Hang on, can we all just cool it.

First of all, the 6pm Radio 4 news bulletin said that 9 of the people "rescued" claimed that they hadn't been enslaved at all, and had no wish for the police to continue with their investigations. We will have to await the outcomes of interviews with the remaining 15 before anyone can decide whether there is any basis to these allegations.

Secondly, if you were going to keep 24 people as slaves in inhumane conditions, I doubt you'd do it on what I take to be a council run travellers camping site. It's just too damned public.

Thirdly, even if this bizarre situation turned out to be true, and all the people arrested were subsequently convicted, that is 5 out of a total population of how many travellers? By comparison, look at Fred and Rosemary West, and the murderers of Baby P, and Hindley and Brady, and the killers of Stephen Lawrence and Anthony Walker, and at Thompson and Venbales, and at the gang who were sentenced just today for murdering a 27 year old woman with learning difficulties.

If those 5 travellers are seriously representative of traveller behaviour in general, then we who live in towns and houses must be tarred with exactly the same brush as the settled scumbags I've just listed.

Fourthly, if you want slavery type conditions, take a look at the sweatshops of the third world, where people work impossibly long hours for impossibly little pay in impossible working conditions, so that people in the first world can get goods at prices, which are dirt cheap to us, but which the people making the goods couldn't afford in a million years.

Yes I know I've just written an impossibly long sentence. But if you want to point the finger at slavery, just make sure you point it in the right direction.