I think that's pretty much par for the course but what really turned me against their position was the banner they put up proclaiming what was happening to them was 'ethnic cleansing'.

[LIFTED] off. [LIFTED] right off.

Ethnic cleansing is not being told 'you built that house illegally, you have to take it down'. Ethnic cleansing is being locked in your house at gunpoint then somebody setting it on fire. Ethnic cleansing is having every male member of your family shot dead in the street in front of you. Ethnic cleansing is mass rape on the pretext that therefore any children born will be of the 'right' racial group.

Ethnic cleansing is an atrocity. They're in the middle of a piddling legal dispute. From that moment on, I couldn't give a damn what happens to them.

Jon

What he said.

It’s not even racism. People like to bandy that word around as it gets attention, but this is not racism. Nor is it ethnic cleansing. It’s enforcement of laws to which we are all subject. If they don’t like the laws, then they can go somewhere else. They are, after all, travellers. So travel then.

There are cases where people have had their houses ripped down because of such mistakes. They can at least put the wheels on and tow them somewhere legal.

Not true for quite a lot of them it seems from the footage I've seen. They're not in any real sense 'mobile homes'. They're bungalows, mostly, because they're easier and cheaper to build. Basically built from pre-fab sections normally used for industrial buildings like warehouses. Given they didn't bother with the planning regs when they built them, I rather doubt they bothered with the fine detail of the building regs either.

Jon

I bet the people with their hands in the concrete filled barrel are going to find the next few days difficult (that is if they really are that embedded).

Maybe Basildon Council has asked NASA to aim this at Dale Farm.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15021323

When all said and done the bare facts are that millions of pounds have been wasted on ground that, according to the man who sold it to the travellers, just used to be a scrap yard and was never considered green belt.

Millions. Frak me.

it may have been a scrap yard but it never had planning permission to change its use from commercial to domestic. A bit of land in a restricted planning area is not worth that much, a bit of land that has homes built on it is worth a shed load more.