I quote from the coverage on The Guardian’s website on Wednesday morning:-

“10.38am: I’ve just been speaking to the Guardian’s Johnny Howorth, who’s witnessed scenes of “abject chaos” at Dale Farm this morning. The clashes of earlier have now given way to a stand-off, he says.

At present, there seems to be more or less a stalemate between protesters and bailiffs and the police who are figuring out what to do next.

There’s a real sense of despondency on behalf of the Travellers … They never thought it would come to this.” (Emphasis added).

And yesterday afternoon they all just filed out.

So – someone please tell me why they couldn’t have done that 10 years ago when they were first notified that they were there illegally, or 8 years ago when John Prescott gave them 2 year’s grace to leave voluntarily, or when they lost any one of their decreasingly credible challenges in Courts?

The clue is in the last sentence of the quote. I’ve spent a good many years in enforcement and the most common emotion is complete shock that, despite all the warnings they’ve received, this is actually happening to them. Enforcement is always something that’s done to someone else.

One last observation. Dale Farm resident Kathleen McCarthy said: ‘The memory of Dale Farm will weigh heavily on Britain for generations.”

Don’t bank on it, dear. You were already tomorrow’s fish and chip wrappers long before they shot Gaddafi.

Well, at seven this morning, it finally happened.

Despite all the bravado and bullshit about the barricades, the police took precisely seven minutes to get into Dale Farm. The rest has been fairly predictable – the howls of outrage about “police brutality” being the most predictable of all. It was clear from the coverage at seven this morning that the activists were all too ready to start hurling bricks before the police had even entered the site. This despite the weasel words on the Dale Farm Solidarity site, namely “We need people to come willing to engage in civil disobedience as well as support residents and activists in resisting the eviction through non-arrestable roles.” I venture to suggest that chucking bricks, beating people with a shovel and pissing on them are all arrestable offences. (Unless, of course, you happen to frequent some of the more hard-core clubs in Berlin, in which case they’re about 200 Euros an hour (allegedly)!) Continue reading Not for Nothing is it called Enforcement. →

Tomorrow is going to be an ugly day in Essex. It need not be so, but there are forces in society which just do not know when to give up. And sadly, in these days of spin doctors, they use every device at their disposal to mislead.

The site clearance of Dale Farm (see below) need not be a cause for violence. Indeed, it need not be happening at all, but for the fact that the travellers seem to regard themselves as above the law. It is not my intention today to revisit the legality of Basildon Council’s actions as, quite clearly, they are acting lawfully. (Whether there are other aspects of law that affect the issue of sites for travellers is a different matter and should not be used to muddy the waters.)

Continue reading Dale Farm →

I realise that this might upset a few people, so some of you might want to pop out for the next five minutes.

Vanessa Redgrave and the grey cardigan of concern made an appearance in Essex this week. No doubt she feels strongly about the site clearance of land owned by Irish travellers at Dale Farm, and I applaud anyone who shows the courage of their convictions, but she’s not being entirely honest with us and has, as a consequence, annoyed me sufficiently to blog about it. Ms Redgrave insists that the travellers have not broken any law. She is wrong, and if this is the limit of her understanding of law she would be very well advised to stick to acting, because this is the real world and to transpose her distorted view onto it would set a very dangerous precedent.

The argument about Dale Farm has been rumbling on for a decade and is now so shrouded in melodramatic hogwash and human rights mumbo-jumbo that we need to get back to the core of the issue – planning law. Shorn of all the emotive issues being thrust into the headlines, let’s take a look at what has actually happened. Continue reading The Law According to Vanessa →

There has been a huge hooha going on the press about Jon Venables. The red tops are baying for blood and the BBC Have Your Say pages are full of comments from those who are incapable of making the distinction between justice and revenge.

Don’t get me wrong – what Venables did was horrific, and, had it happened in my family, I would find it next to impossible to forgive and forget. But there is a far more important issue here than just him. Continue reading The Devil and Benefit of Law →