Cornwall’s gypsies face eviction

‘Don’t use our real names,’ says the teenage gypsy. ‘Other gypsies will laugh at us.’ Even in a tracksuit, the girl is crazy beautiful, and strangely remote. She is talking to me because her mother, whom I call Susan, has been ordered to remove her caravans from a council site in the West Country. If Susan, mother of five, and carer to two grandchildren, is evicted by Cornwall council, her family will be scattered to the winds. It’s a peculiarly awful fate for gypsies. They are tribal, and family is everything to them. It is the first eviction of a gypsy from a council site in this county.

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The site is silent and dour: rows of caravans, ugly piles of rubbish, though Susan’s part is neater than most. Much of the rubbish is fly-tipped by outsiders, surely a metaphor for the treatment of gypsies in history. There were gypsy hunts in Saxony; forced sterilisation in Sweden; kidnap of gypsy children in Switzerland, even in the 1970s. Like Jews, with whom gypsies share more than is acknowledged, they have a monument at Auschwitz to what they call ‘the Porajmos’ [the devouring]. I have seen with my own eyes at Yad Vashem a Nazi document mandating sterilisation for all gypsies ‘for reasons of national hygiene’.

Modern Britain does not understand or like gypsies. The name ‘gypsy’ itself is a misunderstanding, a corruption of ‘Egyptian’ though they were nomads from India. Multiple governments have restricted their freedoms. In May, the High Court found that the parts of the 2022 Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act were, in regard to gypsies, ‘incompatible’ with the ECHR: under the act, police can imprison people in unauthorised camps and seize their property.