As we go to press, Travellers on the Dale Farm site in Basildon, Essex, are waiting to hear whether the High Court will extend the reprieve against eviction they won on 19 September, as well as ruling on two further judicial review applications lodged on 22 September.
The Travellers won the last-ditch injunction as bailiffs were already entering the site and supporters had locked themselves to gates and barricades. The High Court postponed the eviction on the grounds that Basildon Council’s eviction notices are incomplete and the council might ‘go further’ than the eviction notices allowed. However, no one is under any illusion that the reprieve is permanent. The battle to save Dale Farm depends on mobilising the widest possible forces on the ground because the racist council, pandering to local prejudice, is determined to win a battle they say has already cost £8 million and whose final cost could reach £18 million.
Gypsies and Travellers have lived at Dale Farm since the 1960s, their numbers growing as councils started shutting down public sites, forcing Travellers to look for permanent places to settle. Dale Farm, a former scrapyard, consists of a hundred plots of land and at its peak housed over a thousand residents of Irish Traveller and English Gypsy heritage. Basildon Borough Council, which has spent ten years attempting to force the Travellers out, is trying to evict some 90 families – about 500 people, many of them children – from the 52 plots of land at Dale Farm that do not have planning permission.
It is worth noting that, fueled by racist prejudice, 90% of planning applications nationally by Travellers are turned down, compared to an 80% success-rate for the non-Traveller community. For all the council’s propaganda about protecting a ‘greenbelt site’ (although in reality Dale Farm is a former brownfield site), in 2010, 173 acres of greenbelt land in Basildon were bought by Barratt Homes to build on. This is not about planning laws but about state-sanctioned ethnic cleansing, funded by the Home Office to the tune of £4.65 million. So outrageous is the eviction plan that the United Nations Commission for Human Rights offered to mediate in the dispute between Travellers and the council, only to be rebuffed by the British government.
For Gypsies and Travellers, Dale Farm is another battle in the struggle for their rights. The British state’s attack on the Dale Farm community is part and parcel of a Europe-wide intensification of racism against Roma and Traveller people.
Since the end of August, supporters have been arriving at Camp Constant on the Dale Farm site. On 10 September, FRFI joined hundreds of protesters and Dale Farm residents to march against Basildon Council’s plans. The rally was addressed by a local MEP, the head of the Gypsy Council and other activists. At every court hearing, supporters have turned up en masse to show the depth of solidarity that exists for the Travellers.
On 13 September, Yves Cabannes of the United Nations Advisory Group on Forced Evictions held a press conference at Dale Farm, denouncing the British government’s violation of international human rights. He pointed out that Basildon Council had failed to provide an adequate number of pitches for Travellers and said: ‘The people who are abusing the law are the council, not the Travellers. The council is not fulfilling its duties’.
The respite afforded the Travellers by the current injunction will provide a much-needed breathing space to regroup, gather their forces and prepare for further onslaughts from the state and the local council. As Mary, a mother of four at Dale Farm, said: ‘Maybe, with all the people that have come here from the settled community and from all over the world to support us, maybe this is the start of the civil rights movement for Travellers.’
The residents are organising resistance in case the legal process fails them. For details of how you can help, visit dalefarm.wordpress.com.
Barnaby Mitchell
FRFI 223 October/November 2011
