Comedy is a barometer of popular attitudes. What people deem funny, and what they feel is acceptable to laugh at, tells us a lot about society. After the comedian Jimmy Carr “joked” that the Nazis’ industrialised extermination of Europe’s Roma population was a “positive”, several Tory ministers decided that a line did actually exist in public discourse, and that this time it had well and truly been crossed.
Carr’s comments were “abhorrent and they just shouldn’t be on television,” declared the culture secretary and newly minted tribune of the oppressed, Nadine Dorries. The health secretary, Sajid Javid, denounced Carr’s “horrid” joke and called for audiences to boycott him.
To paraphrase Luke 15:7, surely there is more joy in heaven over the repentance of one Tory woke-basher than 99 people who haven’t used public platforms to stigmatise minorities. Yet, as disturbing as Carr’s grotesque remarks were, the audience’s laughter – rather than, say, shocked silence or gasps – was at least as horrifying. Why did so many express public amusement at the enslavement, torture and gassing of a group of people? Because in the UK, Gypsies, Roma and Travellers are a minority that is acceptable, permissible and indeed fashionable to stigmatise and hate – and the ministers condemning Carr have played a role.
Granted, the Tories are guilty of many sins, but inventing this ancient hatred is not one of them. Roma people have been subjected to profound persecution across Europe since the middle ages – from enslavement to expulsion to murder – and England’s so-called “Egyptians Act” of 1530 sought to remove them en masse. But the Tories continue to exploit and stoke this bigotry for political gain. Back in 2007, one Tory pundit congratulated Dorries for writing about “why Gypsies and Travellers aren’t welcome in her constituency”; in that post, the then backbencher detailed her “solution to the Traveller problem”, in which they should be legally forbidden from following a nomadic tradition which has been on these shores for centuries. When Javid was the home secretary, he was condemned in Travellers Times in 2019 for “drawing on a long tradition on Conservative politics of using Gypsy and Traveller families as a community of fear and blame”, after he drew up proposals to further criminalise them.
Indeed, there was little outcry at the Tories’ attempts to exploit anti-GRT sentiment for political gain in the 2019 election. Michael Gove listed cracking down on “illegal Traveller incursions” as a key election priority. Tory candidates lined up to centre hostility to GRT camps in their election campaigns, while the Tory candidate for Crewe and Nantwich led a demonstration against the local GRT community.
This ugly rhetoric has only continued since: the Tory MP for Ashfield, Lee Anderson – a former Labour councillor – denounced local Travellers as thieves likely to be “seen leaving your garden shed at 3 o’clock in the morning, probably with your lawnmower and half of your tools”. Meanwhile, when the Scottish Tory MP Douglas Ross was asked what he’d do if he was prime minister for a day, rather than choosing, say, housing the homeless or fighting child poverty, he opted instead for “tougher enforcement against Gypsies and Travellers”.
There’s a long history of this – Michael Howard was condemned for “tapping into the deepest vein of bigotry in our society” when he made clearing unauthorised Gypsy camps a key plank of the Tories’ 2005 election campaign – but it’s not just the Tories who have mined this rich seam of prejudice. As Labour home secretary, Jack Straw once described Gypsies as people who “think that it’s perfectly OK for them to cause mayhem in an area, to go burgling, thieving, breaking into vehicles, causing all kinds of other trouble including defecating in the doorways of firms and so on”. (The Home Office later clarified he was attacking “criminal gangs” of Travellers rather than the group as a whole.) The New Labour stalwart David Blunkett was reprimanded by David Cameron after warning of riots if Roma people did not integrate more.
But this Tory government has fused hateful rhetoric with laws that persecute. Their policing bill has not only sought to suppress peaceful protest by reclassifying trespass as a criminal rather than a civil offence; it would allow police to arrest GRT people – who are facing a woeful lack of authorised sites where they can settle – if they set up on unauthorised ones. Police could confiscate their homes, impose crippling fines and lock them up for up to three months. A hostile environment has been built for this intentionally marginalised minority by stripping them of legal spaces for them to move to, and then when they are driven by lack of options to illegally pitch, they face the full weight of the state crashing down on their backs.
Against this backdrop, is the laughter at Carr’s mockery of genocide surprising, even as it shocks us? This is a country in which only four in 10 parents would be happy for their child to hang out at the home of a GRT friend, in large part because powerful people have sent a strong signal to the public: that the centuries-old bullying of this minority is not only understandable, it is acceptable.
The real reason there has been little to no public education on the Nazi genocide of Europe’s Roma people is straightforward: it would mean a reckoning with a deep-rooted prejudice which continues to this day. That’s why Carr’s obscene “joke” was received by enthusiastic laughter – and the politicians now wringing their hands are partly to blame.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
