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Misguided emotion on gypsy situation
3:36pm Thursday 3rd July 2008
Comments (2)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
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marthaquinn, Brighton says...
10:41pm Thu 3 Jul 08
To state that they should be happy to live anywhere shows a serious lack of understanding and compassion for this issue. I find this opinion particularly worrying coming from a councillor, who must be aware of her responsibilities under the Human Rights Act 1998 to encourage positive race relations. If she is not however, I would strongly recommend that she reads Chapter 2 of the Commission for Racial Equality Report entitled Common Ground: Equality, good race relations and sites for Gypsies and Irish Travellers. Chapter 2 reminds councillors of their individual responsibility to promote race equality and good race relations.
Secondly, I appreciate that the Roma and Sinti Gypsies killed in the Holocaust, made up only a tiny percentage of the overall number of people killed, however since that time they have barely received any compensation for their suffering. They were also refused the opportunity to give evidence at the Nuremberg Trails as other survivors, including Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Weiesel blocked their entry due to their ethnicity and the negative stereotypes attached to the word Gypsy.