UK Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act comes into law

Today the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act come into power. Part 4 of this new law was aimed at removing the nomadic right of Gypsies, Roma and Travellers in the UK. There are no transit sites for families to access and avoid trespass. Instead a new law states that 1/3

— Martin Gallagher (@GallagherGRT) June 28, 2022

George Monbiot noted this in the Guardian way back when but apparently next to no coverage today.

The new bill would enable the police to confiscate people’s vehicles (in other words their homes) on the mere suspicion of trespass. When their homes have been seized and their parents arrested, GRT children are likely to be taken into care. The police bill would deprive this minority of everything: homes, livelihoods, identity, culture, even their families.

And, like the homeless people trapped between the Vagrancy Act and the housing qualification, it would put people who are Gypsies, Roma and Travellers in an impossible position. To apply for an official pitch, you must demonstrate “proof of travelling”. But if you don’t have access to official pitches, travelling will put you outside the new law. In other words, it is not a particular behaviour that is being criminalised. It is the minority itself.

The new authoritarianism meshes with a very old one, that harks back to an imagined world in which the peasants could be neatly divided into villeins (good) and vagrants (bad), where everyone knew their place, geographically and socially. Of course, the demonisation of mobile people, whether Roma or asylum seekers, does not extend to the government ministers and newspaper editors who might shift between their pads in London and their second homes in Cornwall or Tuscany. It’s about the rich controlling the poor, as if democracy had never happened.

This from the Sunday World.

Many thanks to the person who sent the links.