Gypsies and Nazis

I have no idea why people whose judgement I usually regard as sound consider Kevin MacNamara’s remarks to be in any way uncalled-for. As far as I can see, the Conservative Party’s new policy on gypsies is utterly odious; the Conservative Party themselves are not particularly similar to the Nazis, but their policy on Gypsy camps is sufficiently similar to be worthy of the analogy. Michael Howard (who created this problem in the first place by removing the obligation on local authorities to provide sites for Gypsies) has said, in public, that he intends to repeal or alter the “so-called” Human Rights Act in order to deprive Gypsies of their right to due legal process in challenging refusals to give planning consent for campsites on land that they have bought. This is scandalous. The Human Rights Act, among other things, guarantees due process for anyone who finds themselves having legal restrictions placed on their ability to do what they want with their property, or to have a home for themselves and their families in a community of their choice. In matters of planning disputes, Gypsies have rather more need for judicial review than most of us, because local authorities tend to racially discriminate against them. But what Michael Howard is saying is that he will alter the law so as to have the effect of removing this protection from Gypsies, because he wants non-Gypsies to be able to prevent Gypsies from living near them and regards this as more important than the public
policy issue.

If you are planning to create legislation to with the intention of making an ethnic group into second class citizens, and you know that this ethnic group has historically been the victim of extremely serious persecution, and you are doing so in order to jump onto a newspaper bandwagon which is stirring up hatred of this group, then you are planning to do something which is a) very wrong indeed and b) really quite similar to what the government of Germany did between 1934 and 1945. Nazi comparisons are overdone, but some policies actually are “quite like the Nazis”, and denying civil rights to Gypsies is one of them.

There certainly is a “whiff of the gas chambers” about this, the Gypsy Council also thinks that there is, and Kevin MacNamara should be congratulated for having the courage to say it out loud; God knows that there are no votes in it as Gypsies aren’t very well represented on electoral registers. Michael Howard might or might not find Nazi comparisons particularly wounding given that his family were Jewish refugees from the Nazis, but if he does, then all one can say is, well let him bloody well be offended then. He’s planning on changing the law so as to facilitate the removal of people from land that they own by force and the destruction of their homes, and he’s backing a really quite virulent campaign in the Sun and the Mail, so he can wear it. Note that nobody’s called him a Nazi; just this particular policy, because it is. Everyone else’s dumping of litter, petty theft and what have you is kept under to control by the criminal law of England and Wales plus the occasional ASBO, so to claim that there is any particular problem with respect to Gypsy communities is to claim that there is something particularly and congenitally criminal about them. That’s racism, if anything is, so Howard can wear that one as well.

Look, this is not just a matter of knockabout party politics. There is a law in England against incitement to racial hatred (under which, by the way, both Roma and Irish Travellers are considered to be racial groups, and the Gypsy representative bodies simply do not make the deep principled distinction between these two communities which some people seem to determined to draw on) and it is there for a reason. That reason is that this country has a history on race
relations which is in the broad sweep of things quite admirable, but which has certainly been punctuated by some very unpleasant episodes, many of which were stirred up by exactly the kind of opportunistic convergence between mindless newspapers and calculating politicians which we are seeing here in its infancy.

Caravans, as a form of housing, are not very secure and highly vulnerable to fire and anyone who wants to tap into the rage of Middle England ought to be damn careful about what he is playing with. I suspect that the odds are rather better than ten to one that this particular shameful episode ends up in a tragedy, probably somewhere in the South of England, this side of Derby Day.