Tag Archives: roma

Ruth Bright

Jimmy Carr and the Boribumbalas* in the room

By Ruth Bright | Wed 9th February 2022 - 6:00 pm

A terrorist incident? The possibility is always in the back of your mind on the commute to London. Has something awful happened at Waterloo? A few months before the pandemic my local station is crawling with men in Hi-Vis jackets talking earnestly to people as they go in to catch their trains. Police too. What has happened? They warn of an incursion. Trespassers. All these people are here to protect us from danger. Cool. Shame all these helpful people are never present when you arrive home late at night and there’s a drunk guy who shouts at you outside Domino’s. But never mind they are here now.

And what are they here to protect us from? I look around anxiously but all I can see is about eight camper vans in the car park. Identical clean white camper vans, most with baby or kiddies’ clothes drying on the windscreens. A few deck chairs.

Ah now I see. The scales fall from my eyes. Gypsies, Travellers, Romanies are in town. Romany people have been in Hampshire since Tudor times if not before. As I know from my own father (a Romany speaking bricklayer born in 1920) for centuries the boundary between Gypsy travellers and other Hampshire rural working class people has been a porous one.

But never mind the history; feel the terror and hysteria at their “incursion”.

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged and | 15 Comments
Ruth Bright

Opinion: Clegg’s big fat gypsy blunder

By Ruth Bright | Fri 15th November 2013 - 11:50 am

Once a week I stay with a relative in South London. I am not talking here about Nick Clegg’s South London (a Putney, Wimbledon or Clapham) but about a very different South London – the border between Camberwell and Peckham. The Guardian-reading euphemism would be that Camberwell and Peckham are “vibrant and diverse” places. The upshot of some of that diversity is that at all times of the night people hang around chatting in the street, especially in the summer. In a ground floor flat late at night it sometimes feels a bit intimidating. I have never talked about this …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged and | 67 Comments
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