep them warm, as there are no heating systems. Small wonder that they didn’t know how to initially deal with Scottish tenement living in one of the most densely populated areas of Glasgow,’ he said.
‘When the Slovakian community turned up they weren’t used to putting their rubbish in the common bins – they often flung it out of the window.’ In one of the first cases he dealt with for the housing association, he recorded eighteen people living in a one-bedroom flat. ‘There were nine children and the toilet was blocked, so the children were defecating and urinating down the stairwell.’ McDonald’s team moved in, and noticed that there was no food in the flat and there were cockroaches and bed bugs. They helped the family gain access to benefits and more appropriate housing.
One of those arriving in Govanhill at that time was a young Slovakian Roma woman named Marcela Adamova. Now a well-respected community worker for her people, and an employee of Oxfam, she recalled the difficulties of those early days. ‘We were very vulnerable to exploitation around housing, slum landlords. Occasionally I will hear negative remarks about my community. But things are much better now.’19 Last year Marcela helped to organise a community-led clean-up of Govanhill, picking up litter with a small team of Roma volunteers who received some free English lessons as a thank-you. Perhaps, she thought, the tide was turning: a small number of Scots decided to celebrate International Roma Day in April 2012 by giving the Govanhill Roma flowers and chocolates – a much appreciated gesture, Marcela said, though many were slightly bemused by the unexpected kindness.
Despite Circular 1/2006, opposition to new sites to accommodate British Gypsies and Travellers continued. Yet again, government action was honoured in the breach. The Equality and Human Rights Commission reported that councils would need to double their speed to meet the target of 5,733 extra pitches in England by 2011 – a sluggishness of action that was destined to leave one-fifth of all Gypsies and Travellers with nowhere legal to live.20 This, of course, led desperate, homeless families to double up on any sites where they had family connections. Some of those desperate families arrived at Dale Farm, even though the two-year permission to stay had expired the year before.
Tony Ball, the leader of Basildon Council, was growing ever more impatient at the delays – and annoyed that Basildon was tolerating the largest Gypsy and Traveller encampment not just in England, but in Europe. He was also exercised by the fact that the site was, in many ways, an extended family enclave – the Sheridans, Flynns and Egans creating a village that he felt was operating outside the law. ‘It not only broke green-belt law on planning but on size as well,’ he said. ‘You were never going to get a site with fifty pitches in one place; we don’t do fifty terraced houses in one site.’ He batted off complaints that the move to evict the families from Dale Farm was ‘Middle England’ flexing its control over the less fortunate. ‘We are, this country is, very tolerant, multi-racial, – [we have] a good record because we have managed to integrate.’21 But neither the local community nor the Travellers themselves really wanted to integrate. A solution had to be found.
The Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, stepped forward with a proposal: a site at Pitsea was pushed as a new home for the community. He had been persuaded finally that the Travellers at Dale Farm could not stay indefinitely. ‘The site clearance at Dale Farm was inevitable. I had given them two years, but they didn’t use that time to find somewhere else. They took the view that they were there, staying there and nobody was going to move them,’ he said with some regret. In February 2007 Ruth Kelly, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, turned down another appeal by the families to stay at Dale Farm (although the families won the right to a judicial review). Basildon Council promptly made matters worse, by turning down the Pitsea application.22
For their part, local MPs John Baron and Eric Pickles could not understand the continuing delays either, and their language hardened significantly. In May 2008, Baron took up the debate in Parliament. He alleged that Dale Farm had grown into something quite sinister. ‘The problems locally, at least in my constituency, have gone well beyond fly-tipping; they include the intimidation of the settled community. I am copied in on a steady stream of emails to the police reporting a number of incidents, including vandalism and young people throwing stones and firing air rifles. I have had to deal with local people whose water supply has been diverted by some Travellers whose presence is illegal. We have complaints about the speed and volume of traffic going down narrow lanes, and even gas cylinders are being piled up around the entrance of an illegal site, as if to warn off unwanted visitors. Royal Mail refuses to deliver post to two of the illegal sites in question because it is unable to guarantee the safety of staff following an incident involving dangerous dogs.’ Baron said he had tried to play the peacemaker, convening people from all sides to see if there was any way around the issues. The police had ‘offered to provide an escort’ to the postal workers, he said, but Royal Mail did not believe this was sufficient.
‘We should not allow any part of the community [to] become a no-go area for public services. However, that example shows the problems generated by those illegal sites,’ Baron went on. ‘I am not attributing such problems to Travellers in general – I am talking about a minority – but I refer to the problem of anti-social behaviour because of the report’s finding that illegal sites should be tolerated without resort to firmer enforcement action. That has to be wrong. Again, it is a question of fairness. My constituents cannot understand why it should be so difficult to take effective action against those who have so brazenly broken the law. It appears to my constituents that there is one law for the Travellers and another for the settled community. All my constituents ask is that the law be fairly applied to everyone. No one seeks to discriminate against the minority, but it seems that local residents are being discriminated against.’23
These were fighting words. But Julie Morgan, who was then a Labour MP and a key supporter of Gypsies and Travellers within Parliament, said that Baron had remained open to confidential negotiations at this time, however. In fact he was pursuing a twin-track approach, saying that Dale Farm must be closed while not denying the right of Travellers to appropriate housing.24
That approach would not help local Conservative councillors in Essex, who were also being challenged from the far Right on the Dale Farm issue. The British National Party was mobilising, saying that they opposed illegal Traveller sites – and that they were no longer willing to stand by, waiting for some government paper to be issued. One BNP candidate, Len Heather, attempted to gain a seat in local district council elections in the parish council of Noak Bridge, near Dale Farm, in May 2008. His bid failed, but the party came second. Then he stood in a by-election in September 2008. He lost again. But he clearly was not going to relent. He told the local paper: ‘The feedback we got on the doors was they have the biggest illegal traveller site on their doorstep and want something done about it. Basildon councillors make a lot of noise about the issue, usually at election time, then it goes quiet. I would ask residents what they want done, then put pressure on the council.’25
Heather later set up street stalls in Brentwood to advance the BNP cause, putting yet more pressure on local and national politicians to take action on Dale Farm. John Baron denied, however, that the BNP presence had any effect on him personally. ‘There were groups from both ends of the political spectrum involved – to my knowledge, they had no effect on policy. Our case in moving the Travellers off the illegal site was that the law should apply equally and fairly to everyone, Traveller or not.’26
Then, that November, Pickles vented his wrath against the unauthorised encampments. Reacting to New Labour’s plans to have regional targets for new sites, he told the Daily Express: ‘Communities across the country are going to face the bombshell of having a Traveller camp dumped on their back yard, whether they like it or not,’ he wrote. ‘Councils are powerless to resist these regional targets and are being bullied into building on the green belt or using compulsory purchase powers to provide the land for Travellers. It’s not fair that hard-working families have to save up to get on the housing ladder while Travellers get special treatment at tax-payers’ expense.’27
Notwithstanding such assaults, New Labour continued in their efforts to bring Gypsies and Travellers in from the margins. In June the government had introduced and funded Gypsy and Traveller History Month, which aimed to showcase the artistic, political and historical contributions that Gypsies, Roma and Travellers have made – and continue to make – to the UK. The magazine, Travellers’ Times, was also founded, with funding coming from the National Lottery. But how would these pieces of PR, welcome as they were, counter the fiery words of an Eric Pickles or a John Baron?
Dale Farm, Julie Morgan was convinced, had become an iconic plot of ground. And it was shaping up to be the literal battleground on which Gypsy and Traveller policies would be fought out.