I've Never Seen A Site That Didn't Look Better Looking Back.

At midnight tonight, it appears that Basildon Council will officially serve notice of eviction to the inhabitants of Dale Farm in Essex. The result of this is that the people who live there, who call themselves Travellers, will be turfed off the land which they own because of repeated planning violations over the course of a decade or so. Predictably, the usual suspects are up in arms, including the Luvvie-In-Chief and all-round UN Good Egg Vannessa Redgrave who whinged out of my radio this morning telling me the "just go down there" and meet these people. The local Catholic bish went and did his bit, although he was altogether more sensible in his ideas, merely suggesting that the Council had better have a good idea of where people were going to go.

Still, it's quite a difference between the calls for the law to be rigorously enforced with regards to the rioters of two weeks ago, and pleas for mercy and the bending of the law for the gypsies. It is the personal opinion of your humble correspondant that the law applies to everybody, regardless of which particular law, and regardless of whatever special specious racial circumstances surround the issue. Planning law applies to everybody wishing to alter their land to ensure that the whole UK doesn't turn into one giant, unmitigated hellhole like Dale Farm.

Various defences have been put forward to persuade Basildon Council to allow the gypises to remain where they are, primarily to do with race. Indeed, the blog dedicated to Dale Farm specifically accuses Basildon council of racism for turning down their planning applications without considering the other reasons for doing so. I think quite a good one is that the whole area looks like an inhabited cess-pit - precisely the sort of thing the planning rules are there to avoid.

In any case "Traveller" is not a race, so racism cannot possibly be involved. The inhabitants claim to be descended from Scottish, Irish and Romanian wanderers, which seems essentially to encompass Europe, making them Europeans. Is it possible to be racist against your own race? Furthermore, in decribing themselves as Travellers, I'm sure I'm not wrong in inferring that means they intend to travel, perhaps when their position on a certain bit of land becomes untenable?

Whether Travellers can be considered a distinct race or not, the issue is not about that. It is evident that in a functioning society, everybody must follow the same laws. A property the immediately abuts Dale Farm must after all keep the law of the land, apparently simply because the inhabitant has the great misfortune not to be a gypsy, if those same gipsies are to be believed. No, I am firmly on the side of Basildon Council here. A decade is far to long for a planning dispute to go on, and they should have been told to clear out years ago if they continued to ignore the law.