"Another thing Scottish and Irish Travellers are not a "race", but a Group,"
Can't speak for the UK but recent research has dated based on DNA has dated Irish 'Tinkers' back as far as the Bronze Age, I suspect (based on Lucy Duran's wonderful programmes of twenty years odd ago) that this is the case with all Travellers in these Islands.
"but travellers have no option but to conform in the short term."
And you appear to be equally obtuse - how can they conform if they have no stopping places and are refused access to settled property.
There is no "short term" about this - like in Tesco's sale 'when they're gone, they're gone'
Our thirty odd year association with Travellers didn't just consist of sitting around the campfire for a cosy chat - it was thirty years of interviewing them intensively, first about their oral culture and early history, and later about their urban experience - this included witnessing evictions and actual examples of persecution and, on a number of occasions, actually being subjected to that persecution ourselves because of our associating with "those people".
One night we got a call from one family in Hackney
Their 14 year old son had been arrested, unbeknownst to the parents, not charged, but told he fitted the description of someone who had been seen breaking into a house in Birmingham, driven up to that fair city in a police car, still not charged, and finally released without being questioned - and left to make his own way back to Hackney with about a fiver in his pocket.
I think I've mentioned my playing a part in preventing a fire-bomb attack on an unofficial site on Streatham Common because of a mouthy workmate whose brother-in-law and his neighbours were organising the event - as I was once told by an attractive young lady when I attempted to bat above my league "Come back when you've got hairs on it".
I have no "obsession with bigotry" - I say what I see, and you really aren't helping to change what I'm seeing here.
I ask again - what do you propose should happen to those being ethnically cleansed, or am I imagining it all?
You have little to add to the discussion here other than to express your disapproval of Travellers lifestyle - just like all those nice householders at the end of 'The Travelling People'
Did You know that, shortly after the radio ballad was made, a Midlands Council received a large sum of Government money tp ease the lot of Travellers in their area - they used it to evict the Travellers and fence off the sites.
Jim Carroll