Yesterday the standard of political debate reached a new low when Labour MP, Kevin McNamara, said that the Tory plans to apply housing and planning laws equally to gypsies had "the whiff of the gas chamber about them". Margaret Beckett, the Environment Secretary, did not go quite so far, but remarked that Mr Howard combined "opportunism and nastiness in equal measure". Unusually, Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, did not exploit the issue to exaggerate racism as he has so often done. Instead, he commented in the Guardian: "This will only be a race issue if people want to make it one ... it really should be about space and housing, not ethnicity." Full credit to Mr Phillips.
On one level this is a simple question about equality before the law. The law applies equally to all or it does not. As Locke taught, the law should be the same for the favourite at court or the countryman at plough. But this is not an isolated case. Increasingly claiming ‘victim status’ has become a useful political ploy for gaining preferential treatment at the expense of other people. Politically designated victim status can provide opportunities for circumventing laws that apply to everyone else and for making private gains at the expense of other people. Victim status has become the equivalent of the ‘favourite at court’ in the seventeenth century.
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Margaret Beckett’s attack on Howard were made on the Labour Party’s website. The same day the Prime Minister made a similar attack. In both cases they showed an alleged lack of respect to gypsies by using the lower case “g” to refer to them despite the pleas of the Gypsy Council and the Commission for Racial Equality’s guidance “Listen to the people you are writing about” to use upper case.
The Gypsy Council states: “The Gypsy people are a recognised ethnic group and when writing about us, please show us the same respect as other ethnic and racial groups by spelling our name with a capital not a small g.”
The CRE states: “The terms Traveller(s), Gypsy or Irish Traveller should be used with initial capital letters.”
After this was pointed out to them not only did they not amend the website entries but another release went out on 24 March in which John Prescott used lower case g and lower case t of gypsies and travellers when damning Michael Howard. Funnily enough you can only find this last release with a cached google search since it has now been taken off the website and overlaid with a completely different release to which the original web site address now directs you.
The issue is an important one. The otherwise perfectly reasonable use of the upper case to refer to gypsies and travellers bolsters the maintenance of racial divisiveness. The continued use by mainstream politicians and journalists of the lower case helps to limit this development in an already polarised society of fragmenting ‘communities’. But for how long will the Labour Party, Civitas or anyone else be allowed to choose without civil or criminal penalty?
Posted by Gerald Hartup | March 26, 2005 1:21 PM
Posted on March 26, 2005 13:21
So why is it so difficult to distinguish between Romany Gypsies (who were persecuted by the Nazis) and Southern Irish travellers?
The latter make up the vast majority of those causing aggravation to the non-travelling population, and yet the bleeding heart human rights lobby persist in confusing the situation.
Posted by John East | March 22, 2005 5:22 PM
Posted on March 22, 2005 17:22
"the whiff of the gas chamber about them": quite a line from the anti-Semitic party, eh?
Posted by dearieme | March 22, 2005 12:08 PM
Posted on March 22, 2005 12:08