It was one of those hazy, sepia-toned summer evenings in London, when the beer gardens are full and the sun feels like it doesn’t really set. We were congregated in the smoking area outside the Jago in Hackney, east London, when a man caught my eye and made his way over to me. He said he knew of me and my work and wanted to talk. He told me, in minute detail, about a WhatsApp group made up of staff and proprietors of various different pubs, clubs and venues in east London.
Ostensibly, its purpose was as a community group – to exchange information and band together in fights against increasingly draconian licensing restrictions across boroughs.
It was also being used, however, for a darker purpose. When a group of Travellers, or people suspected to be Travellers, arrived in one of the venues in the group, a warning to other venues in the area would immediately be broadcast: “Beware! Travellers on the loose.”
Friends in Camden and Kentish town have told me about similar groups, as have those in Bristol. Indeed, I am sure similarly racist systems exist across hospitality chains and networks in every part of the country – such is the depth of hatred aimed at Traveller communities everywhere.
It’s why I was not surprised to hear that the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) had served the holiday park operator Pontins with an unlawful act notice after an investigation found multiple instances of race discrimination against Irish Travellers on its sites.
The company, which runs two venues in England, had instructed call centre staff to listen for Irish accents to identify Irish Travellers and decline or cancel bookings. The EHRC, the regulator responsible for enforcing the Equality Act in England, Scotland and Wales, also found the company had labelled Irish Travellers and their guests “undesirables”; maintained a “banned guests list” containing people Pontins suspected of being Irish Travellers and their associates, such as friends and family; and introduced rules requiring guests to appear on the electoral register – a practice found to be discriminatory against Gypsies and Irish Travellers.
It is, of course, enraging, repugnant and racist, and yet we’ve heard this song before. Pontins had already been accused of race discrimination. In 2021, it entered into a legally binding agreement with the EHRC to not commit unlawful acts of race discrimination when providing its services, after a whistleblower revealed the holiday parks had created a list of “undesirable guests” – all of whom had known Traveller surnames.
Yvonne MacNamara, CEO of the Traveller Movement, told me it “welcomed” the decision of the EHRC, and hoped it would send “a strong message to the hospitality sector that anti-Gypsy, Roma and Irish Traveller racism is unacceptable and that we will not allow it to continue”. She noted, however, “reservations as to how much this decision will affect racist practice in the hospitality sector” and added, “We successfully took JD Wetherspoon plc to court over a refusal-of-service incident in 2015 and since the Pontins investigation by the EHRC we have dealt with a number of refusal-of-service cases. The EHRC and the Equalities Act need stronger teeth in tackling discrimination, and we welcome reforms to enable this change.”
While I agree that there must be genuine consequences for companies who enact racist policies, we ought to be looking to our elected and prospective representatives to understand how deep this rot is set. I have written before about the systematic discrimination against Travellers across society, and how Conservative and Labour MPs routinely weaponise these harmful stereotypes. The Conservatives dedicated a whole section of their 2019 manifesto to “tackling unauthorised Traveller camps”, and just this week the Traveller Movement has made complaints about a Conservative MP and a Labour mayoral candidate because of derogatory and discriminatory language against the Traveller community.
The realities of these words, of these discriminatory practices, of the blacklists, the WhatsApp groups, the signs, the slurs are so much more than the sum of their parts. It has been 21 years since 15-year-old Johnny Delaney, a Traveller child, was beaten to death in Ellesmere Port. The court prosecuting his killers heard that one of the defendants had stamped on Johnny Delaney’s head with both feet and said he deserved it because “he was only a fucking Gypsy”.
Little appears to have changed since Johnny’s death. A 2020 study by the Gypsy, Traveller and Roma organisation, GATE Herts found that 78% of survey Gypsy, Traveller and Roma people experienced hate speech or hate crimes “very often”. One respondent referred to the hate as “regular as rain”. That same study linked an “epidemic” of suicide deaths in the community to that hate. Support workers involved in the study reported that 90% of those who killed themselves, or had attempted suicide had experienced a hate crime.
Our words, our actions, our “it’s not really racist” platitudes have consequences. You can trace a blacklist of surnames or a politically expedient discriminatory leaflet or tweet to violence against Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people. It’s time we recognised that and hold those responsible, in every sense of the word, properly accountable.
Ben Smoke is a commissioning editor at Huck
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