Howard – a Nazi?
It seems there’s been yet another spurious anti-Semitism row in the UK after Gypsy leaders accused Michael Howard (the right-wing opposition leader who, along with the Murdoch gutter rag The Sun – AKA The Scum – has been running a really quite distasteful campaign against gypsies) of using Nazi-like tactics. Michael Howard is the son of Romanian Jewish immigrants and his grandma died in the Holocaust. In recent years it’s emerged that Howard’s father was allowed to stay in Britain only because a Labour MP intervened on his behalf.
Still, I don’t think the Nazis are the most appropriate comparison for Howard. A better likeness is the western politicians who refused to allow Jewish refugees into their countries, particularly the USA. I’m sure that none of these politicians actually intended that the people they were sending on to other countries, including the Netherlands which was subsequently invaded by Germany, would end up being murdered, but they had the opportunity to save millions of people’s lives, and passed it up for political reasons.
Which is exactly what Howard is likely to do, given his campaigning record. Time after time he has aimed for the vote of gutter-press reading morons, and the anti-gypsy campaign is yet another example. The Independent reported today (page 5) that the Tories have proposed to follow an Irish example in passing anti-trespass laws, but that these laws had in fact been used against vulnerable families who travel alone, and not against large traveller encampments. So a mother goes to collect her child from school and returns to find her home gone, but of course the police cannot confiscate 100 caravans.
Many of these illegal travellers’ sites, by the way, are on the travellers’ own land, not other people’s property or public property. From the 1960s until 1994, local authorities were obliged to provide travellers with sites. The John Major government (which included Michael Howard) removed this obligation. The laws being broken are usually planning laws, which essentially ration land use, allowing house building only in its “proper place”. These laws are sometimes plain stupid – in one case, a family living in Hawes, which lies in the middle of the Yorkshire Dales National Park, were told they could not build a house for their own family, but only for use as holiday accommodation. And there’s a dire shortage of houses in that region, resulting in house prices going through the roof in a low-income area and locals being unable to buy houses in their own home towns.
There’s also a housing shortage down south, as well as house prices which are among the highest in Europe. Much of the land around London is “green belt”, meaning protected countryside. An awful lot of that region’s residents are wealthy commuters from London and other regional centres like Reading, Crawley and so on, and some of these people would be up in arms if “their” countryside was to have houses built on it. Sooner or later something will have to be done about this, either by encouraging people (and businesses) to move up north, or by building more houses in the precious Surrey countryside. I suspect that, before long, some people will thank the travellers for forcing the issue on Britain’s increasinly untenable planning law régime.
