The criminalisation of Gypsies and Travellers - book review

From the Institute Of Race Relations

There is much to commend in No Place to Call Home, a potted history of Gypsies, Roma and Travellers in the UK and Ireland, but its reliance on police sources is worrying.

There is much to praise in Katharine Quarmby’s No Place to Call Home. She capably describes the structured state and institutional racism that Gypsies and Travellers encounter, and relates their history to the waves of government legislation that abandoned the needs of its poorest communities for those of the market. In the 1800s nomadism faced encroachment from Enclosure, which privatised much of the land traditionally used in Gypsy and Traveller economies. A heightened culture of suspicion grew around those who refused to give up their old way of life until, in 1960, the government introduced the Caravan Sites and Control of Development Act, deciding once and for all to sweep Gypsies and Travellers off the roads and into houses. This rendered it illegal for them to use the majority of their traditional stopping places, making a virtual impossibility of Travelling. This was essentially forced assimilation.

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