19th Octo­ber 2011

 

Despite coura­geous resis­tance by fam­i­lies and a group of activists, Basil­don Coun­cil are con­tin­u­ing their evic­tion of Dale Farm res­i­dents, backed up by the iron fist­ed bru­tal­i­ty of Essex riot cops. Har­row­ing and dev­as­tat­ing though the episode is for the peo­ple being oppressed, it also has dark impli­ca­tions for soci­ety as a whole, in the UK and glob­al­ly.

 

While the cor­po­rate media rou­tine­ly spreads the decep­tion that Dale Farm is an “ille­gal site”, it is in fact legal­ly owned by the trav­ellers them­selves. In one part, res­i­dents con­struct­ed build­ings hav­ing won plan­ning per­mis­sion to do so. In the oth­er — where eighty fam­i­lies had been camped before today- no such per­mis­sion has been won. How­ev­er, the lack of legal rights for trav­ellers is part of a broad­er issue, and can­not jus­ti­fi­ably be used to excuse one of the largest mass evic­tions in the coun­try’s recent past. It should be not­ed that 90% of plan­ning per­mis­sion appli­ca­tions by trav­ellers are reject­ed.

The land cur­rent­ly called Dale Farm has been dis­put­ed for decades. Though it is often referred to as “green belt”, it was used as a scrap­yard by the coun­cil as ear­ly as the 1960s. Eng­lish trav­ellers first lived there in the 1970s, but they most­ly left around ten years ago, when Irish trav­ellers moved in.

Legal bat­tles have been rag­ing between Basil­don Coun­cil and the trav­ellers for years, and the lat­ter have exhaust­ed every pos­si­ble avenue in defend­ing their homes. But when the High Court ver­dict was hand­ed down last week, it became clear that the coun­cil’s evic­tion would be going ahead.

Cops and bailiffs began their inva­sion at sev­en this morn­ing, as police in riot gear ille­gal­ly broke down a rear fence, while an appar­tent­ly planned dis­trac­tion took place at the front. Elec­tric­i­ty was cut off, affect­ing essen­tial med­ical equip­ment used by one res­i­dent. Police used Tasers — again poten­tial­ly ille­gal in this sit­u­a­tion — and one batoned woman was hos­pi­talised with back pain, unable to move her legs. Cops were met with bricks and oth­er mis­siles, but their supe­ri­or force is telling.

Local Con­ser­v­a­tive MP John Baron was quick to applaud the state aggres­sion, stat­ing that: “The police have been restrained but at the end of the day, the police have got to defend them­selves to ensure there is no vio­lence”. [empha­sis added]

Clear­ly for Baron, police vio­lence is not vio­lence, and in fact serves to pre­vent vio­lence. The incon­gruity of vio­lent­ly defend­ing your­self from vio­lence before vio­lence takes place does not seem to have occurred to him. In plain Eng­lish, this gang of armed thugs smashed their way into some­one’s prop­er­ty and got their retal­i­a­tion in first, in much the same way as the US and UK rained “shock and awe” on Iraq eight years ago, before con­demn­ing the indige­nous resis­tance.

The finan­cial costs of all this — esti­mat­ed at near­ly £20 mil­lion at a time of pub­lic sec­tor aus­ter­i­ty — show that this is not just some coun­cil’s response to a plan­ning issue. Rather it is a polit­i­cal attack on a mar­gin­alised lay­er of soci­ety, aimed at: 1) reclaim­ing a piece of land for poten­tial­ly more prof­itable use, 2) divert­ing atten­tion from rul­ing class crimes which are impov­er­ish­ing broad mass­es of the pop­u­la­tion, and 3) spear­head­ing the gov­ern­men­t’s Local­ism Bill — which will decrease the already insuf­fi­cient num­ber of sites avail­able to trav­ellers.

In respect to num­ber 2, the right wing gut­ter press has been lead­ing this charge for months, com­bin­ing crude eth­nic stereo­typ­ing of the trav­ellers with out­right lies about the activists who have ded­i­cat­ed so much time to this strug­gle. In a time of sky-high eco­nom­ic ten­sions, the rul­ing class are des­per­ate to find scape­goats and alter­na­tive hate fig­ures, in order to pro­tect them­selves from the seething class anger now endem­ic in soci­ety.

In this respect, the British rul­ing class is no dif­fer­ent to the French, the Ital­ian, Hun­gar­i­an and Czech gov­ern­ments, which have all dra­mat­i­cal­ly increased their per­se­cu­tion of Roma in recent times. This — along­side the anti-Mus­lim big­otry pro­mot­ed by rulers through­out the west­ern world — is an expres­sion of the sort of rul­ing class decay that was last seen dur­ing the last Great Depres­sion, and ulti­mate­ly led to fas­cism in Europe.

The events at Dale Farm must serve as a warn­ing to all work­ing class peo­ple: Today they came for the trav­ellers; tomor­row they are like­ly to come for you.