"....she has not been a Member of Parliament since 1992"
Our direct involvement with attempting to have these signs remove was limited to the period when Ken Livingstone offered the services of the GLC to assist - we continued to see these signs regularly right up to the point when we stopped recording Travellers regularly in 1998.
Can I prove that they are "common in Britain" - no, of course I can't, any more than the handful of people here can prove that they aren't, on the basis of not having seen them.
I have produced evidence that they were still around as late as 2010 and we spoke to Travellers last September who told us that they encounter them regularly, though they point out that they are now found (in the Bristol area at least) to be sited out of the view of casual passers by, inside the bars - we saw one inside one bar and in the porch of another - this in the space of a few miles from one Travellers site
Those who claim otherwise have not produced one single shred of solid evidence to back up their case - if that is not true - please point out something I have missed.
This from the Runnymede Trust pamphlet, 'On the Verge: the gypsies of England', by Donald Kendrick and Sian Bakewell, re-published and expanded by University of Hertfordshire Press in 1995:
"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 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 skills will see the sign as applying to him, but in cases of prosecution the landlord might get away with arguing that he is referring to commercial travellers."
The problem has not gone away, there is no reason at all why it should, as nobody has shown the slightest concern about this "last acceptable form of racism" apart from a handful of 'seatwarmers' like the Commission For Racial Equality. It has adapted to changing times but it still continues to condemn Travellers to a 'pariah' existence.
Basically, nothing has changed in Britain since MacColl, Parker and Seeger made 'The Travelling People' in the early sixties. That programme played a part in the introduction of the Caravan and Camping Act, which made it obligatory for councils to provide so many sites - (removed by the Major Government - so back to square one)
Jim Carroll