The Irksome Travellers

August 3, 1992

Having returned from England a few days ago, it can be expected that some “Musings” will report experiences in that “green and pleasant land.”

Looking at the “telly” in resting times, I was fascinated by several BBC sequences on the “Travellers” (not the insurance company).

The “Travellers” are a group of wanderers moving about in decrepit buses, trucks, trailers (“caravans” in the U.K.). Without anyone’s permission they move in and occupy private property – farmland, sheep meadows, pasturage. These squatters aren’t very clean; they litter the land; conditions become unsanitary, to put it mildly; ragged children romp about; crops are damaged; sometimes sheep are maimed by the Travellers’ dogs.

Naturally, the farmers and land owners are furious about this invasion of their property and the flaunting of their rights. But the Travellers refuse to leave. In the events televised, squadrons of Welsh police pressured them to move away. But the squatters blatantly refused.

In an interview, one scruffy-looking man who appeared to be in his late twenties or early thirties, said aggressively, “I say what I think; I don’t care what anyone else thinks; I do what I like; I live where I want to live; I don't like to work, so I don't work.”

The police, at least on the telly were polite but insistent that the Travellers leave the private land. Of course, the police had no answer to the question, “Where would the Travellers go?” The police wanted them out of their jurisdiction and didn’t concern themselves overmuch about what other venue inherited the problem.

However, the Travellers insisted stubbornly that they couldn’t move because they had no money for petrol for their motley array of vehicles (we would call them “clunkers”). They did agree to leave when they received their Dole checks (welfare). By special government arrangement, the Dole checks were expedited. The Travellers were placed at the head of the queue, usurping the places of the long line of others waiting for THEIR Dole checks. Understandably, the others were enraged that the Travellers displaced them. A policeman’s lot is not a happy one.

The next episode televised the seedy procession leaving that farm. The problems would be transferred to someone else. One report indicated that the Dole for a a mother and child was eighty pounds every two weeks. That would not go far because the British economy, like ours, is in bad shape. Prices are steep. I don’t know what the unmarried partners of mothers and children would receive. But with petrol costing about the American equivalent of $4.00 per gallon, how much would be left when the Travellers found someone else’s land to invade and occupy?

If you were a British M.P. or other official, what would you do? Here in the U.S., we have thousands of homeless who exist on the streets, in condemned buildings, under bridges, in alleys and so on. Thus we have no warrant to feel any civic superiority.

If you suggest that public housing be provided, the waiting list is already formidably extensive. Neither the U.S. nor the U.K. have the funds or the national will to address this vast housing deficiency. You say, “Put ’em in jail.” But jails are already overcrowded, underfunded, and very costly. If you suggest that acreage be assigned and shoo onto it the clunking procession of Travellers, where would it be? “Not in my neighborhood” would be a loud chorus wherever a location would be selected. Furthermore, the more anarchistic of the Travellers might very well refuse to accept.

Both our nations esteem property rights. Historians have noted that in the American Colonist’s Declaration of Independence, there was discussion that instead of “Men (sic) being endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” that the unalienable rights should be “life, liberty and property.” The latter phrase did not prevail, of course, but the right to hold property is an untouchable in our nation except for seizure for unpaid taxes and for reasons of eminent domain. Mortgages are property liens, not simply loans.

In the U.K., likewise, property is a right, perhaps not sacred, but close to it. The Travellers have no right to camp unpermitted on anyone’s private property. The homeless in our nation have no right to park on anyone’s acreage or back yard. Nowhere is there land to be acquired by “homestaking” or “homesteading” as there was in our nation’s beginnings.

Is a solution possible to this painful problem? The immediate pressing problems of thousands of persons fleeing death, destruction and persecution in what was Yugoslavia make the Travellers issue appear as a rather mild, localized annoyance. But similar principles and national budget dilemmas apply on a gargantuan international scale.

I have no workable answer and I do not know of anyone who has. So I assume that the policy will be, as it has been, to lurch from one stopgap expedient to another, all the while wistfully wishing that no fierce, widespread rebellion will occur; and that the bad news will somehow fade away. But I fear that the problems will increase incrementally.