A new illegal traveller camp? It must be Easter

By EASTER Monday night, work on Britain’s newest illegal gipsy camp will be well advanced. travellers are expected to use the holiday to lay down asphalt and move caravans on to the five-acre site, near Wickford in Essex.

Weekends and Bank Holidays are favourite times for setting up such camps. Councils close down and the courts aren’t sitting, so it’s virtually impossible to get an injunction to stop the work going ahead.

Not that those building the new development are likely to take any notice of a restraining order. Last October, a High Court judge issued an injunction banning all construction on the green-belt site.

the owners of the land simply ignored the ruling. again last Friday, Judge Graham Wood said he would hold them in contempt if any further fences were erected, hardstanding laid, or any more caravans arrived on the plot. No one took a blind bit of notice. In the early hours of last saturday, a fleet of 28 lorries delivered 460 tonnes of hardcore. aerial photographs show that the work has since continued apace.

Unless it can be stopped, there are fears that the camp will eventually dwarf Dale Farm, the notorious illegal settlement at nearby Crays Hill, which was home to more than 1,000 people. Dale Farm was closed down in 2011 amid violent clashes between bailiffs, police, travellers and ‘human rights’ activists. It followed a decade-long legal battle, which cost taxpayers £7 million.

Get ready for the re-run. Despite the lack of planning permission and the court injunction, fencing, building materials, septic tanks and heavy machinery have been moved on to the Wickford site. Basildon Council has explored every legal avenue to prevent the work, but says its powers are limited by central government.

AND what’s the point of obtaining injunction after injunction if the courts can’t be bothered to enforce them? although the judge issued his contempt warning a week ago, the case has been adjourned until next month.

that’s ample time for a full-scale development to spring up. as we learned from bitter experience at Dale Farm, once such a camp is established, it’s the devil’s own job to shut it down.

Meanwhile, local residents — who, unlike most travellers, pay their taxes — are to have their rural tranquillity shattered and their lives turned upside down. all the evidence shows that when one of these illegal camps springs up, there’s a sharp spike in everything from crime to fly-tipping.

Nor is there much point appealing to the police. they’re reluctant to intervene in what is essentially a civil planning dispute. In any event, they often turn a blind eye to crimes committed by the ‘travelling community’ because they’re scared stiff of being called RAY-CIST!

Over the past couple of decades, with the ‘diversity’ industry exploding at vast public expense, travellers have managed to get themselves defined as a vulnerable minority. Few of them are proper raggle-taggle gipsies, in the romany sense. Most of those in England, as we discovered at Dale Farm, are Irish tinkers who already have substantial homes back in Ireland.

But having acquired special status, they are adept at manipulating the legal system and playing the victim card — attracting support from an endless supply of Left-wing lawyers and yuman rites activists.

the leader of the Dale Farm mob, richard sheridan, hilariously accused Basildon Council of ‘ethnic cleansing’ — even though all the council was doing was executing a legal eviction notice. that was before he was arrested and jailed for five-and-a-half years for his part in a £57million conspiracy to steal rhino horn and other artefacts from British museums.

yet the gullible human rights brigade had hailed him a hero. He had meetings with two Jags, when he was still Deputy Prime Minister, along with high-profile backing from the speaker’s wife, soppy sally Bercow, and rich revolutionaries like actress Vanessa redgrave.

sheridan canvassed the Council of Europe and was even allowed to address the United Nations. this only goes to prove yet again how desperate self-styled ‘liberals’ are to embrace anyone posing as a ‘victim of oppression’ — no matter how much misery they cause to anyone else.

the Dale Farm crowd got away with it for so long because they knew their way round the pernicious European human rights laws — which the tories shamefully have still not scrapped.

you can bet yuman rites will be the next ploy when the injunction against this latest illegal camp comes back to court.

In neighbouring Hertfordshire, another group of gipsies managed to outwit police and dump 70 tonnes of rubbish on private land.

POLICE set up surveillance cameras after travellers in 20 caravans broke into a development site, earmarked for housing, and started to fill it with truckloads of waste materials piled six feet high.

the travellers then protested that the surveillance was an invasion of their privacy and a breach of their ‘human rights’. Predictably, the Old Bill instantly caved in and the cameras were switched off.

I suppose you have to admire the travellers’ chutzpah. they were the ones who invaded the site illegally, then claimed to be victims of unlawful police intrusion. you couldn’t make it up. as soon as the police presence was withdrawn, they simply set fire to the rubbish, leaving it to fester and blight the surrounding area. Once again, it was the lawabiding, tax-paying homeowners in the neighbourhood who had to suffer the consequences of this criminality and selfishness.

another triumph for human rights! as for the poor residents forced to live next to this latest illegal gipsy camp in Essex, they don’t have any ‘rights’.

Let’s hope they won’t have to wait another ten years to get their peace and sanity restored.

But until the law is changed, the travellers hold all the aces.

Don’t be surprised if this site is still there in ten years’ time, just like Dale Farm.

Happy Easter.

DO YOU ever wonder what goes on behind the closed doors of your local Town Hall? Since they don’t empty the dustbins, or fix the potholes, what exactly do these people find to do all day? In Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, they have convened a meeting to discuss getting rid of the office cat. Missy the moggie has come to the attention of elf’n’safety, which is worried she could upset staff with allergies or get into fights with visiting dogs. She’s been hanging around the Town Hall since last summer and has been adopted by some workers, who like to stroke her. Missy has even got her photo on the council’s website, where she enjoys the honorary title of ‘morale officer’. Her fate has split the staff down the middle, especially as in the past town clerks have been allowed to bring their dogs to work. Tewkesbury’s mayor Karen Brennan is adamant the cat must go: ‘I know it sounds trivial, but an office is somewhere for business to be transacted and we don’t need a cat around — there are issues of health and safety, insurance, security.’ Security? Do they think Missy might be a terrorist sleeper? And, anyway, haven’t they got anything better to do than squabble over an office cat? I think we can take that as a ‘no’.