Last Night’s Protest In Bristol, Before It Was Broken Up By Riot Police. Photo, @sxranya
“GIVEN THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA IS ALL TOO READY TO MONSTER AND HUMILIATE GRT PEOPLE, THE DETERMINATION TO ERASE THEM FROM PUBLIC DISCOURSE ON THE CRIME BILL IS UNFORGIVABLE.”
Last night, peaceful protesters assembled on College Green in Bristol – despite the violence of Sunday night – in order to protest the Crime Sentencing and Courts Bill. Specifically, the protest was opposing the criminalisation of trespass, which will take away the right to roam and have a devastating impact on nomadic Gypsy Roma and Traveller people.
The bill would give police powers to seize vehicles (in this case people’s homes) and arrest the occupants, resulting in penalties of fines up to £2500 and/or three months in prison. Where both parents are arrested, this could lead to their children being taken into the care system.
The focus of the protest was very clear in photos from the Green, where tents were set up in encampment, signs read “Go Trespassing”, “Right to Roam” and “Travellers Rights R Human Rights”, alongside flowers and tributes to Sarah Everard. According to XR Youth, members of the GRT community were involved in organising the occupation though this is unconfirmed.
The focus of the protest was also clear in the police response. At around 10pm, at least 25 police vans, helicopters, mounted police, and dogs were deployed to the Green, including Welsh police vans. In videos which I will not share here for fear of identifying protesters, scores of riot police can be seen trampling the memorial to Everard, brutalising seated protesters, dragging them by their hair, and intimidating and manhandling journalists.
While this excessive and brutal response is surely related to the riots on Sunday, it must also be viewed in the context of ongoing and historic police brutality and discrimination against GRT people. According to research released by the Traveller Movement in 2018, nearly three quarters of police officers believe that Gypsy and Traveller people are prone to crime because of their ethnicity.
A male police constable reported in the survey that, “Somebody [in the police force] made a comment very quietly… ‘dead Gypsy, good Gypsy’… I complained to the sergeant and he [said]… ‘they are not racist, they are just very frustrated.’” The violence used to break up the encampment recalls the violent evictions by riot police of Romany Gypsies, Irish and Scottish Travellers and New Age Travellers in the past from the Battle of Dale Farm to the Battle of Beanfield and countless others.
In the words of campaign group Labour GRT, “This is the kind of force they use against Gypsies and Travellers.
This is going to get worse when the bill goes through.” In a collaboration between universities in Europe, Australia and Aotearoa (New Zealand), including the Professor of Maori Health at Auckland University of Technology, GRT people “have similar experiences as other Indigenous peoples globally who have been subjected to enforced changes in their lifestyles that have contributed to negative impacts on their health and wellbeing.” If the Crime Sentencing and Courts Bill passes, it will amount to a “cultural genocide”.
Given this context, the disturbing behaviour of the police is rivalled only by the disturbing behaviour of many mainstream journalists. Following events on twitter, I – along with many others – watched in real-time as BBC journalist Andrew Plant posted a video of riot police and stated that the protest was peaceful before police arrived, only to delete the tweet with no explanation.
Even more worryingly – due to the consistent pattern across journalists – he also deleted a tweet accurately describing the protest’s purpose: to oppose the criminalisation of trespass and its impact on nomadic GRT people. Instead, along with Allie Hodgkins-Brown and Sangita Lal of ITV Wales, he reported that the protest was about “rent prices”.
All three journalists have been told numerous times that this was not the object of the protests, but none have responded except Lal, who deleted her tweet and reposted one listing no cause for the protest. In the BBC’s report on the protest, including testimony from the scene by Plant, the words “Gypsy”, “Romany”, “Traveller”, “Roma”, “GRT” and “trespass” do not feature once.
In what is perhaps a worrying sign of the times, I have grown accustomed to seeing mainstream journalists minimise police violence and parrot police statements uncritically. I am also accustomed to seeing BBC journalists retract statements, such as the fact that the protests were peaceful until the police’s arrival, if any bad-faith right-wing interpretation could possibly perceive “bias”.
However, flatly misreporting what the protest was even about feels like a new, and frightening, low. Given the mainstream media is all too ready to monster and humiliate GRT people, the determination to erase them from public discourse on the crime bill is unforgivable.
The writer is an MSc student in Social Research Methods and a campaigner with Undod. The fee for this article was donated to Friends, Families and Travellers upon request.
