Travellers and the Law

Just caught the lead story in the Reading Chronicle yesterday about the successful eviction of travellers from all Reading public land. The article was really shocking (to me at least) in its one-eyed fascism. I can vaguely understand success at the extermination of rats from one's house, but the same mentality is being adopted by the council and the paper is supporting it. It was not so long ago when articles likes this reported the exclusion of Jews from society and the people supported that also!

Sadly this is the true nature of most Homo sapiens. We are primarily an ectosocial species. People who do not "fit" are excluded, incarcerated - or more humanely executed.

Two things to deduce from this.

Firstly it means that the primary reason for conforming is not because society is correct, but because of the cost of being excluded. Exclusion of that which does not fit means that in reality we live in a society that is born of fear and is extremely fragile and open to disintegration. This is a far cry from the myth that we have of our society being free and progressive. In the West - at least - we still live in medaeval times!

Secondly their must be the belief that those who have "bought" land are the ones who truly "belong" there. Thus we open the door to anyone buying a house in Reading and immediately having the same status as those whose families have lived in Reading for centuries. It also means that people whose family has lived in Reading for centuries who have family and friends here, whose memories are furnished with the sights, sounds and landmarks of Reading - whose grandparents recall stories of Reading - the moment they do not "possess" territory here immediately cease to belong here!

So the Travellers only need to purchase some land to 100% belong to Reading, that is all the council are interested in. While the people of Reading who are reported to have complained about the travellers are probably just being Xenophobic. Yet the people of Reading don't see that they only officially "belong" here simply because they "possess" a territory. They can experience compulsory purchase from the same authority any time and suddenly over night no longer belong to Reading. They will say that they have been brought up here and so are true Readingers, but council paperwork isn't designed to understand or protect humanity. It follows equally then that maybe a traveller has family and friends in Reading so why do they not belong here?

Its a very mixed up and ill thought out situation.

I argued this briefly with the grandmother of a tutee. She said the problem was travellers causing a disturbance and a mess. This is a problem if anyone does it, and something for which each person traveller or otherwise gets fined and punished. She then said that the problem was that the travellers were beyond the law since the law required an address.

So the real problem is that councils can't bill people or hold them accountable if they do not have an address. That is why travellers are so hated by the establishment it seems.

Given that the establishment has a particular ideological issue with travellers we can assume that much of the bad press is actually propaganda - exactly as the Nazis created propaganda against the Jews (famously a nomadic people also). The parallels are not just rhetoric of my own but frighteningly close.

The solution seems to require a deep piece of rethinking of Anglo-Saxon law, and this was done and stupidly rejected by the travellers themselves.

The Poll Tax does seem to be a fair and reasonable system. Why shouldn't each person be accountable and contribute to the council in which they live? This combined with an identity card system means that each person can be accountable as themselves. We vote as individuals, we shop as individuals, we are obsessed with living as individuals. Why then do Anglo-Saxon individuals reel so much from being held up as individuals?

Much of the conspiracy theory material that exists - the stuff that is afraid of the New World Order - is clearly counter-rhetoric against the idea of society. We in the individually obsessed West interpret Society as simply another set of individuals seeking to limit our own individuality. What such thinking lacks is an understanding of human beings as first and foremost an inter-connected, inter-dependent Society.

So if anglo-saxon law treated individuals as such then we would gain freedom from "property" and the physical objects that surround us. The "the people" could have what they want which is true belonging. A man from Reading can be easily known - he speaks like the people of Reading; he has long memories of Reading; he has family and friends in Reading; he has a deep affection for Reading (in that he has been affected by Reading), altho maybe expressed through a hatred if his experience is bad; he feels at home when he comes back to Reading. A man from Reading may live in a caravan, a street corner, a semi-detached; a palace - these adornments however do not make him either from Reading nor a Man.

A small change this may seem but it drives to the root of the ironic lack of freedom that we experience in our society.

One tutee I teach expressed the illness of our society. Everything that happens leads to eBay or the shops in search of new things. The clothes he wears, the haircut, the toys; everything around him must be attended to because it is upon these that he judges himself. If his hair is too long he thinks this makes a difference to himself. To me however I can see that hair or no hair: what difference does it make. Altho it makes one big difference: we can tell that the people who care about their hair are either: intelligently attentive to and creative with the social norms; or lost so that they must find themselves in externalia. It is not always clear which people are - but the latter is so dangerous that it is worth messing up the former to ensure we know ourselves. Many monks importantly shave their heads - this is for exactly this reason.

So it seems to me that the UK law must change urgently to save this nation and allow people to be themselves rather than surround themselves with material features of the economy that they are required to hold simply to be allowed to be themselves!

Another point from the article is the council's self imposed responsibility to "protect" public spaces. But protect from who? The public! The travellers are automatically excluded from being members of the public - what are they then? It seems I don't understand the concept of "public". Public is a controlled concept that is designated by the council. As indeed Private is a controlled state designated by the Law. When people call something private they misunderstand that this is only Private because the Law (someone else) says so!

I always thought in all this that the Planet was here long before people and will be here long after we are extinct and all of us are together equally responsible for what happens. Whether we join together in councils are not, and draw up rules and regulations or not - none of these temporary rules distract from the funadmental Law that we live together on this planet and what each of us does effects everyone - councils or no councils.