The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #146699   Message #3402744
Posted By: Jim Carroll
11-Sep-12 - 09:07 AM
Thread Name: BS: 'NoTravellers'common UK sign?
Subject: RE: BS: 'NoTravellers'common UK sign?
"Jack Straw, Keighley MP Ann Cryer, Mohammed Shafiq, Lord Ahmed, Jasmin Alibhai-Brown."
No of whom ever made a claim which implicated "All male Pakistanis"
Had they done so they would not only have committed professional suicide, but they would have faced criminal charges for incitement to race hatred.
All your own work Keith
However, should you produce evidence to the contrary, my offer still stands - shouldn't be too difficult.
"We found they are not."
No you didn't - all you could claim is that you had never seen them - nothing more.
Jim Carroll

On the other hand - once more:
"Discrimination
Gypsies have suffered discrimination by being refused service in public houses and shops, entry to dance halls and youth clubs, even on at least one occasion (in Sheffield) not allowed on a bus.
Discrimination is not a new phenomenon. Here is an example taken from an article in The Countryman recalling the 1920s.
"In season, the itinerants poured in, to pea pick, single out and so on; tramps, Gypsies and Travellers of every kind. 'No Gypos' read the notice on the pub door."
The Commission for Racial Equality and its predecessor, the Race Relations Board, received many complaints in particular about pubs with 'No Gypsies' signs outside. Letters 'achieved some success' in the removal of signs but recently new wording 'No Travellers' has been used. Under the Race Relations Act such a sign may be seen as discriminating indirectly against Romany Gypsies. The pub owner would need to justify the sign and a suitable test case is awaited to see how these notices could be justified. Under the Race Relations Act only the CRE can prosecute a discriminator. All that Gypsies can do is refer these signs, and refusals of service, to the CRE and leave it to the Commission to decide which cases to take up.
Notices are becoming more subtle, such as 'Travellers by Appointment only', so that a Gypsy with limited reading ability will see the sign as applying to him, but in case of prosecution the landlord might get away with arguing that he was referring to commercial travellers.
In two cases where clubs rather than pubs were concerned, the cases were settled out of court with an apology to the Traveller who had been refused entry. One involved an Irish Traveller but - because it never reached the stage of a trial - the argument that Irish Travellers are an ethnic group has never been settled."
and from Mrs Thatchers pet Civil Servant:
"since the phrase 'or a gipsy' was finally ex¬punged from the highways legislation as being discriminatory. An ethnic meaning has, however, recently been reaffirmed in a different legal context where precedents created in regard to highways and caravan sites are not necessarily relevant. This came about by virtue of a judgement arising from the 1976 Race Relations Act, which gives protection in Great Britain against discrimination on racial grounds, defined as meaning 'colour, race, nationality, or ethnic or national origins'. Arguments about whether Gypsies were protected by the race relations legislation had increased steadily over the years ever since the first Act of 1965, and much effort had been expended over 'No Gypsies' signs put up by some publicans. These were not unlawful in themselves under the first Act but became so subsequently. Some publicans, however, sought safer ground by resorting to notices saying 'No Travellers', a description which gave rise to trickier legal issues, so much so that, when the Commission for Racial Equality contested the display of such a sign in an east London pub named The Cat and Mutton, the implications had to engage the judicial attention of, first, Westminster County Court in 1987 and then, in 1988, the Court of Appeal.
The question was whether such a denial of access to goods and services was discrimination 'on racial grounds'. The County Court judge refused to accept the CRE's case that 'Traveller' was synonymous and interchangeable with 'Gypsy' and that Gypsies were an ethnic group: he concluded that notices like the one in The Cat and Mutton were not unlawful, and he dismissed the action. The Court of Appeal upheld this finding to the extent that the three judges agreed that 'Traveller' was not synonymous with 'Gypsy' and that the class of persons excluded by the sign was not confined to Gypsies: there had therefore been no direct discrimination. However, they went on to confirm that Gypsies were a racial group for the purposes of the Act. A notice saying 'No Gypsies' would therefore be unlawful; moreover, a 'No Travellers' sign constituted indirect discrimination, to the detriment of Gypsies, by imposing a condition (of not being a Traveller) which fell more heavily on them than on people of other racial groups.
If excuse is needed for having plunged here into such legal niceties, it lies in the fact that we shall find that the question of Gypsy identity has attended their passage through Europe ever since they first arrived, and these legal debates in English courts serve very well to illustrate an important dilemma which refuses to go away in any discussion of Gypsies. Is it the way of life that is the paramount factor in definition? That may be sufficient identification in cases like some of those just mentioned, but it is far from being a complete answer, for where does it leave the many Gypsies who have adopted a settled way of life and do not 'travel', but who nevertheless feel themselves to be Gypsies?"