If not a scrapyard then where?
Jon Day
To get to Dale Farm you have to take a train to Wickford or Basildon and then try to get a taxi. ‘If your cab driver refuses to take you,’ the Dale Farm Solidarity website says, ‘tell them they’re being silly, then ask to get dropped off at the Belvedere Golf range.’ On Sunday I went to the Traveller site in Essex, where eighty or so families are waiting to be evicted from the green-belt land they own (it used to be a scrapyard, and hasn’t been ‘green’ for years), with Damian Le Bas, a journalist and Romani gypsy.
There’s been plenty of vitriolic reaction to the recent injunctionsagainst the eviction of the site: ‘If they’re travellers why don’t they travel?’ is the inane, recurring question on Twitter. The 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act repealed the duty imposed on local councils to provide sites for Travellers and ‘was the end of legal nomadic living of any kind in Britain,’ Damian says. ‘At the same time as the act was passed, the government released guidance saying that if Travellers bought their own plots of land, they would get preferential judgments for making sites. So the government pays nothing and gets them to house themselves. Amazingly, Travellers began to do this anyway, hoping for the best. What they got was a 90 per cent refusal rate on any application.’ Dale Farm occupies just the sort of land that the government is proposing developing for local housing under the draft National Planning Policy Framework published last month.
When we got to Oak Lane, which leads to the site, the cab driver told us he wouldn’t take us any further. An imposing metal fence bristling with CCTV cameras runs beside the lane. The bailiffs have set up camp behind it. Security guards were positioned along its length. A few people were sitting on a sofa by the entrance to the site. Others were climbing on the scaffolding that forms an arch over the entrance, painting barbed wire-covered tyres with white paint. There were signs that said ‘no ethnic cleansing’ and bunting displaying the Romani flag.
A man introduced himself as ‘Bits O’Wood’ and asked who we were. Had we phoned the press phone? Had we talked to the media liaison team? We hadn’t. He sent someone to see if we’d be allowed in. I asked him why he was called Bits O’Wood and he said it was a long story. He went off to discuss painting a banner with a colleague: ‘It should be like George and the Dragon, but with the Dragon slaying George, because George is, like, the man,’ he said.
After a while the press liaison officer, Kirsty, arrived. She took our names and contact details, and asked us why we were there. Damian explained that he was from the Travellers’ Times, he’d visited the site before and we wondered if we could have a look round. She was friendly but wary, and told us that as it was Sunday most of the Travellers were at church or having family meals, and we probably wouldn’t be able to talk to anyone. We should have phoned ahead. She offered to show us round the site anyway.
There are really several sites at Dale Farm, Kirsty explained: Travellers and protesters live together on the contested land. At the back of the site is ‘Camp Constant’, the hub of the solidarity operation. (The name is a reference to Constant and Co., the bailiffs who have been contracted to clear the land. They claim to be specialists in ‘gypsy evictions, recovery and possession of land from Travellers’.) Then there is the bailiff’s camp in front of the site, and journalists from Sky and ITV have rented the fields behind it.
There were messages on some of the walls and trailers: ‘A beautiful family owns this land’; ‘lady with difficulty breathing’; ‘If not a scrapyard then where?’ On one wall someone had written: ‘Vandalism: beautiful as a rock in a bailiff’s face’. Another hand had added: ‘depends on the context’. A toddler in a bright pink dress walked along with her mother. A group of boys pushed each other around in a plastic car. It was quiet. After a while Kirsty told us it was time to go. As we left, a group of old men asked if we were from the council.
Damian said the site felt different this time: ‘Quieter, more like a camp than a village. You could feel their readiness to move. Plots had emptied. Decisions had been made, painfully.’ We didn’t try to interview anyone. Damian said he didn’t want to bother people who are facing eviction: ‘I’ve dealt with council visits at home, and everyone puts a brave face on it and gives it the hard Traveller, but once the gate shuts there are tears. It’s shit knowing nobody wants you near them because of what you were born as.’
When we got back to the Belvedere Golf range to get a cab back to the station, two security guards asked us what we were doing there. We told them we wanted a drink at the bar, but one of them, noticing Damian’s gold chain and Chelsea boots, said he thought the bar was closed on Sundays ‘because of the Carvery’. We wondered why that would stop us getting a drink, and he checked with his colleague, who seemed content to let us in. Inside a couple ate their anaemic roast dinners in silence. We asked the barmaid why a golf club needed such tight security. ‘Do you know Dale Farm?’ she said. ‘It’s because of that, because of the gypsies, because of the evictions,’ as if that was explanation enough. Damian held his tongue.
Comments
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28 September 2011
at
2:26pm
Bob Beck
says:
Someone from Basildon council was interviewed on this subject yesterday on Canadian Broadcastng Corporation Radio. CBC did not do itself proud, likely from lack of preparatory research -- the interviewer seemingly unaware, for example, of the former use of the site and so not challenging the claim that this was "greenbelt" land.
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28 September 2011
at
3:01pm
Darren
says:
@
Bob Beck
It's a criminal offence to breach a Planning Enforcement Notice, which is what has happened in this case.
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28 September 2011
at
6:44pm
Bob Beck
says:
@
Darren
Makes sense, though the councillor -- one Tony Ball, I've just found from the CBC website -- did not mention the distinction.
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30 September 2011
at
8:11am
Phil Edwards
says:
@
Darren
In practice it's an offence that's very selectively enforced. The site isn't exactly going to return to a state of nature if the Travellers are evicted, anyway - the council would have the power to dig up the hard standing that's been laid, but not to do anything else with the land, which the Travellers themselves own. It's a crazy situation.
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30 September 2011
at
1:29pm
Bob Beck
says:
@
Phil Edwards
When I said "makes sense," I was referring to the greenbelt-designation thing. The rest of it (the council's case, I mean) I still don't particularly get. How can people be evicted -- as opposed to merely fined, say -- for building, even "illegally," on their own land? Bizarre.
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2 October 2011
at
8:58am
splimwad
says:
I see it from both sides. If I built an extension on my house or built a smaller property behind my house, the council would come knocking and I may have to demolish it or pay a fine.However, the sort of mental anguish this has caused to the families on the site can't be overlooked. Potentially destroying peoples lives isn't a particularly nice resolution.
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2 October 2011
at
1:44pm
Harry Stopes
says:
The power of councils to enforce planning regulations seems a bit erratic. The owner of a house near to mine built a rubbishy kind of penthouse type extension on the top of the house without planning permission. The council have ordered him to take it down and fine him every month it stays up, but he obviously makes more extra rent by increasing the size of the property than the amount of the fine, so he just pays the fine and leaves it up.
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2 October 2011
at
3:30pm
Bob Beck
says:
@
Harry Stopes
That's what I mean when I say I'm astonished this has gone into the realm of criminal prosecution. I'd have thought it a matter for some administrative penalty, at worst. Here in Canada at least, if you're slapped with some such penalty and don't pay up, the government might get a court injunction, and if you ignore that, it's criminal contempt of court (so far as I know). But even then, though you might be looking at a short jail sentence, I can't see you being evicted from your own (freehold) land, unless maybe you fail to pay taxes on it, and it's then forfeit to the Crown for that reason.
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2 October 2011
at
7:06pm
Bob Beck
says:
@
Harry Stopes
... but then, I shouldn't be complacent. Any number of governments have chosen to make examples of "illegal occupiers" -- First Nations protesters with land claims, for example.
Read moreThe councilor said, in effect, that the Travellers' construction of homes without planning permission amounted to a "criminal" matter. I found that hard to believe on its face -- can it be remotely true? Or was he oversimplifying, based on disobedience of an injunction, criminal contempt-of-court charges and the like? He talked, anyway, as if he thought bylaw-enforcement officers had, or should have, police powers.
The land can be a brownfield site but still within the greenbelt, i.e. classified as greenbelt.