A Voice For the Voiceless

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The Advocacy Project seeks to help community-based advocates produce, disseminate and use information, and so become more effective advocates for human rights and social justice

Town Council Drops Race Equality Group for Aiding Dale Farm

Dale Farm News #4,
April 19, 2008

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Essex, U.K. April 3, 2008. In what can only be seen as an escalation in hostility towards his own Gypsy constituents, Tory MP JohnBaron has called for the withdrawal of funding for Essex Racial Equality Council - because, he alleges, it's biased in favour of Travellers.

 At the same time, Basildon council leader Malcolm Buckley has announced this week that he has cut ties with the EREC and withdrawn payments it received as his advisor on race equality issues in the district.

These moves follow partially successful efforts by the EREC to help the Dale Farm community obtain grants for work with young Travellers.

 Up until recently, although funding may theoretically have been available in some quarters of local government, none had in fact been awarded to Gypsy self-help groups in the area.

Now Mr Baron, MP for Billericay, is claiming that the Essex Racial Equality Council has shown a bias by assisting Dale Farm residents in this way.

 "We have ended a service level agreement with the organization," Mr Buckley is quoted as saying in the local ECHO newspaper.

 It follows upon criticism of Basildon council by the EREC for creating growing community tensions through its plans to evict up to a hundred Traveller and Gypsy families from Dale Farm and nearby Hovefields, Wickford.

 Mr Baron has already taken the step of writing to he National Lottery, which funds many charities in the UK, urging that grants previously made to theEREC should be taken away from the group.

In a letter to the EREC, he accuses the council of exhibiting a bias and says the reason Travellers face destruction of their homes is because they have contravened planning regulations and indicate
they won't leave peacefully.

 "Basildon council is therefore right to pursue eviction if necessary in order to ensure the law is enforced equally and fairly across the community," says Mr Baron. He blames Travellers for setting up their homes in the protected Greenbelt, where development is restricted.

 However, what he does not mention is that his own home at Noaks Bridge is built on land which was previously part of the Greenbelt. And that more of the Greenbelt zone will shortly be surrendered to enable Basildon to meet a quota of 11,000 new houses.

"All we want is a little patch in the Greenbelt most of which was a scrap-yard," comments Dale Farm resident John Flynn, a pensioner who like many other Travellers has nowhere legally to live and face imminent homelessness.