The most depressing thing this week has been the level of bile spewed about people at Dale Farm, now set for an eviction on September 10th. Unlike most, I’ve actually been there.
A few years back I travelled down to Basildon in Essex. I got in a taxi and asked to be taken to Dale Farm on Cray’s Hill. The court case was raging at the time, tensions were high in the local community and when we got to the end of the track up to the site, I was told “this is as far as I go.”
I don’t know what I was expecting as I walked up to the spit of land which has for many years been the focal point for some of the national presses’ worst bigotry and hatred. I’d only seen photos taken from afar, blurry shots by snappers eager to show the squalid conditions Those People were living in.
And in fairness, when I got there a lot of rubbish was lying around, in piles of black bin bags or drifting around the fences and hedgerows. Basildon Council doesn’t do rubbish clearing on illegal sites. But the actual plots? They ranged from the spotless to the scruffy – pretty much as you’d expect on any estate in Britain. There were a fair few dogs around as well, usually off the leash, but they were friendly and looked well-fed. And of course there were a lot of caravans.
But what might be surprising to the critics is the number of actual houses. Fully plumbed-in, connected homes built on land they paid for and set up in exactly the manner which has been touted as the “solution” to the Traveller “problem” since way back when.
from Rob Ray at LibCom READ MORE HERE
http://libcom.org/blog/travellers-tale-dale-farm-02092011
‘Ethnic Cleansing in England’ CLICK HERE https://thefreeonline.wordpress.com/2011/08/31/dale-farm-ethnic-cleansing-in-england/
The Free 