OCCUPANTS of an unauthorised travellers' site in Cottenham cannot call themselves gypsies because they no longer travel for a living, a council has claimed.
South Cambridgeshire District Council's enforcement officer John Koch gave evidence yesterday (Friday, 15 July) at the public inquiry into 22 illegal pitches on Victoria View in Smithy Fen.
He said the occupants of the plots - who had given up travelling for health reasons or to bring up children - were no longer officially considered to be gypsies under planning law.
The council's legal team says this should weigh against them being given planning permission.
One of the travellers, 69-year-old Patrick McCarthy, previously told the inquiry he had given up travelling because he had had several heart bypass operations and his wife had a heart murmur and arthritis. More...
EDITORIAL COMMENT:
This is exactly as predicted by some of us as regards to the playing around with the word "Gypsy" and by "doctoring" ethnicity to mean "lifestyle" rather than race and I have been expecting this to happen sooner or later in that the authorities, no longer wanting to grant our People the protection of an ethnic minority/group would "reclassify" the meaning of "Gypsy" and thereby making all settled Romani-Gypsies no longer "Gypsy" under the law and therefore washing their hands of any need to make provisions for us and also removing any and all legal protection as regards to attacks on racial grounds, etc.
It has not taken long since the day that measures were being put in place to "doctor" the term to the day the first actions have arrived, as we can now see with this planning ruling for Smithy Fen.
From the names I do assume that, theoretically and in all truth, the people concerned on that illegal encampment are Irish Travellers, seeing the name McCarthy, however, it is the changing of the term "Gypsy" that should and must concern the Romani very much in this.
South Cambridgeshire District Council's enforcement officer John Koch gave evidence yesterday (Friday, 15 July) at the public inquiry into 22 illegal pitches on Victoria View in Smithy Fen.
He said the occupants of the plots - who had given up travelling for health reasons or to bring up children - were no longer officially considered to be gypsies under planning law.
The council's legal team says this should weigh against them being given planning permission.
One of the travellers, 69-year-old Patrick McCarthy, previously told the inquiry he had given up travelling because he had had several heart bypass operations and his wife had a heart murmur and arthritis. More...
EDITORIAL COMMENT:
This is exactly as predicted by some of us as regards to the playing around with the word "Gypsy" and by "doctoring" ethnicity to mean "lifestyle" rather than race and I have been expecting this to happen sooner or later in that the authorities, no longer wanting to grant our People the protection of an ethnic minority/group would "reclassify" the meaning of "Gypsy" and thereby making all settled Romani-Gypsies no longer "Gypsy" under the law and therefore washing their hands of any need to make provisions for us and also removing any and all legal protection as regards to attacks on racial grounds, etc.
It has not taken long since the day that measures were being put in place to "doctor" the term to the day the first actions have arrived, as we can now see with this planning ruling for Smithy Fen.
From the names I do assume that, theoretically and in all truth, the people concerned on that illegal encampment are Irish Travellers, seeing the name McCarthy, however, it is the changing of the term "Gypsy" that should and must concern the Romani very much in this.
