Forced to apologise, the council chief who said travellers spread ‘misery and mayhem’
A COUNCIL leader has been forced to apologise after calling travellers ‘parasites’ who cause ‘misery and mayhem’.
Mike Bird said the groups who had set up camp in Walsall were part of a ‘lawless society’ who ‘run around on motorbikes shouting abuse’.
His comments followed a string of other complaints about anti-social behaviour by residents and traders in the Surrey commuter belt after a series of illegal camps set up by travellers.
But Tory Mr Bird sparked outrage among the travelling community, with one organisation saying it would be liaising with police to see if a crime has been committed. There were also calls for his party leader Theresa May to discipline him for his ‘frankly disgusting’ language.
Mr Bird, the leader of Walsall council in the West Midlands, was speaking during a phone-in on local BBC radio last week.
The topic was ‘ should people be more sympathetic to the travelling community?’, after police in Surrey caused fury by telling people there to have more empathy. Responding to residents’ concerns last week, Elmbridge police tweeted that they should ‘consider how upsetting it is to be uprooted every day’.
Mr Bird said: ‘The [travellers] I have come across are a lawless society, they have no respect whatsoever for our community.
‘I get this all the time, “Oh, it’s their culture.” But what about our culture? What about our way of life? They do not give a damn. I have now got 24 injunctions because of the incursions we’ve had.’ In June, a group of travel- lers moved onto Walsall Arboretum despite an injunction banning them and last year they set up camp on a local nature reserve four times.
Asked if he felt any venom towards travellers in general, Mr Bird replied: ‘Oh, absolutely’, adding: ‘We have had many incursions in Walsall and the mess and the mayhem they cause, the theft they cause, is disgraceful.’
One man labelled travellers ‘parasitic’ during the phone-in, to which Mr Bird responded: ‘The gentleman is absolutely 100 per cent right. They have cost us hundreds of thousands of pounds and caused nothing but misery and mayhem.
He later added: ‘So, yes, parasites is a good word for them.’ Mr Bird’s remarks sparked an angry backlash.
The Walsall Labour party condemned the ‘ frankly disgusting’ remarks and Labour’s local government spokesman Andrew Gwynne said Mrs May ‘ must take action’. Phien O’Reachtagian chairman of the Gypsy and Traveller Coalition, said: ‘His suggestion that communities are lawless is cause for concern from someone in his position.
‘We’d be looking to make a formal complaint and liaise with police to see if a crime has been committed.’
Mr Bird later apologised in a statement, saying he did not mean to cause offence. But he stood by his remarks. Asked if ‘ parasite’ was a loaded word that inflamed tensions, he said: ‘No, not at all’.
He insisted he was not talking about all travellers, saying his remarks had been taken out of context ‘ because travellers are many and varied’. But Mr Bird added that comments should be ‘directed entirely at the lawless community who tend to be, from my experience, Irish travellers.’