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The Travelers' Travails

From The Washington Post
By Iain Guest
Sunday, March 9, 2008; Page B02

ESSEX, England: It's more like a battleground than a housing development.

Dale Farm lies deep in the English countryside, about 50 miles east of London. You enter through a makeshift barbed-wire gate, driving past gas cylinders that were once stacked as a barricade against invaders and a large banner ("Save Dale Farm") that has seen action outside 10 Downing Street, the home of the British prime minister.

Inside, 86 families are steeling themselves for eviction. Several years ago, they built houses here without permission from the local government, or council, which ordered them to vacate the premises in June 2005. Last month, their appeal reached the High Court in London, which is expected to rule after Easter. If it goes against them, their homes could be reduced to rubble.

These 86 families are one of the country's largest concentrations of Travelers, a nomadic group of Irish origin that began migrating to Britain in the 1960s. I recently spent a few chilly days at the farm, meeting with young mothers, widows, old men with asthma and high blood pressure, and high-spirited youngsters who should have been in school. When I worked with the United Nations in Cambodia, we used to describe people like this as "EVIs" -- extremely vulnerable individuals. And the stakes in their case are enormous -- not only for the Travelers, but also for Britain.

First and foremost, theirs would be a massive eviction. Hundreds would be affected, including a 72-year-old cancer patient, a young woman pregnant with twins, children with severe disabilities, elderly widows and many families with no means of transport. It's not clear where they would go. They can't be deported, because most are British citizens. It's assumed that the police would keep moving them until they ended up in a district willing to take them in.

The Dale Farm case is also being closely watched in Europe, where a number of governments are seeking a way to deal with substantial populations of Roma, another nomadic and socially excluded group that is often linked with Travelers. Countries such as Bulgaria, France, Greece and Romania would be happy to take their cue from a country like Britain that prides itself on its human rights record.

No one knows exactly how many Travelers reside in Britain, but they are recognized as a distinct racial group under British law and thus entitled to protection. What, however, does "protection" mean -- and does it help the Travelers participate in society on their own terms?

This is a perennial question that minorities raise, and in 1994 the British government signaled its answer by toughening the penalties for trespassing (and therefore "traveling") and by removing the obligation on local councils such as the one in Basildon, where Dale Farm is located, to find land for caravan sites. In other words, there would be no more roaming around the British countryside, and the Travelers would have to find their own land.

At this, Traveler families began to purchase land at Dale Farm. The Basildon council, which was controlled at the time by the Labor Party, gave them planning permission even though the farm was classified as "green belt" and zoned against development. The "legal" part of the development that was built then is as neat as any suburban enclave, with bungalows and SUVs, and these families are going nowhere.

But after the Conservatives took over in 2002, the council did a 180-degree turn and began to reject all new Traveler applications to build at Dale Farm. The 86 families moved in anyway and built without permission.

Their status, however, makes any sort of integration more difficult. One government health official told me that such populations typically don't receive the medical screening that picks up risk factors that lead to killers such as heart disease. (This helps explain why the life expectancy of Travelers and Roma is typically at least 10 years lower than the national average across Europe.) And the health of the Dale Farm Travelers isn't helped by poor services. Municipal workers come to collect garbage and occasionally clear out rats, but the council has withheld most other services, which the Travelers installed themselves. Water and sanitation could be much improved.

Education is another challenge. Almost none of the older Travelers can read or write, and they don't want their children to suffer the same fate. But many local families pulled their children out of the nearby primary school when the Travelers started attending, and the school population fell from more than 200 to just 40. Attendance has now risen to 80, thanks to some persistent outreach by dedicated teachers, but many Traveler children still perform poorly, not least because their parents pull them out of school frequently and without warning. None of the older children I met at Dale Farm were attending secondary school.

And there's undeniably much ill will toward the Travelers, who are blamed for forcing down land prices, dumping garbage on public property and driving too fast along country lanes. One local official described relations between the Travelers and locals as "pure poison."

Still, for all the uncertainty, Dale Farm has brought some stability to the Travelers and has shown how they might be brought into the mainstream of society. All the families have registered with local doctors, and when health officials have been able to provide preventive care, they've achieved results. One anti-smoking clinic got 200 Travelers to quit in six months.

This modest progress would be brutally interrupted by eviction. Once on the road, the Travelers would be barred from receiving regular medical treatment, because Britons need a fixed address to register with a doctor. The children's education would come to a grinding halt. Not only would eviction not "solve" anything, it would simply shift the burden and create new costs for British society as a whole.

None of this seems to worry the Basildon council or its combative leader, Malcolm Buckley, who is openly exploiting local prejudice against the Travelers. (Buckley's office declined to comment to me while the High Court case is pending.) Under a 2006 government regulation, the council is required to assess the housing needs of Travelers in its area, but it hasn't done so. It has challenged an order from its own regional governing body to find 81 new housing plots. It is lobbying hard against a face-saving formula offered by John Prescott, a former deputy prime minister, to relocate the Travelers to nearby Pitsea.

This appears to be a calculated snub to the Labor government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The government has no wish to reward illegal behavior, but in a sharp departure from the 1990s, it has also accepted a clear obligation toward Travelers and gypsies. It has asked local councils to help find authorized sites for these groups, to respect human rights, to promote race relations and to reduce homelessness. Buckley and his council ignore all this.

There is a solution for Dale Farm, as there is for the Roma "problem" throughout Europe, but it will require hard work and common sense on both sides. The Basildon council could simply legalize the entire Dale Farm site. If it's concerned that this would be seen as "rewarding illegality," it should find another site, at Pitsea or elsewhere. In return, the Travelers would have to accept greater responsibility for education and stewardship of the land. This would also open the way to a belated investment in health and education and some community bridge-building. Dale Farm could yet become an example of racial harmony in Europe.

Will it happen? Brown would certainly pay a short-term political price for taking on the Basildon council and, presumably, the Conservative opposition. But the alternative would be worse: the deepening marginalization of a vulnerable minority and damage to Britain's international reputation. It should not be a difficult decision.