A local outdoor arts event. As I brush past a family group sitting on the grass, I briefly meet the gaze of a man in his 30s and he speaks to me:

“Traveller?”

“What’s it to you?”

“Didn’t mean anything by it, just wondering”

“Half”

“Bishops Waltham?”

“No Bradley way, near Basingstoke – they were settled, way back, through my Dad”.

This does not happen often. I can actually date the last time this happened, July 1995, at Goodwood races with my late Dad.

Everyone understands what it means when someone is picked out for visible difference. It is common sense that some minorities are more visible than others. The hierarchy of pain is not the most helpful of devices but since so many (particularly in the Labour Pary) invoke it, let’s go there. The sickening racist abuse experienced by those from a visible minority is scandalous. An abomination. “Traditional” racism might be rife, but it is not, however, respectable; mainstream society does not buy into it. The use of the “n” word is rightly a major, career ending transgression.

Abuse against Romany, Roma, Gypsies and travellers (RGT is an imperfect acronym but it will suffice) is completely mainstream and accepted widely. The words “pikey” and “chav” are everywhere. If nomadic people alight almost anywhere at any time in the Home Counties (where incidentally they have lived since Tudor times) it is immediately a matter for the Police and local government to deal with. Nomadic people are criticized just for existing.

A very recent “unauthorized encampment” in Hampshire produced absurd comments in our local newspaper. Comments incidentally, which were not taken down. First of all, it is offered that all “likeys” are on benefits or sponge because they pay no council tax. But simultaneously the same commenters say they RGT people cannot be trusted so should not be given work if they call door to door asking to earn their keep by doing gardening or odd jobs!

Secondly, (perhaps ignorant of, or inspired by, the fact that there has already been a systematic, mechanized gypsy genocide in living memory) there are continual and openly expressed views that RGT should be wiped off the face of the earth. Hanged or killed by drones are favourites. Yes, of course, these sorts of comments on social media are often extreme. But prosecutions, even imprisonment has followed for similar incitement against other groups. These people happily use their names and the comments are left up. I have followed these sorts of comments closely in recent years and they are becoming more and more brazen with no sign of sanction.

To own any English Romany, Roma, Gypsy, traveller or Irish traveller heritage is to be in a strange cultural cleft stick. Stuck between the kitsch romanticization and appropriation of fortune tellers and “Peaky Blinders” and the shame, stigma and fear of accusations of criminality, dirtiness and cruelty to animals. The stigma manifests itself in many ways – suicide rates, are appalling, for example, 1 in 11 Irish travellers end their own lives.

Tolstoy said that all happy families are happy in the same way but all unhappy families are unhappy differently. So, it is with racism – different groups experience racism differently, visibility is a factor but only one of them.

* Ruth Bright has been a councillor in Southwark and Parliamentary Candidate for Hampshire East