The arrival of a group
of marginalised people is challenging not because of who they are, but because
they are poor
Sensitivity is a great thing, but mythology is
dangerous. One wonders how the Roma should indicate their inculcation into
British values. By encouraging their teens to get hammered on a Friday and
Saturday night and start brawling? Or by stigmatising the next group of
immigrants who come after them? For that too is the way "life is
lived in this country".
Meanwhile, another
Sheffield MP, Labour's David
Blunkett, warned of "explosions" on a par with the
northern riots over a decade ago if the Roma didn't integrate. Ukip's Nigel
Farage praised Blunkett for his "courage".
There is nothing
courageous about slandering a group of impoverished, marginalised people.
They're too poor to sue and too isolated to effectively resist. There can be no
comeback because they have no power, so where's the courage? But there is
everything racist about denigrating
a group of people as though their shared ethnicity means shared values
and implying collective responsibility for the actions of individuals in their
community.
Nor does there seem to
be much basis for this moral panic. The Guardian recently reported that South
Yorkshire police say crime has not increased significantly since the Roma moved
to town a few years ago. After a
chip-shop owner swore two teenagers tried to sell him a baby, the
police scoured CCTV footage and records of babies born in the area and found
nothing. A police spokesman said it "could have been a joke in poor
taste". That didn't stop it making the front page of
the Express. What's left, according to Blunkett, is littering and
hanging out in large numbers. But there are laws against littering and
obstruction. They shouldn't be applied specifically to the Roma – but nor
should the Roma be specifically spared.
To be against demonisation is not to be in
denial. The arrival of a large number of poor people does demand resources to
facilitate their integration. Those challenges are most likely to fall on
working-class communities that are least equipped to meet then, their capacity
further diminished by the swingeing cuts of Clegg's government, including – as
Blunkett pointed out – the Migration Impact Fund. But the challenges are
because the Roma are overwhelmingly poor, not because they're Roma.
The truth is the Roma
have far more to fear from non-Roma than vice-versa. Gassed
by the Nazis, forcibly
sterilised by the Swedes, recently expelled by the French, they have
long been persecuted. In the last six weeks, two Roma families in Ireland,
accused of stealing children because they didn't sufficiently look like
them, had
their kids taken away from them by the state only to have them
returned. In Serbia, skinheads tried to snatch
a blond child from in front of his house for the same reason.
This discrimination is not legitimised by the
fact that the villification comes from a multiracial group, as is the case in Sheffield.
Racism is about power not colour. A mob is a mob, whether it's decked in the
union jack or looks like the United Colours of Benetton. The Residents
Association of Page Hall, the area of Sheffield where the Roma are concentrated,
is on patrol, to monitor and correct their behaviour. To his credit, Blunkett
also called on local communities to reach out. If there is anything to fear
it's not that there'll be a riot but a pogrom.
Paradoxically, the
plight of the Roma in eastern Europe was so bad that securing minority rights
for the Roma was a precondition for countries from the region joining the EU.
Polls show that 91% of Czechs had "negative views" towards them while
a survey of Hungarian police officers revealed that 54% believed criminality to
be a key element of the Roma identity. In the Czech Republic, 75% of Roma
children were placed in schools for people with learning difficulties; in
Hungary it was 44%. The
mayor of Mendez, a small town in Slovakia, said: "I am no
racist … but some Gypsies you would have to shoot."
To counterbalance
integration against the threat of riots is basically the
Tebbit test without the sport. "Where you have a clash of
history, a clash of race then it's all too easy for there to be an actual clash
of violence," said the former Tory party chairman. With
all due respect, that is racist. [Abridged]
Twitter: @garyyounge
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/17/slandering-roma-isnt-courageous-but-racist
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