...It is important to state that it is not communities that commit crimes but individuals. Those convicted are squarely Henry Long, Albert Bowers and Jessie Cole, not thousands of innocent people who share their heritage. Tarring all Travellers with the brush of these men’s callousness is as unfair as tarring all Catholics for paedophile priests or all eskimos for daft militant wog attacks.
Yet to completely ignore the cultural context of this crime is wrong. Henry Long, the ringleader, was removed from school at the age of 12; he followed his father and grandfather into the thieving “trade”. Albert Bowers left school at 11 and before the trial had already picked up three youth convictions. These young men could not read or write. For years they had not known school or structure. Their education was in petty crime.
Such problems do not solely beset Travellers but they are far more prevalent among Traveller communities. If we want to be a country where all are treated the same, where all live by the same rules and where the state does its best to furnish each with a decent chance in life, we have to end the squeamishness that prevents open talk about Travellers. This squeamishness is down to two fears. First, the fear of retribution. After the verdict on PC Harper’s death it emerged that the judge, Mr Justice Edis, brought the first trial to a temporary halt over an alleged potential plot to intimidate jurors. Extra security measures were brought in. Jurors were referred to by number not name. One juror was dismissed for acting oddly in court, mouthing pleasantries at the defendants. Whether she was motivated by misplaced friendliness or fear of someone up in that public gallery we do not know, but most will not be shocked by revelations of intimidation.
The fear of the bullet, the knife, the burnt-out car; this helps the lawless elements of Traveller culture maintain a certain power, and gives the law-abiding majority of Travellers a terrible name.
The second fear is that of being labelled racist. Since the Equality Act 2010 recognised Gypsy, Roma and Travellers as ethnic minorities, race has been used to shield this culture from due scrutiny. Sensible questions about why those within these groups are more likely to be in prison, more likely to be illiterate or more likely to suffer domestic violence prompt cries of racism. In April a Channel 4 Dispatches programme titled The Truth About Traveller Crime was dubbed “dehumanising” by activists and investigated by Ofcom. Desperate not to offend, the authorities turn a culturally sensitive blind eye.
The fears hush most into silence, and the silence means the stand-off between Travellers and the rest of society continues uneasily. Many feel disquieted to see the mobile homes rolling on to a local beauty spot, a portent too often of littering, mess, anti-social behaviour. Meanwhile those in Traveller communities are hardly “living their best lives”. Travellers die about ten years earlier than the rest of us. They have higher rates of chronic illness. Their suicide rates are six times higher.
You might argue that they choose to live like this, but the babies born into that life don’t. Many are destined to repeat the same pattern: leave school in your early teens, drift into a life of odd jobs and petty crime, never move beyond the circles you were raised in. As long as the culturally sensitive force-field exists around Travellers, these children are abandoned to a fate that should not be tolerated in 21st-century Britain.
It is a scandal that some Gypsy and Traveller children are taken out of school at primary age; that some start work as young as ten; that about 65 per cent of Traveller children are persistently absent from school; that they have the lowest attainment of all ethnic groups throughout their school years and are far more likely to be excluded. Are we to be surprised when they choose crime?
This one is probably justified. When I was staying at a private resort a Lee ended up making an absolute farce of the martial arts contest, don't know if he was a gyppo but sounded like one sometimes.
When I was in Edinburgh this Lee clan bloke broke into the theatre we were at and started telling us a long, pointless story about pissing on some flies, then he started shouting at us for not getting the point of his story. It was all very uncomfortable, we were supposed to be there for a comedy thing.
I had assumed Pontins had been swallowed up by the black hole of the Great Recession with the likes of Woolworths, even the b-roll they used on the news earlier appeared to be from 1998.
Pontins in Southport is home to Bang Face, the best/worst festival in the world. It's like a post-apocalyptic hellscape but with Strongbow Dark Fruit and cheap speed. See you there in 2022.
The Gandalf clipart with "YOU SHALL NOT PASS!" in that shitty comedy font reminds me of how so much internal corporate literature is littered with inappropriately used typefaces.
Anyway, I thought those holiday parks would've loved to book the Nolan sisters back in the day, or have gyppo shenanigans recently stepped up a gear or two in the past 45 odd years?
>>31622 I think it's one of those exclusivity things, where knowing the correct nomenclature is a very big deal and people go out seeking increasingly obscure terms to be ahead of the curve.
Everyone at Bang Face is perfectly aware that what they're doing is utterly ridiculous, they're just having far too much fun to care. I'm a knobhead, you're a knobhead, but we're all going to be dead soon so we might as well have a laugh. That's my idea of being self-aware.
Fucking hell misery guts, I'd ask you rhetorically when you last did something for fun but I know you could quote exact time and date from your personal log book.
>>31621 What's the word she refused to write, Tinker? Green?
She doesn't know what she's talking about anyway - Walsh is applied to ancestral Britons being the old Germanic for foreigner and the word is literally the root of Welsh. There's lots of Walsh in Ireland for a reason but it's not Irish.
I really can't tell. She says it's a surname on that list, though I assume it might be bastardised in the slang, or maybe they really just do go round calling them "McDonoughs" or similar, but you'd think it would have taken her a wee bit less time to figure out that's a surname.
It seems like something very specific to a small area she lived in, mind - I've spent plenty of time in that neck of the woods and even more time with people originally from there, and nothing's jumping out at me.
Of course she's not complaining about the term "hames" as in "they made a right hames of it" to mean someone fucked up, because Hames is an english name. Racists.
>>31629 This really is some next level 'comment is free' - she's managed to piss me off with an irrelevant mystery I can never solve but which I know my mind will come back to. She clearly knew what she was doing as well by how she danced around it and sold it to us.
It's torture for the internet generation. We're going to remember this article in 10 years time just as we're drifting off to sleep and we'll be tossing and turning all night.
>>31632 >The whistleblower said the company went to exhaustive lengths to try to ensure its policy was enforced. He said: “You were told from day one that you had to listen out for an Irish accent and find out as much as possible about a person such as their address and whereabouts. So if a person had an Irish accent and was calling from Ireland, then strangely that was ok. But if it was an Irish accent and the postcode was for a caravan site or an industrial estate in Britain, then that was a big red flashing light.
>“At that point we would have to signal to a supervisor to come over so they could put on a headset and enter the call silently. Depending on what they heard, it would either be a nod and a thumbs up to say it was ok to proceed or you were asked to put the caller on hold and told ‘we’re not having them’. It was an instruction to refuse the booking. It was up to us to find the way to refuse.”
>The EHRC found that Pontins had resorted to an additional tactic to weed out those it did not wish to accommodate by also excluding commercial vehicles, including vans and caravans of the type often used by the Traveller community, from all its premises.
I was going to say the only really surprising part is that they had to make this an official policy and enforce it at all. I believe we mentioned as much earlier on in the thread, but anyone who's ever done a reasonable stint in retail can attest Mincéiríi are effectively barred by unspoken common knowledge.
The weird bit is the list of surnames. It's not as if there are loads of people with those incredibly common Irish names who aren't gypsies, is it. That'd just be confusing.
A sports club has been forced to cancel all training and fixtures this weekend after travellers arrived during a match last night and caused chaos. The six caravans arrived on Chanterlands Avenue yesterday evening on playing fields owned by The Hull and East Riding Sports Club, where several sports clubs play.
The Hull Zingari Cricket Club was having their under-11s training when the travellers arrived, and said they disrupted their game, forcing it to be abandoned, after "letting their kids and dogs" run all over the pitch. The junior team coach, who did not wish to be named, said: "There were adults shouting and swearing and being abusive. I was talking to a parent when one of the travellers drove his car at me. He drove at me then swerved and told me he’d run me over and kill me if I said anything to him. Then he told me he does what he wants, and started driving round the square like a lunatic."
He said one was driving a vehicle on their pitch which "costs thousands" to maintain and keep pristine, and was doing "wheel spins" on it. "It's fairly superficial damage fortunately, because it's been so dry, but I am worried about what happens if it rains and they do it again. If we get a downpour and they do it, they will ruin it. We spent £2,000 on padded covers for the pitch, and the kids were jumping all over them. We've closed the clubhouse now after someone did their 'business' in the corridor. It's vile."
My aunt was telling me about how this exact same scenario happened at their local rugby club, travellers drove onto the pitch in 4x4s literally while her son and the other kids were playing, they destroyed the pitch and even held the families there hostage inside the club building and refused to let them leave until the police arrived.
There's about 20-odd caravans pitched up in my local park right now, in a few days they've already wrecked 2 football club's pitches and taken over the kid's play area, leaving rubbish strewn everywhere. The local crime rate has also shot up with multiple burglaries being reported and several cases of kids being robbed of their bikes at knifepoint in the local park, but I'm sure that's all just a co-incidence. Pikeys are savage, feral scumbags and anyone who defends them as 'poor oppressed victims of racism" can fuck right off.
The mystery word from that Guardian article three months ago is almost definitely "pikey", if anyone is still worried about it. I learnt the word "pikey" as a synonym for "chav", and it was several years before I learnt it apparently actually meant gypsy.
>>34069 I've just seen your post. If nothing I see is the truth, your statement is false, so what now? At least one thing I see if the truth? Everything I see is the truth? Nothing I see is the ..untruth?
Offenders whose crimes lead to the death of an emergency service worker in the line of duty will receive mandatory life sentences under a new law brought about after the death of a police officer, Andrew Harper.
The ruling, announced by the government, follows a two-year campaign by Lissie Harper, whose husband was killed while answering a late-night burglary call. She previously said she was “outraged” by the sentences handed to the three teenagers responsible for his death. The new legislation, named Harper’s law, will make it on to the statute books through an amendment to the existing police, crime, sentencing and courts bill, and is likely to take effect early next year.
>>36016 Nobody likes scum, of course, but this law really feels like it goes too far. Especially for the police, who have received a lot of bad PR recently precisely because of all the bad things they often do as part of their job. Now it's a mandatory life sentence if you fight back too hard. That's really very despotic indeed.
>>36020 I thought a couple of cops died in the miners's strike. If not, then that really suggests this law is not necessary. Remember that this law does not include mandatory life sentences for police who kill innocent people, which happens unacceptably often.
The article states that the officer was "caught in a strap", which suggests an accident. Indeed the robbers were cleared of murder (which requires intent), and convicted of manslaughter (which does not).
Would this new law have prevented his death? Would the quad bike raiders have stopped to consider the possible life sentence before carelessly driving away? I see no evidence to suggest this.
Is it not a foundational principal of our society that the same laws apply to everyone, including agents of the state? Not in the mind of our home secretary.
>>36027 Agents of the state being allowed to murder and rape while undercover is still in the bill, I believe. Or was that one already passed? It's hard to keep up.
>>36016 How broadly is "lead to" construed as?
if someone shoplifts and the police are called, and the policeman responding is hit by a bus while crossing the road from the car park to the shop is there a chance the shoplifter could find that they're going down for life because a contrived "well if you hadn't done that, this wouldn't have happened" interpretation is possible?
