Posted: September 2011

There is every reason to support the right of this particular community of travellers to live in houses they built themselves on land they own. 

“Green Belt” – that’s a good one!  This is land that used to be used as a dumping ground by Basildon Council.  As James Heartfield points out on Spiked Basildon, Billericay and Wickford were themselves the new towns “made by self-reliant people like the Travellers of Dale Farm” – a generation that migrated and built bungalows in response to London’s over-crowded housing shortage.   It’s a cynical local council that simply forgets the past and – amidst a housing shortage - proclaims land as ‘green belt’ as and when it likes. 

I make this posting for two reasons ..... (see below)

The Essex anti-racism project that triggered The Myth of Racist Kids took me into schools in Basildon, Wickford and Crays Hill.  These were great communities and too often maligned as hotbeds of working-class white racism by those who just reveal their own prejudices in the same breath.  The reason we should support the fight for Dale Farm should not lazily select the default explanation of “racism”. 

Moreover, the primary school closest to Dale Farm is now set to close as over 100 now settled traveller kids are forced to hit the road again.  The morality of Basildon Council in proceeding with this eviction (not to mention the 18 million quid that could be spent on building houses) echoes the grotesque practices of the Home Office.  I’ve worked in too many schools now where refugee and asylum seeker children have begun to settle only to have the draconian ‘National Asylum Support Service’ forcibly uproot them and their families (sometimes without warning and overnight) and ‘disperse’ them to another part of the country. Depressing.                 

[See my Spiked article 'Who's afraid of Basildon Man?' here.]