While you are quoting The Times Jim, here is todays editorial.




"September 14 2011 12:01AM
Society must be ever-vigilant against the temptation to make bogeymen out of travellers. Frequently they jar with those who surround them. In the idealised tapestry of the countryside, the traveller site is the point at which the neat patchwork begins to fray. Even in a more chaotic urban setting, a society shares codes, practices and universal expectations, and traveller communities often seem to share none of them. Their very existence, at times, can feel like a problem. Yet history, in Europe and elsewhere, is littered with grotesque examples of what can happen when society decides this problem must be solved.

No one will allow a repeat of the terrible persecution that gypsies suffered last century under the Nazis. But the surest refuge for an ethnic minority is in the rule of law. So it is all the more shocking that it is the travellers themselves who are the ones flouting the rule of law with utter abandon.

Too many of Britain's travellers behave in a manner entirely unacceptable to society at large. Those with homes close to traveller sites too often live in fear of burglary or violence. Frequently, travellers have muddied the waters between being victims of dislike and distrust, and deserving of it.

The discovery of an alleged organised crime and slavery ring operating from traveller sites is a whole new category of horror. From a corpse found in a wood, to captives allegedly held at Greenacres site in Leighton Buzzard on a starvation diet, the details of the latest revelations are horrific. But the horrifying spectre of slavery in the English countryside has risen, in part, because of a wariness on the part of authorities to meddle in traveller affairs, and a willingness, on the part of travellers, to exploit this.

It has been suggested that some of those held on sites had been living as slaves for as long as 15 years. Some of those freed have refused to co-operate with police; others have protested that traveller families were providing a home and employment for those who would otherwise have lacked it. Even under this interpretation, we still appear to be left with a situation whereby vulnerable people have been held for long periods of time, earning far less than the minimum wage and in severely unhealthy conditions. This would stretch belief in an inner city factory, or even on a remote agricultural farm. We must ask ourselves why it could happen on a caravan site.

Through their separation from society, travellers do not thrive. Statistics on this community are vague, but what fragments are available to us are little short of horrifying, indicating terribly low life expectancy and high rates of infant mortality and maternal death. Less than a decade ago, Save the Children estimated that 10,000 traveller children in the UK were not in school, while another study found that only one in five aged 11 to 16 was in secondary school.

There is some moral distance between slavery and the flouting of planning laws. The shape of the battle over the travellers' site of Dale Farm, Essex, nonetheless, indicates a community accustomed to considering the law only as an obstacle, in this respect as in all others. It is vulnerable and exploited groups themselves which have the most to fear when the reach of law becomes limited. Planning disputes merely show that Britain's travellers must be held accountable under the law like all others. The horror of human traffic in the heart of England shows how badly they should want to be."