Dale Farm

[kopite]

WTF?!?

Its annoyed me how it has seemed like the courts have been favouring the travellers throughout. Even now they are seem to be getting special treatment even though they are in the wrong :@

[TheAnimus]

The problem is, when someone mentions the human rights act, its such a wide spanning all encompassing act for a lay person to be able to understand how all these outcomes happen is very hard.

As such I just slip in to the scrap it voter.

[badass]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-15153060

So apparently the council can clear the land, but the council is going to have to pay a third of their legal costs....... What?!

That's how this dysfunctional legal system works here. You have the law, the intent behind the law and the practice. All three diverge wildly.
For my car, I was told in the strongest legal language possible terms that I would win my case against the car dealer but the best I could hope for was 60-70% of my costs being awarded.

The phrase "justice for the rich" does have a certain amount of truth here.

[Rave]

For the money that the council has wasted on what amounts to the principle of the matter, they could have built a hundred new homes, or a purpose built site to move the travellers onto.

Whilst I realise that the law is the law, sometimes you should just bring some frakking common sense into the matter!

yes Yes YES! Finally someone in this thread gets it.

To be honest it's pretty much the same as squatting IMO. I don't understand why anyone is standing up for them.

If someone had illegally set up at the bottom of your garden and then said, "Right this is mine now, I'm staying here, and there's nothing you can do about it. Actually I think I'll build a house here too." You'd be pretty peeved.

Except it's not at all the same, since they quite legally own the land. Apart from that, really great point m8.

For me, it's simple. Some have planning permission. They stay, no problem. The rest, they need to obey the same planning laws as the rest of us.

Here's the thing.

Buy a green belt field with no planning consent. Price = £50,000.

Buy the same field with planning permission for a couple of hundred homes and price = £1,000,000.

Or figures of that order.

So...the obvious conclusion to draw from that (true) statement is that all travellers are cheeky pisstakers is it?

Because I've thought it through and come to the conclusion that actually the fault is with the planning system. Free up more land for development and maybe everyone might be able to afford a house. I earn more than the national median wage, and I can't afford to buy a decent home in the area I was born. Have a guess at who I blame that on?

Clue: it's not the 'travellers'.

Planning laws are planning laws. Round here, you so much as put up a fence without permission and the council jumps on you, and they don't take 10 years to do it, either. Laws are laws for all, not one law for travellers and another for the rest of us.

Yeah, laws are laws. It's not for the common man to challenge them, clearly someone better than us put them in place so we'd better all just suck them up.

Do I have sympathy with them? Not a single iota, no. They knew full well what they were doing, and have played every obnoxious card they can, from the "look at the likkle kiddies", to "what about the elderly and infirm", to wanting "decent" accommodation for all if they move, to accusations of racial discrimination because the council have the balls to actually expect them to comply with the law, to milking publicity for all it's worth.

The lesson in this for councils is to grow a pair and not faff around for 10 years until it gets to this stage, ever again. Apply the law to travellers exactly as you apply it to the rest of us, and do it promptly. No more, no less.

Indeed. I guess whatever council it is in Essex has planned ahead and got 300 council homes ready for the people they've planned for ages to make involuntarily homeless?

By that logic, we shouldn't look up murderers, do you know how much those trials cost.

Oh and someone who has done any kind of fraud, they are so damned costly to investigate.

Perspective. Have you heard of it? There's a bit of a difference between killing someone, and choosing to live somewhere that someone else doesn't like.

[Rave]

Oh and in my drunken attempt at multiquoting, I quite forgot the post I wanted to reply to above all- the one I'd really been looking forward to.

What the hell goes on in their heads ??? If it anyone else they would ahve been dealt with by now! There was that guy who built a large house, but hid it behind bales of hay. When the council found out, the house was taken down within a year.

Yeah, and damned right! Which lover of the countryside in their right mind would want to see a beautiful stack of polythene wrapped hay bales removed.....to be replaced with a relative small and rather twee faux castle! What a blot on the landscape- give me the hay bales any day!

Clearly you're a man after my own heart- I live in London and my door is always open to fellow aesthetes. If you've got a few hours spare for sightseeing how about Eros House:

/IMG]...

What a beautiful building! I mean, think how impoverished we suburban Londoners would have been if we hadn't had planning committees building lovely buildings like that for us.

Status Quo FTW!

[TheAnimus]

Perspective. Have you heard of it? There's a bit of a difference between killing someone, and choosing to live somewhere that someone else doesn't like.

I was just drawing attention to the fact that enforcing the law cost, is often more than the crime cost.

Plenty of people who are murdered, will have generated less revenue than the cost of punishing the guilty, the police investigation, the trials etc.

Then you get fraud, some of these are so complex we no longer get trial by jury, this scares me not just because of the lack of a jury of ones peers, but also because we admit that most jurists are too thick.

Sometimes the fraud is only a few hundred thou, yet we have such high costs of investigation and trial.

The sad thing is here, is that these travelers who know they are breaking the law, aren't even paying their fair share of the legal costs. But then you get this, and this is the bit that rubs me the wrong way, they because of their BIRTHRIGHT are somehow allowed to claim land..... WTF!

[Saracen]

...


So...the obvious conclusion to draw from that (true) statement is that all travellers are cheeky pisstakers is it?

How on earth do you get that from what I said? Or are you deliberately trying to be offensive?

I said, very clearly, some have planning permission and stay, and some don't, and don't.

So no, not all travellers are cheeky pisstakers. But everyone, traveller or not, who puts up buildings without having planning permission and then expects to stay, after losing appeal after appeal is taking the pee, and so are those travellers that believe they aren't subject to the same laws as everyone else because they're travellers.

...

Because I've thought it through and come to the conclusion that actually the fault is with the planning system. Free up more land for development and maybe everyone might be able to afford a house. I earn more than the national median wage, and I can't afford to buy a decent home in the area I was born. Have a guess at who I blame that on?

Clue: it's not the 'travellers'..

Are there problems with the planning system? In my view, yes. And it's being changed, though whether it's an improvement remains to be seen. And you have a point, but it's not what this thread or my comments were about.

...

Yeah, laws are laws. It's not for the common man to challenge them, clearly someone better than us put them in place so we'd better all just suck them up.

....

Indeed. I guess whatever council it is in Essex has planned ahead and got 300 council homes ready for the people they've planned for ages to make involuntarily homeless?
....

It is for the common man to challenge laws via the courts, or to lobby your MP for changes, or to stand for Parliament and try to change it yourself. But it is not for common man to ignore laws they don't like, and in this case, build anyway. There is a system, there is an appeals process and you're supposed to follow that and, if you can, win an appeal and get planning permission before building, not just build anyway.

If non-travellers ignore planning rules, they get jumped on by the system. So should travellers. One law for all, not one for travellers and another for everyone else.

As for council homes for 300 people, that assumes that, first, all 300 qualify for council homes under the same rules as everyone else, and have earned their place in the same queue that the rest of us face. And second, it assumes that those travellers that do qualify, probably as priority cases, want such accommodation.

[shaithis]

Clearly you're a man after my own heart- I live in London and my door is always open to fellow aesthetes. If you've got a few hours spare for sightseeing how about Eros House:

What a beautiful building! I mean, think how impoverished we suburban Londoners would have been if we hadn't had planning committees building lovely buildings like that for us.

Moved from London (Catford!) 18 months ago.....I thought I would never see that eye-sore again!!

[santa claus]

/IMG

That is a truly spectacularly ugly building. I think its traumatising you; it is me

Who in their right mind thought that Beirut chic would look good in London? Just looking at it makes me think I can smell stale kebabs and urine.

A picture paints a thousand words.

[chuckskull]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-15163750

The criminal law must apply equally to travellers and non-travellers alike, he added.

I'd be impressed by that level of common sense if it hadn't taken 10 years to reach a conclusion my 4 yr old nephew could have knocked out in 2 minutes.

Wonder how much money has been wasted having everything standing by, police, baliffs etc over the last month it took them to figure that out.

[Rave]

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.p...article/11338/

Pretty much sums it up for me.

Edit: especially the last few paragraphs about traveller life expectancy and the impact on the local school.