Metta,

We both know the history of these awful clothes, that is not disputed.

I am NOT disputing any of this.

you wrote:

“Dress is not just protection from the elements but a set of signs and symbols that can be read for implicit or explicit statements.”

Yes it is and no it isn’t. Depends. I fear that this topic is getting caught up in something of a moral panic, and the rational issues concerning legislating dress codes are ignored.

There is a terrible tendency, as you will see above (with Field, Morgoth’s, etc comments), that this issue is being caught within the clutches of Daily Mail hysteria.

I think we need to step back and think of the wider implications, legislating dress codes, even non-legal but coercive dress codes is not the way to go and anyone of an older generation will remember the rebellions of the 1950s and 1960s concerning clothes.

Metta, I don’t disagree with what you say, but the legislative method is clumsy and brutal.

————

There is already a law on the statute books that covers the wearing of certain types of dress – the Public Order Act 1938 – banning the wearing of ‘political uniforms’ in public. But I don’t hear you protesting about that.

Willing to accommodate fascism as long as it emanates from brown-skinned people?

I don’t think I said *you* made any connection between Roma and disease. I know I wrote that this connection was made (along with the one about criminality) in the same way as was made of the Jewish immigrant poor of central and Eastern Europe by some of the more violent anti-Semites over a century ago.

I find it disturbing that you associate criminality with an entire ethnicity, nonetheless.

I don’t think I made any claim about Roma being associated with disease but obviously there are issues over health care, vaccinations etc with any travelling community.

But I think the association between criminal/begging activity and Roma communities is I am afraid too strong to ignore. Are you saying it is simply impossible for an identifiable social group within a community to display a higher level of criminality than another? That would be a very odd claim.

We know children in one parent families have higher levels of criminality.

So do young people who are not in education or employment.

Why is it that a particular ethnic group with a particular culture and lifestyle could not produce higher levels of criminality or begging than seen in the wider community?

Yet the prejudice is not simply a White person’s burden. Pakistani are sometimes immensely hostile to Roma – a prejudice that is somewhat mollified when Panjabi shopkeeps discover that Romani speakers can make out about 2/3rds of what these Panjabi speakers are saying.

There are affluent Roma, honest Roma, Roma who have entirely abandoned the Roma culture (married out into gorja families) – there are also dirt-poor Roma and those so marginalised (sometimes as a result of extreme discrimination in the countries of Eastern and Central Europe) that they have taken to begging or crime.

There are also a whole plethora of more-or-less nomadic other peoples in Europe – it is sometimes the case that these Travelers are confused with Roma. Unlike the Roma, these tend to be the product of wide-scale economic and social change squeezing out marginal groups into nomadic, or semi-nomadic lifestyles.

The de-classed, lumpen attitudes and lifestyle (begging, petty crime) of some of the Roma immigrants in the UK from Eastern and Central Europe do not reflect the traditions of Roma self-sufficiency. Rather, they reflect the parlous and often highly oppressive and prejudicial conditions of existence that the Roma communities of places such as Romania and elsewhere have faced for generations – conditions that have significantly worsened since the early 1990s.

This is not to excuse, but to explain.

Oh dear, watch out – here comes Modernity with his “racist” red pencil to censor you.

You mustn’t speak non-PC truths.

“….. You also won’t go far, especially in Belfast, to find a street or location that does not have Roma women begging passersby for money. This tradition of theirs, and it is a tradition, has not made the Roma’s overly popular with the locals.

“They are prolific in their activity; they stand beside you at ATM’s, approach you in carparks, outside shops, restaurants, nightclubs – one hand held out to you and the other clutching a mobile phone.

“To be perfectly straight the people here do not like it or accept it. To see these women standing outside nightclubs in the small hours with very young children begging or trying to sell you a wilted flower is quite an affront to a society not accustomed to street begging.

“The people of Northern Ireland lived through great austerity during and after the war, through the sixties and seventies – they knew very hard times and if you could not buy food you grew it…and you only ate what you could grow.

“I am told however that to go out begging, no matter how needy you were, was simply unthinkable. The people in those times were too proud to do so – and now to be constantly approached by these newcomers who boldy ask for money at every turn…?

“This nation is still evolving and for a country that had little to no immigration for so long – until recently – it is a very tolerant society. While nobody condones those attacks on those people it would help the Roma’s case alot more if they understood that what they do on the streets of Belfast is not an example of ‘good integration’.

“If the Govt is going to allow unchecked immigration here surely it is good policy to ensure that these people are given a better understanding of the local culture – and that they are more than welcomed to share the best of theirs.

I would be interested to know if this was actually the case or have I just developed a case of Daily Mail-itis?

Yep. Of course I do. That’s where my intervention began because someone was ignorantly claiming there couldn’t be racial prejudice because these Romanians would be “white European”. My involvement in the debate began with me pointing out they were Roma – people who originally were a people from the Indian sub-continent and fairly dark skinned.