Or maybe you’re one of those people who generally believes that violence is valid if it’s the police doing it and despicable if it’s anyone else.

Here’s a thought for you: the resulting police injuries, according to a spokeperson, were “a few minor cuts and bruises”. On the side of the Travellers and activists, however, several people were HOSPITALISED, including one with a spinal injury, and including several who were beaten up and/or pressure pointed while non-violently locked on to stuff.

What does that tell you about the “police action”?

See the problem?

The residents of Dale farm deliberately broke the law 10 years ago, and have spent 10 years using every trick in the legal book to make their illegal activity legal. For once the local authority had a back bone and stuck with it.

Yes, there is an element of NIMBY here, but justifiably so when you have lived near them, as I have. Would you like your farm equipment stolen, and then sold back to you complete with a threat of “If we have any comeback on this we know where you live and we’ll burn your f*****g house down with you and your family inside”?

You could call that change of mind “correcting” the issue.

I don’t. I see it as double-standards to make a U-turn like that for the sake of one guy occupying a whole patch of actually-green greenbelt by himself, while refusing to allow a whole community living on a similar size piece of actually-concrete technically-greenbelt to stay.

The point is, Travellers have a VERY different experience of the planning system to non-Travellers, one that I would argue amounts to systemic discrimination.

Why should Travellers abandon their community, their way of life, taking their families into situations of homelessness or waiting lists for council housing (an alien environment culturally), just to abide by a planning system that is being used by bigotted local Councillors to try and crush them?

If you had to choose:
1. Make you and your family homeless.
2. Abandon your culture and isolate yourself from your community by going into council housing.
3. Break planning law.
…what would you do?

Please reflect on this, and even better chat (and listen!) to some actual Travellers, before replying with more hateful nonsense. Cheers…

Nonsense. For example, corporations and other powerful interests get away with building illegally and then obtaining retrospective planning permission all the time. I’ve even listed specific cases of double standards in Basildon itself above.

“We’re not idiots, we’re just the law-abiding majority.”

You’re idiots if you think it’s possible to stop “corporate greed” while remaining law-abiding.

That’s probably a bit too harsh. Not idiots so much as people who’ve had sheltered/privileged and/or obedient lives so far. Still, everyone has to start somewhere.. in the meantime I guess the rest of us will have to try and be patient with you “law-abiding” folks and your nonsense.

Laws are made by the powerful to defend the interests of the powerful. Where they overlap with basic human decency and morals (eg not killing/raping people) they obviously make sense, but other than that there is nothing to be proud of in being “law-abiding”. It just means you’ve foolishly played by the arbitrary rules your enemy set up for you.

If you feel bad about the unfairness of the world then that’s great. I feel bad about it too. But the world isn’t fair. Life’s not fair. Other people are not fair. What you and most of the ‘anti-capitalist’ crew seem to want is to introduce (through sit-ins? Through violent revolution? Through the interweb?) a New World Order in which ‘fairness’ is imposed. I’m not sure how aware you are of history but this has already been tried – many, many times. Each time the result has been the same: dictatorship, tyranny, bloodshed. Look at Stalin, look at Mao; the combined death toll of their regimes dwarfs that of Hitler’s (and whereas Hitler was actively engaged in a genocide. Stalin and Mao’s murders were the result of an attempt to impose a new economic system).

No, you’re insane.

I’m not talking about job creation, i’m talking about TAX EVASION!… Even jobs creation is a debatable one!
I guess the government is talking about closing down tax havens for no reason! Capitalism is a joke mate! If people have money they buy a clever accountant to pay as little tax as they can! This my friend is a fact!