FROM NOON WEDNESDAY.
Our midweek podcasts cover such things as world events, Ukraine, Gaza as well as discussing matters such as multipolarity and BRICS. We have also had two in depth discussions on the possible miscarriage of justice with Luke Mitchell.
Today we are bringing you a topic that has been in the main ignored by our politicians, our media and the public. The public are the only ones that can possibly escape criticism. As I have often opined it is the information, our media and politicians omit to tell us that is their worst crime, not their lies.
Nothing illuminates this better than the almost total silence by the establishment over the plight of the Scottish travelling community. The prejudices they have encountered I would suggest are probably the worst and the most inhumane I have ever encountered. It brings shame to our nation and on to us as a people.
Like most of you I was oblivious to this blight on our nation until it was brought to my attention. Today I am joined by Eva Comrie and two wonderful ladies from the travelling community, Lynne Tammi and Roseanna Mcphee.
They will tell you in their own words the appalling treatment, this community has endured over decades. Forced off the road, placed in substandard huts. Indeed, in one location they were housed in ‘chalets’ that had been deemed unfit for letting to holidaymakers. The same local authority that made that decision decided they were good enough for tinkers!
Horrendous stories of children being taken away from their parents and sent to orphanages and then trafficked to Canada and Australia. It all helped the British imperialists with the colonisation of those particular nations. The children at a young age were sold into indentured servitude. That is a posh way of saying white slavery! For that is exactly what it was. Torn from their families and sold on to colonialists in far flung parts of the British Empire. Rule Britannia!
We even had the British Government allowing one of Hitler’s eugenics fanatics in 1938 access to tinker communities in Scotland to study and photograph them. Those of you familiar with the holocaust will be aware what the Nazis did with European tinkers!
To this day nobody in the UK or Scottish Governments has ever contemplated even a simple apology. They have apologised and pardoned 16th century witches and Gays that were convicted in the 1950s and 1960s. However, when it comes to the tinkers the prejudice still remains, in place, not even an apology, has been forthcoming.
We Scots take great pride in our global reputation for being a welcoming nation. We pride ourselves in our tolerance and in taking in asylum seekers and refugees from all over the world. We love to pat ourselves in the back and say to ourselves how tolerant and non-racist we are in comparison to our southern neighbour. However, here and now we have Scots being marginalised and treated appallingly because of their ethnicity and life choice.
We sort of acknowledge the religious bigotry we endure in the West of Scotland and dismiss that away by kidding ourselves it is only in WOS and it is all football related. The truth is that curse goes further and deeper in our society. It too needs addressed head on.
However, appalling as the treatment is to those of an Irish heritage we at least know of it and some folk try to address this cancer in our society. We acknowledge it as a problem. It is discussed daily although sadly we still have bigotry condoned by too many in positions of influence and power.
The plight of the tinkers is less well known, and it seems nobody cares enough to do anything to redress the wrongs carried out on these Scots by Scots.
That is why today’s show is called The Great Travesty. That is exactly what it is. I hope by bringing this to the attention of the Prism viewers we can raise awareness of the wrongs committed and force our government to act and our fellow citizens to help right the wrongs our fellow Scots endure daily.
Please listen carefully to these two wonderful and brave ladies as they expose some of the horrors and heartbreak the travelling community have had to endure from the 19th century to now in the 21st century. Please watch and share it is the least we can do.
Two inspirational women.
Three counting Eva.
What happened to us. What has happened to our country.
Stupid question really, cause we know
What a cracking Prism, BB. Thank you for letting us all hear and see this and thank you to Eva, Lynne and Roseanna. Those two traveller women are amazing, and I salute them in their courage and determination. Roseanna’s story of academic prowess leading nowhere is very common in traveller families. Lack of self-esteem and the fear, still, of cultural repercussions deters many. Eva is a staunch ally.
In the North-east, the travellers were referred to as ‘tinks’ or ‘tinkies’ or ‘minkers’, and it was always meant as an insult and a put-down to make people feel inadequate and inferior, or people would be more circumspect and let it be known that their children were not to play with settled traveller children. So agree with Lynne and Roseanna that intergenerational trauma was and is a real thing in this community which was forced into assimilation. However, many people in the settled community – probably most – were decent and did not go out of their way to offer insults, although, it must be said, some definitely did, and the feelings of hurt and inferiority invoked wiped out to a large extent the acceptance by the majority, and stayed with travellers throughout their lives so that many, many of them were emotionally crippled, lacking self-esteem.
In the North-east, most traveller families who were willing to settle after WW II – basically, they could barely travel at all during the war – lived in traveller camps with bow tents, caravan camps or substandard housing until they were allocated decent housing, which the vast majority were, eventually. Many travellers in the North-east were ‘Highland travellers’ who had once spoken only Gaelic, and originated from the Highlands and islands of Scotland. Some of them could trace their heritage back to the post Culloden era, when they were forced off their crofts, others uprooted by the Clearances and yet others had travelled for centuries before either of those mass migrations within Scotland.
Eugenics are never far from any government, including both the British and Scottish ones. What is the sterilisation of children in the name of ‘trans’, but eugenics, but from the perspective of a supposed minority that is anything but under threat and has all its rights? The comparison is laughable. Heard as a child about the removal of children and the measuring of heads from travellers. This was the real thing. Also heard about ‘The Tinker Experiment’. Can recall tinkers being terrified of the authorities across the board because of what had happened in the past. They were also terrified of the ‘Burkers’ in the late Victorian and early 20th century, when medical people bought dead bodies for dissection, and travellers would be preyed upon as being expendable and anonymous.
The traveller community was, indeed, sex-segrated, and this division went on, and possibly still goes on, into the present day, but many of the jobs that the men did, such as basket-weaving, cone/acorn gathering, peg-making, tinsmithing have long gone or been commercialized and exploited by others, while others, piping for small rewards, remains even among their descendants. Tattie-howkin, neep hoeing, berry picking, etc. on the land, and in which the whole family could participate and bring home a little money, are jobs that are also scarce, given over to industrialization and to new migrants. Begging and reading fortunes, which the women did, have also lost their appeal to a great extent, and the men’s pearl fishing is not longer allowed – rightly so – as freshwater beds are protected and scarce.
The traveller community that I have encountered have like most of us been sold out by a privileged few . Rather than occupy the majority of land that the gentry claim they take the local sports grounds or play fields. Rather than the thousands of acres of private land it is the public wee bits.
This is deliberate on part of our feudal rulers in agreement with the gypsy kings. Ask them , they know.
You do have to ask yourself who the true Nazi’s are.
Traveling people were just another example of the shit on the shoes of the British.
The Irish of course we’re exactly the same when over a million were allowed to starve to death and double that number emigrate in the 1840s whilst food was exported from Ireland to England whilst the British Government concluded there was nothing they could do.
And later in that century over a third of the people in the highlands and islands were cleared from the land to be driven overseas. More flotsom people on the shoes of the Brits needing cleaned.
And in 1920 when Ireland was fighting for it’s independence two great Brits by the name of Winston Churchill and Earl Haig proposed using the RAF to drop mustard gas on Irish towns a d villages. Political fall out considerations stopped the proposal but 100,000 in remote villages across Mesopotsnia ( née part of Iraq today) were not so lucky as women and chirdren sustained pitiful gassing deaths.
And today our British prime minister ( and labour leader of the opposition) opposition stand shoulder to shoulder with the Israeli military as they starve millions whilst civilian men women and children are slaughtered in what is pure state sponsored genocide.
And underneath I note an extract of the reality of the British supported mass terror onslaught.
An Al Jazeera correspondent is mourning the loss of his entire immediate family after they were killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza, the Qatar-based network said in a statement.
Wael al-Dahdouh, Al Jazeera’s bureau chief in Gaza, had fled with his family to the Nuseirat camp in central Gaza after Israel warned those in the northern half of the territory to leave immediately.
Al-Dahdouh’s wife, son, daughter and grandson were killed in the airstrike late on Tuesday, which came amid an overnight surge of Israeli attacks reported to have killed hundreds of people.
Our tax payments are well spent the. Mr Sunak, Mr Sir Keir Starmer.
Britain showing it’s true colours as to how it really thinks and acts. Colonisers are like that.
Or am I missing something?
Since WW I, Willie, civilians have been the front line in wars and conflicts, and this is a deliberate tactic to terrify the population and to save soldier lives. ‘Boots on the ground’ cost soldier lives in their thousands, hundreds of thousands, although few, if any conflicts, have been settled by aerial bombardment alone.
Israel could have allowed all women and children, and very old men, out of the area, into Egypt, temporarily, as Hamas fighters will be seeded through the younger to middle-aged male population. Then, the civilian males could have been asked to undergo personal searches for weapons, and, if none found, allowed to join their compatriots over the border in Egypt. I think Egypt could have been persuaded, but they did not want Hamas coming over the border with the civilians, which is perfectly understandable.
A pledge could have been given to the UN and to the Palestinian population that all civilians would be returned to Gaza after all the tunnels and the Hamas strongholds were destroyed. They will never totally destroy Hamas (think the Taliban and ISIS) but they could have crippled them severely. Any weaponry found to have links to Iran, which is almost certainly the puppet master here, could have been used as propaganda. The destruction of Gaza could have been very quickly repaired after the operations ended by Israel pledging to help to rebuild, with international help, and, meantime, they could have offered aid and water and medical supplies.
In this way, they could have built trust with the Palestinians and shown the world that they were willing to adopt a very different strategy. Simultaneously, they would have to move quickly to quell right-wing agitation within Israel, pull back some of the kibbutzes and create a peace corridor, on the Israeli side (not the Palestinian side, they have lost too much land already) with the promise of a joint Israeli-Palestinian militarised corridor between Gaza and the West Bank to create one state of Palestine. It is the continuing Israeli expansionism that is one of the biggest triggers, and America and other nations must be prepared to put an embargo on their people, already well provided for, emigrating to Israel in order to establish new kibbutzes and cause more trouble. Many Palestinian deaths are down to armed kibbutzim who have formed local militias.
Like the American First Nations, the Palestinians are never going to get back the whole of the former Palestine: the Israelis will go down fighting to the last man, woman and child to preserve Israel; and that has to be understood finally; and the two-state solution put into operation no matter how galling that would be. Let the big Arab nations be the peace brokers: Saudi, Egypt, Jordan. Before the Hamas attack, the Israelis were about to enter trade talks with Saudi Arabia, having already brokered deals with Egypt and Jordan. There is no other way forward, just endless deaths of innocents on both sides into eternity, and this would continue to be the case even if Israel expanded to the borders of every Arab neighbour, and that, too, has to be understood.
Or, John, the playing fields and sports grounds have been built over former traveller sites? Most communities had traveller sites pre WW II, but these have almost all been requisitioned by local councils and built upon or used for other purposes. You may well be right about travellers using public sporting sites, but most estates are sporting estates and miles from the public road. Most are owned by corporate interests out-with Scotland, unlike the old family-owned estates, many of which did welcome travellers at one time, and travellers will not be tolerated. Otherwise, I agree with you that too much of Scotland is given over to monied interests.
I doubt that real travelling as it was in the past can be restored, with horses and carts and bow tents and caravans, and I take no pleasure in saying it, but carefully designated sites, all over Scotland, and chosen by travellers themselves, in consultation with local authorities and local settled communities, would go some way to alleviate the issue. However, in practice, most settled communities object to travellers and agreement would be very difficult to achieve. Even patches of woodland or heath, favourite traveller sites, away from settled people, are managed by public or private enterprise for public use or regeneration projects. The world has changed, a sad but true fact.
Perhaps, if designated sites, in agreement with the traveller community, could be opened up during the late Spring, Summer and Autumn months, with full facilities, and with strict rules of occupancy as to rubbish disposal, waste disposal, etc., much of the ill-feeling on both sides could be avoided. This would mean that local authorities up and down Scotland would be under notice, by law, to organize sites and travellers would be under obligation to keep them rubbish-free and waste-free, and, of course, to pay a fee to the local authority to off-set the costs. It would not be perfect, and it would not really reflect the old ways, which, in reality will never return, but it might be a step forward in laying to rest the objections from both sides. Easier said than done, I know.
In the US, they settled the question by providing reservations, and I believe this was once considered in Scotland, too, for the travelling people. In The States, the First Nations, many of them nomads, were herded on to land that was considered useless, much of which turned out to be anything but, and even that was under threat from vested interests, and they were to some extent able to maintain and sustain their cultural heritage(s) in these enclosed areas. That’s the word, though, ‘enclosed’. They could no longer roam free.
Personally, I don’t know about gypsy kings, who would have been Romany, not traditional Scottish traveller, albeit there was/is inter-marriage with Romanies and Irish travellers. Remember, most traditional Scottish travellers normally married other travellers until about the middle of the 20th century when marriage into the settled community became more common: McPhees, Stewarts, Robertsons, Whytes, etc. Perhaps Lynne and Roseanna could enlighten you?
Colonialism is racism. All Scots suffer from colonial racism (including internalised racism), and will continue to do so until independent.
https://yoursforscotlandcom.wordpress.com/2021/08/15/determinants-of-independence-ethnicity/comment-page-1/
Good tae see ye dude.
We kicked ass today.
See ye ra morra.
Hey, it’s our Alba conference gig weekend.
Heading out into this Glasgow night.
See y’all today 🙂
Glasgow, it’s still a no mean City.