Misguided emotion on gypsy situation (From The Wiltshire Gazette and Herald)

Misguided emotion on gypsy situation

3:36pm Thursday 3rd July 2008

• Print
• Email
• Share

Quite clearly, Sarah Singleton, the highly respected ex-reporter of the Gazette & Herald, is the victim of misguided emotion regarding the situation of gypsies and travellers (Gazette letters, June 26).

If it only were Romany gypsies that were involved, I doubt whether there would be quite the racial discrimination that she describes.

When she describes the victims of the Hitler holocaust, Romany gypsies were a small proportion of non-Aryans. Gays and other groups were included in the list for genocide. The six million Jews who were killed were the main category. To draw from immediate personal experience, my grandfather, a Jewish doctor, had to escape to this country with his family where he re-took all his examinations and became a Harley Street practitioner. My half-Jewish father, having been inturned, joined the British army and fought for them on Juno beach in addition to other battles in the Second World War. My mother was English.

In contrast, the Government offers very little help to homeless people, let alone the positive discrimination to those whose choice it is to travel.

Here, I am not including real gypsies who are above the need for government handouts including the insistence that sites are within yards of services like schools, hospital and doctors.

Instead, obtaining funding to assist those who become homeless because of situations like the credit crunch is achieved by Doorway which goes from hand to mouth on a day-to-day basis. She will recall the Doorway sleepout in January in which her ex-colleagues as well as me and an executive colleague from the district council plus about 34 others slept in the church yard to raise approximately £10,000. Homeless people are simply considered lucky if they are housed anywhere.

So one can work out who has been given the most rights.

Councillor Nina Phillips, Redland Ward, Chippenham

• Print
• Email
• Share