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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 185 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 185, April 1995.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The Gypsy and the State
Derek Hawes and Barbara Perez
SAUS Publications £12.95
Last month Gypsies in the Austrian town of Oberwart came across a placard planted by the roadside declaring ‘Gypsies go back to India’.
They went to uproot the offensive object and triggered a bomb that killed four of them. The local police immediately dismissed the bomb as a result of a feud between rival Gypsy groups. After a howl of protest they were forced to admit that the murder was the work of an Austrian neo-Nazi gang.
This terrible episode exposes not just the Austrian authorities’ perception of Gypsies, but the present precariousness of Gypsies across Europe. Not only are they discriminated against by the state, but they are a useful scapegoat for the right.
A new book – The Gypsy and the State – examines the prospects for the 120,000 Gypsies who live in Britain. Presently they are bearing the brunt of Tory bigotry enshrined in the Criminal Justice Act. Reports are beginning to come in of Gypsies arrested or threatened under the act. Specific clauses in the Criminal Justice Act have been designed to force anyone with a nomadic lifestyle onto the wrong side of the law.
This discrimination is compounded by the simultaneous scrapping of the 1968 Caravan Sites Act which previously obliged local councils to provide sites for encampment.
The book is useful in shedding light on the history of British Gypsies. It also contains useful surveys and tables, and chapters on past legislation and the evolution of provisions such as education and healthcare. Quite rightly the book refuses to distinguish – in terms of rights – between Gypsies, travellers and New Age travellers. In all these ways it illuminates its subject.
However there are major flaws in the book.
The authors assert that modern treatment of Gypsies is part of a reaction to ‘the perceived threat to society which Gypsies have apparently presented since their first recorded appearance here over 500 years ago’. But is it really the case that the level of hostility has been constant for the last 500 years?
It is important to distinguish between suspicion towards outsiders in a closed feudal society and the way in which capitalist society benefits from the divisions fostered by scapegoating minority groups. Unless you make this distinction then you are drawn to the conclusion that nothing can be done about discrimination against Gypsies. It is timeless. The best that can be done is to fight for protective legislation.
Of course legislation does matter. The authors rightly say that the 1968 Caravan Sites Act was an important advance, but then characterise it as a ‘brief flowering of consensual liberation which is the aberration’. This misses the point. The date 1968 should not be viewed as an ‘aberration’. Surely it is no accident that Gypsies were ‘beginning to find a voice of their own’ and finding wider support at the same time as other oppressed groups – blacks, women, gays – were also being radicalised in the class cauldron of the late 1960s. To miss the potential of the impact of the class struggle on Gypsy rights leads the authors of this study in two fruitless directions.
The subtitle of the book is The Ethnic Cleansing of British Society. Of course it is true that there is discrimination and pressure on Gypsies to abandon their nomadic lives and assimilate. But to equate this with the bloody process by which rival nationalisms in ex-Yugoslavia carve up territory is frankly nonsense. The authors are compelled to make this comparison because they pin their hopes on EU legislation providing a solution to the problems that Gypsies face.
By magnifying discrimination against Gypsies and by calling it ethnic cleansing the authors hope that this makes the Gypsies’ case stronger and more urgent. But it would be a mistake to rely on an institution which is busy closing its borders to immigrants and fuelling racism to defend Gypsies.
The book ends by claiming that Gypsies in Britain have been caught in the crossfire of legislation fuelled by ‘justified public anger at ... large-scale open-air music festivals and the disruptive consequences that can result’. But in reality it is precisely those who are being politicised while fighting the Criminal Justice Act in its totality – Tory hating, anti-racist young people and trade union activists – who are most likely in the future to rally in support of Gypsy rights.
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