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Travelling Without Moving

August 14th, 2008 · Posted by Skuds in Politics · 4 Comments · Politics

The local papers have recently been providing a sort of running commentary on the ever-changing location of a group of travellers in Crawley.  Or maybe there are a couple of groups: its hard to tell.  All I know is that there have been caravans parked somewhere for the last couple of months.  Which all reminds me of three competing theories about the travellers in Crawley.

The first theory is the one the local Tories were proposing in May. The gist of it was that the travellers used to be all over the place, and then the Tories took over the council and their tough line on travellers made them all disappear instantly with the result that there had been no illegal encampments for a year or so.

The second theory was one I heard in mid-May.  The gist of this theory was that when Labour ran the borough council and travellers camped on land belonging to the county council, the Tory-run county council were in no hurry to move them on and were happy for their stays to be extended as the general public don’t appreciate the exact ownership of land and the encampments were reflecting badly on the Labour-run borough council.  There was also a suggestion that as soon as the Tories took over the borough, their colleagues in the county helped to find a place for the most persistant family of travellers in an official site near Burgess Hill.  The overall implication was that the Tories had tried to prolong the problem in Crawley while it damaged Labour’s reputation and then proved that they could have sorted it all out ages ago if there had been the political will.

And then there was the third theory, which was my own point of view.  When I read the original Tory election claims I thought they were laughable.   Had the travellers stopped visiting a year after they took over the council it might have been plausible that their policies were having an effect, but an immediate effect?  That just smelled of coincidence to me.  I felt at the time that they were tempting fate a bit by trying to calim credit for something that just happened.

Apart from anything, the policy of preventing incursions by fortifying land owned by the council was an old one and, by necessity, a long-running one; it takes a long time to do all that work and it costs a lot so the cost (and therefore the work) was spread over several years.  Most of the work was carried out by the previous Labour council, by the time the Tories took over there were far fewer borough-owned bits of land that were accessible.

The other claim, that the council was more lenient when it was Labour-controlled is debatable too.  I remember a meeting with various people including some travellers and a representative from their pressure group where they claimed that Crawley council were more strict than anywhere else and more aggressive in their processing of eviction orders.

Suffice it to say that I just wrote off the Tory claims as standard opportunism and figured that the absence of illegal encampments was down to a combination of the accumulated impact of the long-running strategy of protecting land and pure chance – that the travellers had decided to go somewhere else for a while.

When I heard the second theory I was a bit seduced by it.  It was a conspiracy theory, but one of the more plausible conspiracy theories I have heard.  In the absence of any hard evidence that a particualr family was accommodated in Burgess Hill, or hard-to-get statistics of how many encampments there were on county-owned land and ho long they lasted I still tend towards the cock-up theory rather than the conspiracy theory.

I wish I had told someone all this at the time because then I could say “I told you so”.  As we have seen this summer, the travellers were not absent because this was ‘fortress Crawley’ and they could not find anywhere to stop here: they were absent because they just wanted to be somewhere else.  The problem was not solved either by publicly-quoted policies or by the suspected underhand secret policies, in fact it was not solved at all – it just decided to go away for a bit.

Anyway, I hear through the grapevine that the travellers are camped near Asda at the moment, and I also hear that they are planning to go to Ireland on holiday tomorrow for a couple of months.  When that happens and the Tories claim that they have gone because of some amazing new council tactic just remember – I told you so.

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4 Comments so far ↓

  • Gordon Seekings

    For what it’s worth when Labour ran Crawley I ended up spending 4 days in the Royal Courts of Justice in The Strand with Crawley Borough Council officers and a hired QC spending a lot of money in getting one group of Travellers moved on from a car park in Northgate.

    That shows I think that then Labour Council were prepared to take action when appropriate.

    I’m just sorry that they declined to take action when it was suggested to them a couple of days before the Travellers went on that site to prevent the site actually being used……:-((

  • janeskuds

    I think the key point here seems to be that the word ‘Traveller’ ought to be taken a bit more literally than it had been previously?

  • Danivon

    You mean that they are mobile? Who’d have thunk it?

  • janeskuds

    My specialist subject, ‘stating the bleedin’ obvious’ means that I am never going to go for a career in politics. I think Skuds got the family allocation of tact…..