OFF: Re: Summer festivals... Glastonbury style

[Paul Mather]

On Thursday 24 March 2005 04:49 pm, Jon Jarrett wrote:
> On Wed, 23 Mar 2005, Paul Mather wrote:
> > BTW, I read recently on the Grauniad that the Tories want to clamp
> > down on the Travellers as part of their election manifesto.  Some
> > things never change...
>
>         I see the point, but I think on this occasion that's just a
> knee-jerk because currently Labour have made themses look stupid by
> not having a clear policy on travellers and one lot round Cambridge
> actually having a lawyer or two and thus being unusually hard to
> move. John Prescott has been in international press being
> mealy-mouthed about it and as the unofficial election campaign over
> here gets up to speed the Tories have seen a chance to put the boot
> in and look as they have something coherent themselves. Yours,
>                             Jon (neither one nor the other)

I have to confess to being a bit bemused by the coverage I read because
it seemed that the Tories were very upset at the Travellers' use of the
legal system to secure places for them to live.  There was a mention
that if the Human Rights Act can't be aligned with Tory ideology,
they'll simply scrap it.  (Better to eliminate the rights of the many
than to allow a few statistical outliers to finesse the system.)  One
Tory MP was quoted as calling Travellers "scum."

The entire tone their manifest plans as a whole smacked, at best, of
"not in my back yard," and, at worst, of ethnic cleansing.  It seems to
me that the Tories (and apparently several tabloids) feel it is an
affront that Travellers are allowed to exist and if they are able to do
so legally then, quite obviously, the solution is to change the law to
stop that, effectively making their chosen way of life untenable.

But, maybe I'm getting the wrong end of the stick by reading the
Grauniad, and the Tories are actually pursuing a noble cause in the
furtherance of their One Nation politics.  Obviously, I should read the
Sun and become educated on the Deadly Menace that threatens to Destroy
the Very Fabric of our Sacred British Way of Life!  :-)

Yesterday it was asylum seekers.  Today it is the Travellers.  Tomorrow
it will be Cambridge Space Rock Music Collectives. :)  Where will it
end?

"You can't do this, you can't do that."

(It probably doesn't help matters that I saw _Hotel Rwanda_ at my local
cinema recently.)

Cheers,

Paul.

NP: Gong, Chateau Neuf, Oslo, Norway, 1974-12-15
--
e-mail: paul at gromit.dlib.vt.edu

"Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production
 deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid."
        --- Frank Vincent Zappa