England’s Welfare Nomads
9th September 2011
Everyone who’s dealt with “Gypsies” or the dozen or so different tribes affiliated with the word know they’re about as romantic as abortion. I first learned my utopian vision of them was bullshit back in 1993 when I spent some time in Palermo and saw toddlers stationed on highway medians covered in soot and begging for change. All over Italy, I saw dirt-encrusted pickpockets under the age of ten, and few of them had shoes. The only time I’ve ever seen adult male Gypsies anywhere in Europe has been in bars partying their asses off. One Essex cop told me they shut down all pubs in a ten-mile radius of a Gypsy wedding because there is inevitably complete chaos if they don’t. The men drink all the booze, vandalize the pub, and leave without paying a cent.
The Gypsies in Dale Farm are affectionately referred to as Irish Travellers because although they have essentially the same culture as the Roma, they are white and talk very differently (see Brad Pitt in Snatch). Nobody’s sure why the Irish nomads are so similar to their Romanian counterparts because it’s been this way for hundreds of years. One theory is the redheads met the brunettes at an annual horse fair in the northwest of England called Appleby which began shortly after Oliver Cromwell’s war against the Irish left so many of them wandering aimlessly throughout the countryside in the 1600s. I personally couldn’t give a shit exactly where one Gypsy culture strays from the other. They all suck and for the exact same reasons. The men are king and do nothing but sit on their asses all day. The women are barely considered human beings. The children rank way below that.
Outside of the children, the primary breadwinners in these communities tend to be the women, but when they are arrested for their various petty crimes, the kids are left with no guardian. Men see looking after kids as beneath them, so the police wind up sending the poor bastards to foster care. It’s not unusual for Gypsy women to use foster care itself as a hustle. They play victim, but their entire income is based on scamming innocent victims.
The ones in Dale Farm who will be facing the police on the 19th (along with an army of volunteer soldiers) embody many things the left purports to hate. The examples of environmental destruction, misogyny, homophobia, and child abuse rival extremist Islam. A great behind-the-scenes book about it is Gypsy Boy by Mikey Walsh. It’s the true story of a Romanian Gypsy who grew up getting the shit kicked out of him every day by his bare-knuckled boxing coach/dad and then getting raped every night by his uncle. When Walsh realized he was gay he was forced to leave the group because Gypsies tend to agree with Ahmadinejad when it comes to homosexuality in their community—it does not exist.