Guest Blog by Jake Bowers

I'm very honoured to have Jake's permission to reproduce this:

David Blunkett is feeding Romaphobia

The former home secretary's comments about Romany culture, and his claims we will cause riots, are ignorant and likely to fuel violence and prejudice

• Share346
• inShare4
• Email

• 
• • Jake Bowers
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 13 November 2013 19.26 GMT
  • Jump to comments (626)

David Blunkett said the behaviour of Roma people in the Page Hall area of the Sheffield was 'aggravating' to local people. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian

Ask any Romany woman who still reads palms and you will be told an essential fact – predicting a particular future makes it far more likely to happen. If you believe you are to meet a talk, dark, handsome stranger, then you are far more likely to find him.

However, it wasn't handsome strangers being predicted this week, but antisocial, ill-educated and dirty ones. When David Blunkett told BBC Radio Sheffield that the arrival of a large number of Slovak Roma migrants in his home city would lead to rioting, he wasn't so much predicting social conflict as adding to it. The behaviour of the Romany in the Page Hall area of the city, he said, was "aggravating" to local people. "We have got to change the behaviour and the culture of the incoming community, the Roma community, because there's going to be an explosion otherwise. We all know that." Among his charges was that we Roma don't want to educate our children, we congregate in large numbers on the streets, and we dump rubbish.

Romany individuals, of course, may well be guilty of littering and not sending their kids to school, but to suggest such behaviour is cultural is blatantly racist. From Gravesend to Glasgow I could take Blunkett to Roma migrant families who are fantastic neighbours, and parents who relish the chance to settle in a multicultural environment where they are no longer judged for being different.

Young men such as Artur Conka, for example, whose family escaped the grinding poverty of the Lunik IX ghetto in Slovakia, and who is fully integrating into British society. As a photography graduate he is using his skills to educate the British public about the plight of those he left behind – because he knows that every effort he makes to adapt must be matched by an effort to teach people about the community he comes from. Like every Roma migrant he attempts to disarm the fear evoked by the word Gypsy.

Such a fear of Gypsies is ancient and potent, but it has a name – Romaphobia. It recently led to blond Romany children across Europe being snatched and traumatised by state authorities. If politicians such as Blunkett make Romaphobia acceptable, it will indeed lead to racial violence in British cities. As January 2014 approaches and the anti-immigration lobby warns of the arrival of millions from Romania and Bulgaria, it's essential that progressive politicians – and I'm assuming Blunkett considers himself one – understand why 200,000 Roma migrants have already fled poverty, persecution and discrimination to live in the relative comfort of British cities. I'm sure Blunkett campaigned to end South African apartheid, but does he understand the social apartheid that blights millions of Roma across eastern Europe?

Ion Beldimari and his family. Photograph: Jake Bowers

Ion Beldimari lives in the ragged settlement of Smardioasa in southern Romania. He and his wife and five children live in a two-room mud hovel with no windows or doors. "We live in dread of winter because we have so little shelter," he told me when I visited in September. The family goes hungry if Ion and his eldest son cannot find enough scrap metal or plastic bottles to fill their horse-drawn cart. Like millions of Roma across Europe, they don't so much dump rubbish as recycle it to survive.

Then there's the myth that we don't like to educate our kids. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most Roma migrants I've met come to Britain precisely because they want their children to integrate, and not be forced into special schools where they are deemed "educationally subnormal". In the Czech Republic, for example, 35% of all children in special schools are Romany, perhaps 10 times the proportion in the overall population.

So as politicians churn out old prejudices about my community, I hope for just one thing – understanding. Because the thing we lack most of all isn't education, housing or even employment, it's the rarest commodity of all – empathy. And until media and politicians truly understand what we are attempting to escape, Romaphobia will continue to blight lives.

Feeding a myth

I recently read "Rabbit Stew and a Penny or Two" by Maggie Smith-Bendell, at just about the same time that a Greek couple were being accused of abducting a child, and Irish police removed another fair-haired child from a Traveller family on suspicion that she too was abducted.  Two headlines, from opposite ends of Europe, that occupied a lot of media attention for days on end.

The fact that the true stories, as originally explained to the police by both these families, bore no relation whatsoever to the false accusations received very little coverage in comparison, and the fact that nomadic people everywhere have for centuries lived in dread of the state removing their children from them received no mention whatsoever that I saw.

An early part of Maggie's book reminded me of this truth, however - the very reverse of the impression that was then being conveyed by the media. Maggie's parents were thrown into a total panic by the news that a farmer and his wife would like to adopt their son, and immediately fled the farm, where they had hoped to overwinter, leaving behind some treasured possessions that they could ill afford to do without, including their precious "banties". In this particular case, the family eventually learned that the farmer and his wife had no power to take their son from them.  But the state always has had that power, and still uses it on occasion. A nomadic family is then completely vulnerable, and may have no resources to put their opposing case forward, nor to ensure appropriate care for their lost child.

The point I want to make, is that this is how a lie works.  The evil that we do, we attribute to the victim.  We widely publicise our allegations.  And then we let the story die away.  The victim's innocence may be proven later, but nothing can un-write the headlines that have fed the evil myth.

Finding your dream team

Thanks to the wonders of the internet,  and specifically Twitter, I have been finding people who think like me and feel like me on issues I really care about. It's been much harder to convince the people I know who are still somewhat nervous about social networking via the internet to get online and get connected!

This week I was thrilled to discover some poems full of fire and passion by a Gypsy teenager. Another friend has found an interesting blog written by a Gypsy's wife, and I found one written by author Miriam Wakerly, whose books Gypsies Stop tHere and No Gypsies Served  I've already talked about.

I wanted to say that it felt like finding my karass but I know some of my dream team would definitely hate the idea that they are there to fulfill God's will.  BUT, ever since Kurt Vonnegut wrote about the idea in Cat's Cradle  I've been impressed by the idea that, somewhere in the world, there is a family more real than flesh and blood to which I somehow really belong.  I wonder if anyone else ever feels like that?

My dream team all hate injustice, despise prejudice, believe in treating people as individuals and never as stereotypes and are against anything that limits our rightful freedom to be ourselves and to express our identity and culture. (Dylan the dog is in it, of course - here he enjoys being himself at Sandbanks,)

If any of my flesh and blood family are reading this, most of you would definitely qualify to be in my dream team, not because of any accident of birth, but because of who you are.  OK?

Real people with real lives

Last week the grass verge at a local road junction sprouted a wonderful crop of interesting wooden mushrooms.  They were the work of two sculptors who share a travelling life, each towing his own caravan, but stopping and displaying their wares together. Jim and Dave (not their real names) have been to the area before, but I hadn't stopped to speak to them, because I wasn't sure of my welcome.

"They're really nice boys," said Adrian, our Chaplain for Gypsies and Travellers, so I took my courage in both hands and bumped up the kerb onto the grass.

Jim was obviously busy in the gazebo that stood behind his caravan, outlining the shape of a new sculpture with a chainsaw, but stopped when he noticed me, and listened politely as I introduced myself. I explained that I wanted to represent the reality of Travellers' lives, and was happy to tell their stories, and this short story immediately came to his mind:

'We were in Sussex. It was about half past eight in the evening, and I'd been working hard all day.  I was still carrying on to finish off a piece of work, when somebody drove by, opened a car window and called out, "Get a job, you bum!"  I wonder what he thought I was doing?  I've got a job. Couldn't he see that?'

Possibly not, Jim.  It's hard to shift people from their preconceived ideas.

The sculptures seemed to be all about wildlife, with birds of prey figuring prominently. I was particularly drawn to a barn owl and an otter, and glad I'd stopped.

Dismantling prejudice

My favourite character in the Diskworld (after Granny Weatherwax, of course!) is Captain Sam Vimes of the Night Watch.  We first meet him in "Guards! Guards!"staggering slowly down the street in the grey light of a drizzly dawn and collapsing drunkenly into the gutter outside the Watch House.  Terry Pratchett uses this scandalous, lovable, irrational,courageous, stubborn,loyal, bigoted, idealistic character as a lever to open up the hard shell of our prejudices and enable us, alternately, to laugh at them or to recognise them as reprehensible. Even while we are disapproving of him, we cannot help acknowledging how like us he is.

For a start, his prejudices are much like ours.  You don't refer to dwarfs and trolls as "gritsuckers" and "rocks" because they are "fellow sapient races who have chosen to throw in their lots with the people of the city". In truth, as his men note, he doesn't like anyone much, which enables them to see his negative comments as a consistent characteristic of the man, rather than as any evidence  of bias. But vampires are a different matter, and so are aristocrats like Lord Rust.

In "Jingo" Pratchett makes one of his most sustained attacks on xenophobia, while being enormously entertaining and inventively funny. Vimes sets off to war, not in order to join in, but to arrest the combatants for breach of the peace.

"Snuff", written fourteen years later, is a much darker novel. The cynical Lord Vetinari, Vimes' boss and despotic ruler of Ankh Morpork, is found, uncharacteristically "awash with tears" as he contemplates the goblin race. "Vermin, Drumknott," he reflects aloud to his secretary, "an entire race reduced to vermin!"  Vimes being Vimes, he finds himself fighting for the lives of the goblin race simply because people like Lord Rust feel able to treat them as expendable vermin.  And Pratchett being Pratchett, he too is driven to show us why we should give our sympathies in this story to this apparently unlovely and unlovable race.

Within the story of "Snuff" itself, Vimes' most effective ally is his aristocratic wife Sybil.  Much as he deplores the aristocracy in general, Vimes cannot help admiring the way Sybil can use her breeding to good effect in support of truth, justice and other good things like a fry-up with black crunchy bits. When he introduces his wife to the wonderful music of goblin harpist Tears of the Mushroom, Lady Sybil doesn't take long to see a way to make acceptance of the goblin race not only possible, but fashionable.

It's hard to say how much the hugely popular Diskworld series has contributed to Britain's acceptance and celebration of itself as a multicultural society.  The controlled experiment of a Britain without any knowledge of the Diskworld doesn't exist.  The nearest analogues we can find, other European countries, or other anglophone countries, are probably not closely matched enough to be good comparators. But whenever I contemplate the relentless racism that faces nomadic peoples in this country, I am grateful that I can find the example of a consummate artist like Terry Pratchett who has consistently drawn attention to the facile stupidity of racism, and its sinister outcomes.

Never Again!

It's always a happy day when I see that a new Ben Elton book has come out.  The latest, "Two Brothers" was no exception. In a year when the Borders Agency has stopped people in the street and at train stations because they looked as if they might be illegal immigrants, the Home Office has toured its own special hate campaign around on huge posters and the police have abused the powers given them by search warrants to harass, rob and humiliate an elderly Romani activist and his wife and others, it told such an instructive story.

We find ourselves in 1920s Berlin, and as the story unfolds, we see how the gathering horror that was Nazi Germany and its holocaust begins to take shape. The hounding and persecution of Jews begins with hate speech, progresses through spiteful and petty indignities and rises to a crescendo of agonisingly brutal bullying. Ben Elton writes with such immediacy and detail that the reader cannot doubt that he has meticulously researched his story.

By the end of the novel, we don't need to be told that many children like the two brothers of the title did not survive the Nazi era. The holocaust hangs over the scene all too tangibly.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Two-Brothers-Ben-Elton/dp/0552775312/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1380231967&sr=1-1&keywords=ben+elton+two+brothers

I put this book down more determined than ever to say, at every opportunity, "This must not happen here!" But I also felt a dreadful sense of foreboding, because it seemed to me that we are already in the beginning stages of a process that is heading in the same direction.  I wonder how many of us will mark Holocaust Memorial Day on 27th January next year, and stand up to say, "Never Again"?

It has always seemed to me that the English believe it couldn't happen here.  I have always known it could. We may point to the successful assimilation of Jews into British life, but dig a little deeper, whether into history or into current affairs, and you will quickly see that murderous prejudice targets other, more vulnerable groups as well. The holocaust engulfed several groups of people who can all too easily become targets for random acts of violence as well as hate campaigns.  People with learning disabilities, for example, were used to test the efficiency of the Zyklon-B gas eventually used in the gas chambers. Homosexuals were also targeted, and so were Roma and Sinti Gypsies, who died in unknown numbers, possibly as many as half a million, in a forgotten and hidden genocide.

I say "hidden," because many of the state-sponsored murders were carried out without leaving written records. Men, women and children were simply rounded up, taken into the forests, made to dig graves, and then shot and buried. But state records do exist for some 200 Roma and Sinti children who were gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau.  The Buchenwald Railway project exists to preserve and honour their memory. http://www.dw.de/buchenwald-memorial-gives-names-to-sinti-and-roma-victims/a-16965403.  The German web site, "gedenksteine buchenwaldbahn" lets you enter any of the names you see on the memorial stones, and to find a brief biography of the child named. Most horribly, this story consists of bare details gleaned from official Nazi records, which have no humanity about them at all.  If you don't read German, you can just click on a tab to get an English translation. http://gedenksteine-buchenwaldbahn.de/630/

"Why do we want to remember these horrible things?" says a colleague of mine, who resists any remembrance of the holocaust. It's because we need to remind ourselves to say, "Never again!" loud and clear in our own time and our own country - before it's too late.

Who do you believe you are?

Miriam Wakerly's "No Gypsies Served" begins with a chillingly real situation following on from the campaign for a Gypsy site that we read about in "Gypsies Stop tHere". The heroine receives a threatening anonymous letter that seems to be linked to her advocacy for the Gypsies.  This has actually happened to someone I know and have worked with,  so I was instantly hooked on the story!
http://www.amazon.co.uk/No-Gypsies-Served-Miriam-Wakerly/dp/0955843219/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1379370380&sr=1-1&keywords=No+Gypsies+Served

The other totally believable storyline is about the importance that Romany Gypsies attach to their identity as Romanies.  If you saw Countryfile yesterday, you will have seen this illustrated in real life.  A Romany living a "settled" life was interviewed as he walked with his horse in front of a traditional wagon or "vardo", which he takes out on the droves every summer, to allow his children to see the traditional Gypsy way of life.  His children were in the vardo, obviously enjoying every minute of their lovely nostalgic trip, and when he asked his little girl "What are you, Gypsy or Gorgie?" her reply was immediate: "Gypsy!"
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03bjlb4/Countryfile_Dorset/

In "No Gypsies Served"  the hero, Dunstan, is trying to come to terms with the feeling that he has betrayed his family by staying away from them, and living a settled life, even if it is in a mobile home.  As he delves into his memories of his early life, we are aware of how strong the bonds are that bind the Romany community together, and how important that identity is to every Gypsy.  This understanding leaves us deeply concerned for the heroine, who has unwittingly caused great offence by implying that Dunstan is no longer a Gypsy. I always say that you will never find a truer friend that a Romany Gypsy who has come to trust you.  But equally, you will find it very hard to regain trust if you have caused offence!

Like the father interviewed in Countryfile, Miriam Wakerly is keenly aware of the pain of a whole community whose valued way of life has almost completely disappeared, and paints a vivid picture of its joys and hardships. As Dunstan attends the funeral of his old friend Copper, the chilling facts of the injustices that persist for the Gypsy community haunt the story. Roma, Gypsy and Traveller communities experience the worst health outcomes of all communities in the UK, and have a life expectancy 10 years lower than the average. And the "No Gypsies served" scenario still happens in our country to this day.

As Copper's funeral was described, I had a vivid memory of standing outside my local parish church and watching white-faced, black-clad groups of grieving Gypsies arriving for a funeral, and feeling overwhelmed by the depth of the loss they felt.

So although this is a work of fiction, the research and the genuine empathy which went into its writing make it a really moving experience.  Like Gypsies Stop tHere, it deserves the widest possible audience.