Transcript

HUTCHEON: Every Spring for more than two hundred and fifty years, gypsies have come to the Appleby Fair from all over Britain. While the tourists look on Romany Gypsies prepare their stock for sale in a tradition which goes back hundreds of years.

BILLY WELCH: Appleby Horse Fair to us is like a pilgrimage. It’s the only one of its kind left in the world and it’s the oldest one in the world. It’s everything, it’s all we have, it’s everything we’ve ever been, it’s everything we’ve ever been and everything we’re going to be.

GYPSY: When it’s sunshine and light, there’s no better place. Look all around.

BILLY WELCH: When the sun is shining like this, it’s God’s country.

HUTCHEON: Billy Welch is the organiser of the Appleby Fair, just like his father was before him. Under British and European law, gypsies are recognised as a distinct ethnic minority. For centuries however they’ve been branded as itinerant vagabonds, reviled and marginalised.

BILLY WELCH: It doesn’t bother us that much because after generations and generations of abuse, your skin tends to go thick and you get used to it.

HUTCHEON: The fair is a rare occasion where gypsies are given an open invitation to park their caravans and enjoy each other’s company without fear of arrest or eviction. But these modern day nomads view non-gypsies, the settled community, with suspicion and while ordinary Britains might enjoy a burst of the colourful culture, increasingly they too view the other side with suspicion.

These days traditional or Romany Gypsies are now just a portion of the community collectively known as travellers. Many other groups make up a diverse population, people like Kathleen McCarthy who’s known as an Irish traveller.

KATHLEEN McCARTHY: Making us move from spot to spot and going to this carpark and that carpark, then we’ve got a reputation we’re gypsies. So now nobody wants us.

HUTCHEON: Over the past 10 years there’s been a gradual decrease in the number of legal campsites leading to a shortfall. One in three travellers now lives on an illegal site.

[Shot of gypsies being evicted, Twin Oaks January 2005]

FEMALE GYPSY: That’s not right, that’s not right!

MALE GYPSY: I’m not moving. We’re not moving. Do not move, do not move!

HUTCHEON: Today, relations between gypsies and the settled community in Britain are fraught.

FEMALE GYPSY: [Shot of old man lying on ground] Come on, leave him, he’s an old man. He’s an old man, leave him, leave him.

EVICTOR: You get out of the way.

FEMALE GYPSY: No, I’m not, I will not.

HUTCHEON: The threat of eviction hangs over dozens of communities.

FEMALE GYPSY: Please go, stop it. You pushed me.

HUTCHEON: For travellers, it’s their recurring nightmare – an army of bailiffs sent in under police protection.

FEMALE GYPSY: Travellers have to have rights. I’m willing to take my three kids and go to prison. I am willing to do that. We’ve been here four years, we’ve never done wrong.

MALE GYPSY: We have got nowhere to go. We’ve got nowhere to go.

HUTCHEON: Eleven years ago the Conservative Party Leader, Michael Howard, who was then Britain’s Home Secretary introduced legislation that removed the legal onus on councils to provide campsites for travellers and gypsies. As a result the number of travellers and gypsies skyrocketed and so too did the number of illegal sites. It’s estimated that another four and a half thousand pitches will be needed to solve the problem.

During Britain’s election campaign earlier this year, the Conservative Party Leader tried to win over voters by seizing on widespread frustration against travellers.

MICHAEL HOWARD [Speech – April 2005]: There are too many people in Britain today who hide behind so-called human rights to justify doing the wrong thing. “I’ve got my rights” has become the verbal equivalent of two fingers to authority.

[Shot of various newspaper headlines: “Sun War on Gipsy Free-For-All. Meet Your Neighbours Thanks to John Prescott” “To stop gipsy invasion – Stamp on The Camps” “Tories pledge tough action against illegal campsites. Prison Threat to Travellers” “Illegal traveller camps bring fear and misery” “Britain Backs the Sun Campaign Against Prescott’s Gypsy Camps”

HUTCHEON: The tabloid press quickly whipped the issue into a frenzy. Neither the Conservative Leader nor the tabloid editors would speak to Foreign Correspondent but a prominent defender of the travellers in the House of Lords did.

LORD ERIC AVEBURY – LIBERAL DEMOCRAT: I thought it was a wicked thing to do to stir up animosity towards gypsies at the time when the election was in progress.

HUTCHEON: So he was basically whipping up hatred.

LORD ERIC AVEBURY – LIBERAL DEMOCRAT: He was whipping up hatred in a way that I think was verging on unlawfulness because of course under our law it is an offence to incite racial hatred.

HUTCHEON: Middle England has also become increasingly frustrated with the ruling Labour Party’s inaction. Cottenham is the birthplace of author Samuel Pepys. It’s a twee slice of postcard Britain where life moves to a leisurely pace.

Each year All Saints Church led by Vicar Michael Hoare, hosts a flower festival to celebrate Spring but with a burgeoning traveller campsite on the edge of town, many in Cottenham feel a distinct chill in the air.

Two years ago the peaceful rhythm of the village was shattered when up to 800 Irish travellers arrived on a traditional gypsy campsite known as Smithy Fen.

TERRY BROWNBILL: Then they proceeded to turn this village into their own private playground.

HUTCHEON: Resident, Terry Brownbill accused the new arrivals of wreaking havoc in gentile Cottenham.

TERRY BROWNBILL: There was an elderly couple that were sitting behind one of the travellers and they beeped their horn and the traveller got out with a monkey wrench and smashed all the windows in their car and just calmly got in their car and drove off in broad daylight and people just thought what on earth is going on here. We’d never seen anything like it.

HUTCHEON: For months hostility between the two communities mounted until events took a dramatic turn. About two years ago, not long after a group of several hundred Irish travellers moved to the outskirts of Cottenham, the local postman, a man named Peter Stone, died after a pub brawl here. At the time of the brawl there were more than 25 travellers in the pub yet despite the large number of witnesses, police say they never had enough evidence to charge anyone. The two communities now keep very much to themselves. The travellers have been barred from many shops and businesses and are rarely seen in the village.

Ask drinkers at the Chequers Pub, many of whom knew the postman as a friend, and their views on travellers haven’t changed.

MAN IN PUB: On that particular night, the only people that were in the pub were travellers. What more can I say?

MAN IN PUB: Myself personally, I would evict them but that would only really move the problem onto somebody else, which isn’t really fair but there you go, I mean we’ve had our fair share of them here. They’ve been here roughly 2 or 3 years now. We’ve suffered more than enough in the village so I basically, I would vote to evict them.

HUTCHEON: After the postman’s death, locals agreed they had to take action. A resident of 18 years, Terry Brownbill spearheads a movement called Middle England in Revolt, which aims to take Cottenham’s strategy to other communities in Britain.

To pressure local authorities into action, residents voted to stop paying council tax for several months.

TERRY BROWNBILL: Withholding council tax means that over a million pounds would have been taken out of their budget. That’s a big amount to take out of their budget and that’s why we did it and it was also giving them the problem.

HUTCHEON: Yet despite several enquiries, the local council, until now, has failed to find a solution.

TERRY BROWNBILL: What angers the settled community is that there is one law for the settled community and one law for travellers.

HUTCHEON: Smithy Fen travellers weren’t prepared to talk.

So how long have they been there? [Talking about campsites]

MAN: These were the English ones that the Irish drove them out of.

HUTCHEON: Today relations with the village remain tense and some believe the campaign begun by Middle England in revolt has been unproductive.

REV. MICHAEL HOARE: On one level it’s understandable – people are by nature reactive and Middle England in Revolt is a good example of that. That having been said, I think that they overstate their case. If they concentrated more on trying to understand and negotiate and find compromises, then I think all of us might find that life would be easier.

HUTCHEON: If you ask the travellers, life on the move is rarely easy.

Travellers from Dale Farm abandoned their caravans for a few hours to visit the Houses of Parliament in Westminster, London’s political heart. Among them is spokeswoman, Kathleen McCarthy.

KATHLEEN McCARTHY: And the Gypsies and the roaming travellers need help from the government.

HUTCHEON: She’s hoping to persuade politicians to end the shortage of campsites and prevent future evictions.

LORD ERIC AVEBURY: I hope this will be a practical meeting.

HUTCHEON: There are several high profile supporters, including actor Corin Redgrave and peer Lord Eric Avebury.

LORD ERIC AVEBURY [Speaking to meeting]: But I wish you every success in the remainder of the meeting and in the campaign to ensure that evictions do not proceed pending the resolution of this problem on a national level.

LORD ERIC AVEBURY: They have a case because you’ve got this enormous number of homeless people and even according to the government’s definition, a person is homeless if he’s got a caravan and there’s nowhere that he can lawfully station it.

HUTCHEON: The Blair government has promised a major overhaul to provide enough pitches or sites for travellers and gypsies. The review is due out any day but could still take years to implement.

From a tiny legal caravan site set up 5 years ago, Dale Farm is now a suburb of fibreglass on wheels for a thousand travellers. Half of the expanded site has been bought by the travellers themselves. They say they had no option except to buy it and live on it. Even though it’s designated as pastoral land where development is supposed to be prohibited.

Dale Farm has been the home of spokeswoman Kathleen McCarthy for 4 years. Mrs McCarthy is 42, she’s lived in a caravan all her life and spent just 7 weeks in school.

KATHLEEN McCARTHY: This caravan, I’ve had this a long, long time.

HUTCHEON: She’s virtually illiterate, getting others to read and write for her. She recalls the day two months ago when Conservative Party Leader, Michael Howard, was spotted peering over the fence into the campsite sparking a nasty and emotive campaign by the tabloid press.

KATHLEEN McCARTHY: He brought so much hatred because then the Sun Paper poke on us and what the Sun did then, they found anywhere, any piece of ground that was nearer to caravans to video all the dirt and everything and then they made it look like it was belong to the travellers.

HUTCHEON: Mrs McCarthy says when she heard Michael Howard had come to Dale Farm she tried to talk to him but he disappeared into a residents’ meeting.

KATHLEEN McCARTHY: So then I thought well we’ll get in contact with Michael Howard to find out will he meet me to hear two sides of the story. You know how many letters I sent, how many phone calls I made and he never had the decency to even reply back.

HUTCHEON: Kathleen McCarthy lives on unemployment and child support benefits totalling $500 a week. I put it to her that critics say travellers live off handouts without returning anything to society.

So do you pay taxes?

KATHLEEN McCARTHY: Yeah we all pay taxes.

HUTCHEON: What kind of taxes, council tax?

KATHLEEN McCARTHY: Yes at the moment we pay council tax and road tax and just like everybody else, when you get your shopping, you’re taxed – all that kind of thing. But for a job and to pay taxes on a job, we don’t because we haven’t got a job to do that and it’s very hard when you can’t read or write to get a job. It is very, very hard.

HUTCHEON: But on the other side of the steel fence built by the travellers neighbour, Len Gridley, there’s a very different story.

LEN GRIDLEY – RESIDENT: These people down here, they want everything out of society but pay nothing in. They want our schools, they want our hospitals, they want our doctors and everything else but they don’t want to pay anything in. That’s wrong. If I went to Australia I couldn’t do that.

[Looking at newspaper clippings]

LEN GRIDLEY: That’s when they got evicted at Chelmsford. That’s how the bailiffs go in.

HUTCHEON: Mr Gridley is one of the chief opponents to the travellers. His family has owned this property for 20 years, hoping to live amid the solitude and beauty of the English countryside. Mr Gridley says that due to the travellers’ presence, he can’t sell his home which has plummeted in value and he’s acquired a massive guard dog named Ben.

LEN GRIDLEY: I’m not living in the countryside, I’m living in a prison. In the last 4 years, I’ve spent over 10,000 pounds on security here, you know, that’s not normal for a normal house, not in the countryside, you know. Who’s caused the problem, I haven’t – they have. So whatever it costs, they’ve got to go. I’ve got an insurance policy against them. Anything happens to me, both these sites will disappear overnight, they will just be bombed. And I don’t care because I’ll be dead anyway so they can come with me.

KATHLEEN McCARTHY: If his house has gone down in value, it’s because he’s done it his own self. Not us. He’s spread the word that the gypsies have moved in, they’re bad people and we want them out. He is so full of hatred and discrimination that it’s just, I got shocked.

HUTCHEON: Gypsies and travellers are starting to fight back.

[Shot of gypsies protesting and saying “Stop the eviction”]

HUTCHEON: The travellers were given two years to leave Dale Farm. Women and children held a protest pleading for the local council not to evict them. But without further appeals, eviction orders are due to be served at any moment, even as many travellers realise their future survival calls for a measure of stability.

KATHLEEN McCARTHY: We want planning permission to be left live with an outside toilet, flushing water, electricity – that’s all we want. We want planning permission for that and I don’t think it’s a hard thing to ask the government of this country for.

MALE GYPSY DURING EVICTION: Get out of the way, this is not yours, this is ours.

HUTCHEON: This was the scene at a small campsite called Twin Oaks earlier this year.

FEMALE GYPSY: (on I’ve got a pregnant woman being attacked by the police. Why? I’m in the middle of a bloody riot and the police are beating people up and there’s a pregnant woman dropped on the floor. I need an ambulance.

HUTCHEON: Evictions cost local governments hundreds of thousands of dollars each year – the results of the Conservative Party’s 11 year old law leaving responsibility for caravan sites to the whim of local councils.

GYPSY MAN: They came down about 4 o’clock this morning and they just started ramming the doors and breaking all the fences down. They didn’t give us a chance or nothing.

HUTCHEON: Wherever these travellers move next, they will still be trespassers.

[Shot of gypsies belongings being burned by bailiffs]

Hundreds of years since gypsies and travellers first began to be marginalised, in this century they still wait for acceptance, respect and equality. This unique ritual is how gypsies seal a deal on the sale of a horse. [Shot of one man hitting another man’s hand with his hand in a chopping like action] No pact has yet been reached with the politicians or the settled community they represent. The clash with the travellers has placed a great strain on Britain’s reputation for tolerance and civility. No one can be sure when peace and harmony might return to the English countryside.