Dale Farm evictions – live updates

• Eviction of 100s of Travellers expected this morning • Talks between community and council could restart • Battle lines drawn as supporters arrive from around the country to stop bailiffs 11.48am: The Guardian’s assistant editor, Michael White has written here about the “two sides” of this very long running story: The trouble is that there’s usually two sides to any story, including this one. I worry when the version I hear on the BBC or sometimes read in the Guardian or Observer is so much at odds with the account I read in the Daily Mail and elsewhere. In the latter version, the protracted battle (it’s lasted 10 years) reflects the willingness of Traveller communities to defy the law, extend their camps illegally, fill local schools with unruly/itinerant kids and engage in antisocial, even criminal, activity. On angry days – today is not one of them – the Mail version prints photos of houses owned by Dale Farm residents elsewhere in England or – last week’s tale – in towns and villages in Ireland to which travelling folk return for an extended family knees-up at Christmas. In Fergal Keane’s version his travelling fellow-countrymen are finally asserting their human rights in England, in the Mail’s they’re abusing other people’s. 11.31am: Just in from Alexandra Topping : Basildon council are understood to be in 11th hour talks with Travellers. A council spokesman said fresh talks, which he said broke down over the weekend, were “likely”. “We are happy to have a meeting to agree how to carry out this operation in a safe and peaceful manner, but talks about the legality of the eviction or to try and delay the operation are not on the table,” he said. 11.27am: PA is reporting that supplies such as crisps, bread, tinned fruit, biscuits, peanuts, dried apricots, orange juice and toilet roll are being passed through the main gate by supporters. 11.18am: Just confirmed with Essex police that the operation at Dale Farm today is codenamed “cabinet”. 11.15am: Picture here from earlier this morning showing protesters on a barricade. 10.52am: My colleague Hannah Waldram has been chatting to commenters below the line about the details behind why the travellers are being evicted. Many posters are keen to debate the details of planning permission in this case: Dunnyboy writes : @SamStone, Actually the land is theirs, and they did pay for it. The problem is that there was no planning permission for the land. There are plenty of building plots for sale in Essex with planning permission if you look online. It’s a wonder that the travellers didn’t think to build their community on one such plot. A cynic might think that they decided to buy a plot without planning permission because it’s an order of magnitude cheaper than one with planning permission. And links to this as evidence . @unherd doesn’t think the issue is about planning and is more about discrimination but adds: As for this being Greenbelt, that’s highly disingenuous, as the Guardian’s article on Saturday showed (the previous owner has stated that the Council itself laid the hardcore for the original scrapyard), and rumour has it the Council plans to site a rubbish incinerator there after the eviction. Planning is a very complex area which the government, rightly or wrongly is trying to simplify. Most of today’s law stems from the 1947 Town and Country planning act , which laid down the principle that development would be controlled and heavily regulated by government. Essentially if you build permanent structures without planning permission, even if you do own the land, then your local authority will tear them down. This story from 2008 is a fascinating example of the ways in which people will go to avoid detection, when farmer Robert Fidler try to hide his newly built mock Tudor castle hidden behind stacks of hay bales. 10.38am: It seems that a meeting between Travellers and authorities set for 10:30 has been stalled or might even be called off. Certainly the expected 10am start for bailiffs to move in has been delayed considerably. 10.28am: A video on the BBC’s website shows a short statement given outside the gates of Dale Farm by activists who say, “If force is used, limbs will be broken or worse…[police and bailiffs] could risk assault or even murder charges”. 10.23am: Sky news also has a very good interactive which is here . It shows how the site has changed over the last decade and a map of the current site showing the location of the main gate and where police and bailiffs are stationed. 10.19am: Essex police has reminded its twitter followers that it is at Dale Farm to keep the peace, “not to carry out enforcement action” . Essex Police is at #DaleFarm to keep the peace not to carry out enforcement action. . 10.04am: ITV’s Damon Green @damongreenITV tweets this : BREAKING: the petrol for Sky’s generator has gone missing at #DaleFarm . This would add to previous reports that Sky and BBC journalists and their equipment have been attacked by activists at the camp. 9.59am: If you haven’t seen it yet, a great video here from Johnny Howorth and Richard Sprenger. . 9.48am: Lib Dem MP Andrew George been speaking to Sky news from his party’s conference in Birmingham. He chairs the all party Parliamentary Group for Gypsy Roma Travellers and has called today’s eviction “inappropriate” and said that it should be suspended. The group entirely respects the right of the council to uphold the integrity of planning legislation. That’s without question. But what we’ve asked is the council to suspend the eviction and get around the table, not only with the Travellers but also the United Nations commissions that have looked at this whole thing, and the Human rights commission in the UK to try and find a long term solution. George also added that because of a lack of legal legal pitches in the country, 1 in 5 travellers is forced to live illegally and that Basildon council would be spending, £18 million to restore the area back to a scrapyard. “It’s going to be the most expensive scrapyard in history.” 9.38am: Reporter @BBCMarkEaston tweets this: Police officers walking to gate at #dalefarm . 9.33am: The Guardian’s Alexandra Topping , who is reporting from the scene, sends this after speaking to Jessica ( photo here ) one of the Dale Farm activists who has locked herself to a car and a friend as part of the barricade. Wearing a blue boiler suit and resting on an old sofa cushion she said protesters had helped with paperwork and campaigning but were now “showing physical support and physical solidarity”. She said: “400 people are being made homeless, what are we doing throwing these people into destitution , do we want more poverty in this country. “The people here are losing everything, their homes, their land, the money they’ve spent on this land and their whole community” “If they can’t live in a scrapyard where can they live? It is prejudice and discrimination and that’s why we are here.” 9.31am: We have now opened the comments section. 9.20am: If you haven’t read it yet, a thought provoking meditation on the “politics of place” from Madeleine Bunting who writes : Where do you belong? Where are you from? Where is home? As the residents of Dale Farm have found, such questions are deeply political. Yet politicians can have a tin ear to the passions that place provokes. In the Dale Farm case, one councillor was quoted as saying that they could move to some free pitches in St Helens, several hundred miles away in the north-west. Try saying that to the outraged residents of Buckinghamshire running a vigorous campaign against the high speed rail link: you can always move. Of course that is never going to happen, because the politics of place exposes power more sharply than any other issue. 9.13am: More from Alexandra Topping who says that “There is still no sign of bailiffs here, but a helicopter circling overhead.” She also has some further comment from farm resident Kathleen McCarthy, from just behind the barricade who sends out a plea to Basildon Council and David Cameron to stop the eviction: If you are human beings this could still be stopped, I would plead and beg to stop this. We’ll go anywhere, you can have this scrapyard, we don’t want it, we just want somewhere to go. Pointing at the protesters locked to cars McCarthy added: “Look at what these people are doing to save us.” 9.09am: Various sources reporting that the bailiffs Constant and Co and now expected to start evictions at 10am. 9.04am: A very interesting statistic from yesterday’s Observer in which Tracy McVeigh reports that 103 of the 106 pupils at the the local school, Crays Hill Primary, live at Dale Farm but that the council has refused to say whether it will close after eviction. 8.54am: A short video up from Sky news’ Mark White who is reporting from the scene. The link is running a bit slow but they have a good view of the site and report that the BBC’s scissor lift was sabotaged and that they had come under brief attack from protesters at the site. 8.45am: Allie Hodgkins-Brown who is an editor for BBC Essex radio who tweets from @essexalliehb posts this : Sign at front of #dalefarm saying if you open this gate you will kill a woman chained by her neck behind it . 8.35am: More from the Today programme who also interviewed Tony Ball, the leader of Basildon council just after 8:15. He is outside Dale Farm himself and said this: It’s a sad day. I’d much rather we hadn’t come to where we are today but the bailiffs will approach the site at the right time in a calm manner and they will request permission to enter the site and then depending on the response they get, then dictates how the operation goes from there… I’m not blind to the humanitarian issue here. What I am buoyed here is that in the last few days an significant amount of travellers on the illegal site have moved off and have moved on to the legal site; don’t forget there is a legal site next door. And what I understand is that the protesters now outnumber the Travellers on site at this moment. 8.26am: Events at Dale Farm have headlined the Today programme on Radio 4. The BBC have sent Fergal Keane to the scene who also reports that two protesters have cemented themselves inside a barrel, again making it difficult for bailiffs to remove them from the scene: Kathleen McCarthy who was speaking for Dale Farm Traveller residents said: We haven’t got somewhere else to go. And we have to show people that we are human beings and that we do really need somewhere to go. If we had somewhere to go we wouldn’t be humiliating ourselves like this. All we’re asking for is the council to build us a site and we will willingly give them our land that we bought and paid for. We will give that to them and they just have to build us a site where we can go in and get our children to school and give them an education and get the very sick look after. 8.21am: Another update from Alexandra Topping : There are an estimated 200 people on site, with around 100-120 of those thought to be protesters. Strange scenes here. Protesters in boiler suits and face masks are watching two 20-something protesters who are locking themselves to a burnt out car and each other. Dogs keep attacking each other against the backdrop of huge colour photographs of Traveller children. Bailiffs have the go ahead to come on site after 8am, though with this barricade it’s hard to see how they will do that. Follow her on twitter on @LexyTopping for all the latest updates and pics. 8.10am: A very mixed reaction on the twittersphere to events at Dale Farm ranging from hostility to support: @MichaelGallon writes : I hope the criminals are evicted from #dalefarm today and as for those professional agitators who have appeared I hope they get a good doing. In contrast @AssedBaig writes : The treatment and discrimination against travellers is unacceptable. Solidarity with the people of Dale Farm. . 8.04am: My colleague Alexandra Topping is at Dale farm and has sent me this update from the site which gives some flavour of the potential battle ahead: It is a beautiful, if chilly morning here at Dale Farm. Hundreds of press and photographers at the barricade to the site. It’s a 20ft structure of scaffolding, gates, wooden boards and palates, barbed wire and tyres- all decorated with pictures of the children who live here, hand painted posters and slogans offering support. One poster reads: “Travellers culture should be celebrated not criminalised there are more criminals in the government than on any travellers site I’ve ever been on”. 7.55am: Welcome to this live blog following the eviction of hundreds of Travellers from Dale Farm, Essex. The battle between the local council and the Travellers which has been going on for a decade now has now culminated in eviction of half the site. Bailiffs have been called in for this morning and will be supported by police. A little background to this is that the entire site is actually owned by the community itself and sits on a former scrap metal works. However planning permission for the chalet style home and other dwellings has only been granted for about half the site. It is the other half of the site which faces eviction today after Basildon council set an eviction date earlier this month . Those standing against the eviction have been coming arriving at Dale Farm all week and another group set off on Saturday morning from Liverpool Street station preparing for a showdown which may be reminiscent of the removal of protesters from the Newbury by-pass , which took weeks to complete. Dale Farm campaigners who have also protested against the fact that the council has not provided an alternative site for families to move to, have received support from both the Jewish community and the UN who say the move is a breach of human rights. We understand that the bailiffs will move in from 8:00am. Dale Farm Protest Housing Human rights Shiv Malik guardian.co.uk

Posted by on September 19, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.