“First They Came for the Travellers”: Priti Patel’s Chilling Attack on Britain’s Travelling Communities

A composite image of the home secretary Priti Patel and a Gypsy caravan.


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I’ve chosen my headline with care, in response to the news that the home secretary, Priti Patel, has launched a horrible attack on Britain’s travelling community, suggesting that the police should be able to immediately confiscate the vehicle of “anyone whom they suspect to be trespassing on land with the purpose of residing on it”, and announcing her intention to “test the appetite to go further” than any previous proposals for dealing with Gypsies and travellers.

As George Monbiot explained in an article for the Guardian on Wednesday, “Until successive Conservative governments began working on it, trespass was a civil and trivial matter. Now it is treated as a crime so serious that on mere suspicion you can lose your home.” Monbiot added, “The government’s proposal, criminalising the use of any place without planning permission for Roma and Travellers to stop, would extinguish the travelling life.” 

“First they came for the travellers” alludes to the famous poem by the German pastor Martin Niemöller with reference to the Nazis, which begins, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a socialist”, and continues with reference to trade unionists and Jews, and ending, “Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.”

I hope you don’t think that allusion sounds like an exaggeration. This, after all, is a government that has made a point of demonising immigrants, not just under Priti Patel, but also, shockingly, under Theresa May, in her six dreadful years as home secretary, as I explained in an article in 2016, when she became Prime Minister, entitled, As Theresa May Becomes Prime Minister, A Look Back at Her Authoritarianism, Islamophobia and Harshness on Immigration — a sordid history that was then magnified when the true scale of May’s “hostile environment” became apparent via the Windrush scandal. And since the EU referendum, of course, the Tories — and their cheerleaders in the right-wing media — have not missed any opportunities to continue to stir up anti-immigrant hatred.

Nor are immigrants and travellers the only victims of the Tories’ drift into dangerously divisive territory. Since 2010, as I have written about repeatedly, the Tories have also persistently demonised the unemployed and those with disabilities.

The Beanfield, Castlemorton, the Public Order Act and the Criminal Justice Act

In addition, when it comes to travellers, the Tories have a long history of authoritarianism and oppression. It took until 1968, and the Caravan Sites Act, introduced by the Labour government of Harold Wilson, for travellers to get legislation providing them with sites — 400 around the country — where none had existed before.

Gypsy and traveller groups weren’t entirely happy with the Caravan Sites Act, for a variety of reasons, but it was an effort — however compromised — to deal with the problems that arose through nomadic people not having dedicated sites for their use.

By the 1980s, however, under Margaret Thatcher, a growing backlash against Gypsies and travellers was prompted by a growing New Traveller movement, whereby thousands of young people — unable to find a job in a Britain wracked by the mass unemployment that Thatcher was deliberately creating as she sought to crush Britain’s traditional manufacturing base, and to turn the UK into a banking- and services-led economy — took to the road in old vehicles, joining and adding to a free festival circuit of travellers that had been growing throughout the 70s. The free festival circuit’s central event was the Stonehenge Free Festival, which occupied the fields opposite Britain’s most famous ancient monument, and which, by the early 80s, lasted for the whole of the month of June and drew in tens of thousands of people.

The New Traveller culture — and the free festival circuit — was dealt a major blow on June 1, 1985, when a group of travellers — some of whom had been harried by police since the summer of 1984, and some of whom had been evicted in February from a protest camp at Molesworth in Cambridgeshire — were assaulted with genuinely shocking violence by 1,400 police from six counties and the MoD, in what has become known as The Battle of the Beanfield. For anyone interested to know more, my book, The Battle of the Beanfield, tells the whole disgraceful story, and my first book, Stonehenge: Celebration & Subversion, a counter-cultural history of Stonehenge, is also still available.

Afterwards the government passed the Public Order Act of 1986, which contained specific passages introduced in response to the New Traveller, free festival and protest culture, including Section 39, which was specifically included as a response to the harrying of travellers the year after the battle of the Beanfield.

As Earl Ferrers, Minister of State for Home Affairs, stated in Parliament in October 1989, “Section 39 of the Public Order Act 1986 was introduced into the Public Order Bill as it was going through Parliament in response to the depredations suffered by landlowners by members of the so-called peace convoy during the summer of 1986.” As he further explained, “The section provides the police with a power to direct trespassers to leave land in certain circumstances. Only if the trespassers knowingly fail to obey such a direction do they commit a criminal offence. Section 39 put in place entirely new powers for the police and introduced an accompanying criminal sanction.”

And there was worse to come. Although parts of the traveller movement were broken by the extraordinary violence of the Beanfield, the survivors were reinvigorated when an unexpected new movement — the rave scene — manifested itself, with illegal parties taking place across the country, leading to new alliances of ravers and travellers, and culminating, over the Bank Holiday weekend in May 1992, with what became known as the Castlemorton Free Festival, the first truly huge anarchic gathering since the last Stonehenge festival in 1984, which promoted another legislative clampdown.

As the Friends, Families and Travellers website explains, the Criminal Justice Act of 1994 “greatly increased the powers of police and local authorities to evict Gypsies and Travellers camping illegally and removed the duty on local authorities, under the 1968 Caravan Sites Act, to provide sites.”

FFT further explained that the Act specifically includes the following sections:

The repeal of Part II of the 1968 Act, removing the duty on local authorities to provide sites, and abolishing the government grant for constructing gypsy caravan sites.



An extended power for local authorities to direct unauthorised campers to leave land, including any land forming part of a highway, any other unoccupied land, or any land occupied without the owner’s consent. It would become a criminal offence for anyone so directed to refuse to leave, or to return to it within three months.



An extended power to Magistrate’s Courts to make orders authorising local authorities to enter land and remove vehicles and property, if persons are present in contravention of a direction to leave.



A strengthening of the powers contained in the Public Order Act 1986 (Section 39), giving the police power to direct trespassers to leave if they have damaged the land itself (as distinct from property on it), or if they have six vehicles. It also extends the application of this section to common land, highway verges, byways, green lanes and other minor highways, and includes new police powers to remove vehicles.

As FFT also explained, “The Government’s response to critics of the 1994 Act was that Gypsies and Travellers should buy their own land and set up sites. However, the reality is that the current planning system makes this virtually impossible. Although nomadism and unauthorised camping are not, in themselves, illegal, the effect of the legislation has been to criminalise a way of life.”

The result, as George Monbiot explained, in what he described as “the Conservative purge in the late 1980s and early 1990s”, was that “two thirds of traditional, informal stopping sites for travellers, some of which had been in use for thousands of years, were sealed off”, sowing the seeds of today’s crisis. As Monbiot also explained, the current consultation “acknowledges that there is nowhere else for these communities to go, other than the council house waiting list, which means abandoning the key elements of their culture.” No wonder he concluded that Priti Patel’s proposal “amounts to legislative cleansing.”

Opposition to Priti Patel’s proposals from the police

The good news, comparatively speaking, is that the police are overwhelmingly opposed to the plans. Submissions from the police, for a consultation launched last year, which were obtained by Friends, Families and Travellers under freedom of information legislation, “showed”, as the Guardian described it, “that 75% of police responses indicated that their current powers were sufficient and/or proportionate. Additionally, 84% did not support the criminalisation of unauthorised encampments and 65% said lack of site provision was the real problem.”

Abbie Kirkby, advice and policy manager at FFT, said, as the Guardian described it, that “the proposed laws would make the lives of Gypsies and Travellers a misery.” She said, “The evidence we have collected shows that the Home Office are deliberately ignoring police views on unauthorised encampments. The timing of the consultation announcement makes it clear that the government’s motive is to use Gypsies and Travellers to gather votes at election time.” She added, “There is no point in bringing in more laws which tell Travellers where they can’t go when you aren’t telling them where they can go.”

As the Guardian explained, FFT was obliged to make “FOI requests to individual forces, police and crime commissioners and three police bodies”, after the Home Office “refused to tell it how many constabularies supported criminalisation of trespass in their submissions to last year’s consultation.”

They discovered that the National Police Chiefs Council, and the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners has stated, in their submission to the compilation, “The lack of sufficient and appropriate accommodation for Gypsies and Travellers remains the main cause of incidents of unauthorised encampment and unauthorised development by these groups”, adding that “criminalisation of trespass would likely breach the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Equality Act 2010.”

The Cambridgeshire police force agreed, saying it “would be criminalising a culture and lifestyle”, while West Yorkshire police “said existing powers enabled a swift and effective response where necessary”, and Surrey police said, “Revised powers does not tackle the root cause of site provision.”

Charities, including FFT, have “warned that nomadic societies are in the midst of of a housing crisis because of a shortage of authorised sites for Gypsies and Travellers to set up on”, as the Guardian put it, leading to the establishment of increasing numbers of unauthorised encampments. FFT’s position is that the government “should be moving from an enforcement approach to one of provision”, and its recommendations “include reintroducing the statutory duty – repealed in 1994 – on local authorities to provide official sites for Gypsies and Travellers.”

The Guardian cited the experience of one particular traveller, Terry, who said, “The evictions are ridiculous. You’ve got children crying, women crying … There’s no time to do anything, you throw everything on to the back of your van and you’ve got to go. They escort you down the road, then after a while they leave you, and then you’ve got to pitch up somewhere else. Then you go through it all over again. It’s a never ending, vicious circle of hatred and racism.”

Beware the normalisation of a far-right drift

Unfortunately, however, the police will do what they’re told if the government changes the legislation regarding illegal encampments, and in the meantime, of course, the immediate effect of Priti Patel’s obnoxious announcement is to stir up additional hatred against Gypsies and travellers, who, lest we forget, have been the victims of hatred from settled people throughout history.

As George Monbiot explained in his article, “Over the past few weeks in Grimsby, Lincolnshire, local people have been debating the merits of the council’s proposal for an official transit site for travelling people. According to one councillor, there have been threats to stone, bottle and petrol bomb anyone who uses it, if planning permission is granted.” Monbiot also explained that, just last week, three travellers’ caravans in Somerset were torched by suspected arsonists.”

Monbiot also explained how “[t]ravelling peoples have been attacked like this for centuries, and sometimes murdered”, and cited the death, in 2003, of 15-year-old Johnny Delaney, who was “kicked to death by a gang of teenagers in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire”, with one of the killers reportedly telling a passer-by, “He was only a fucking Gypsy.”

With Gypsies and travellers under attack, to add to long-standing, government-fuelled hostility towards immigrants, Muslims, the unemployed and the disabled, is it any wonder that the worlds of Pastor Niemöller are on my mind?

We need to stand up and be counted, in support of those subjected to dangerously inflammatory rhetoric from a government that has been remorselessly sliding further to the right since taking office in 2010, since the EU referendum, and. most recently, since the election by Tory Party members of Boris Johnson, who has brought dangerously judgmental figures like Priti Patel — who seems to have contempt for everyone except the rich — into the heart of government, where she most emphatically does not belong.

And if we’re looking at the bigger picture, it is time for the Tories to be removed from power, and for the toxic dream of a no deal Brexit — with the attendant collapse of the economy, civil unrest, and, very possibly, some sort of martial law — to also be done away with once and for all. History shows us not that certain groups of people, or certain nations are “evil”, as our nationalists would like to pretend, but that tyranny can become normalised by degrees, so that, often within a shockingly short amount of time, the unthinkable becomes normalised.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from seven years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

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