As something of a fan of riots and social unrest I was interested to know who, precisely, had gone doolally in the Harehills area of Leeds last week and started setting fire to buses and so on. The local police announced that it was a ‘serious disorder incident’, but I could find no information at all about who it was doing the rioting. Just people, I suppose – and we are all people, aren’t we?
Still I scoured the paper – and nope, no enlightenment. Perhaps it was just northerners – Leeds is full of them, after all, and they can be fractious and violent when the mood grips hold of them. Inner-city northerners with their slavering pitbulls, their skag and their misplaced sense of pride and grievances. Trouble is, looking at the photos in the newspapers, this seemed to me unlikely.
The authorities were, of course, reluctant to offer any clue as to who was causing all the bovver because they did not wish to inflame an already febrile situation by casting blame about willy-nilly. The problem with this approach is that people will cast blame regardless or otherwise of whether they have actual evidence to hand – and perhaps cast that blame in the wrong direction. So on certain sections of social media there was little doubt about who was setting fire to vehicles and hurling rocks at the Old Bill – it had to be them, again. The Muslims – or, as the authorities sometimes describe them at times such as these, Norwegians.
The leader of the Reform party, Nigel Farage, decided that the time for silence on this issue was over. ‘The politics of the subcontinent are currently playing out on the streets of Leeds. Don’t say I didn’t warn you,’ he remarked, a little bombastically. Well, he was quite wrong. What happened in Leeds was nothing to do with the Norwegian sub-continent. Indeed it seems that Norwegians, or Muslims, played a fairly active role in trying to stop the rioting.
It was instead another group of people who are either described as ‘Roma’ or ‘Romanian’ and who were annoyed because the local social services had taken away someone’s children. Not all Roma are Romanian, of course – and not all Romanians are Roma. This makes nomenclature at times like these difficult. You write an article suggesting that Romanians have been responsible for a crimewave in London (very au courant in about 2014) and some charming professor, or dentist, from Constanta contacts your publication and says: ‘Please stop calling these people Romanian. They are not. They are the Roma.’ So, my Leeds informants tell me that these were rather more Roma than Romanian, i.e. travellers. Or, as we are sometimes urged to describe them, ‘static travellers’ – i.e. people who did a bit of travelling but then stopped.
Harehills was actually quite pleasant back in the 1970s, when so many more things were pleasant
Leeds council, meanwhile, put out a statement saying that it ‘has agreed to undertake an urgent review of the case and work with Romanian and Roma-led organisations, the churches, and the honorary consulate of Romania and other family representatives for the best interests of the family and wider Roma community’. The council added: ‘The Romanian and Roma community have played a fantastic role in the community and have contributed much to the diversity and richness of the Harehills.’ No kidding.
Harehills was actually once quite pleasant – we’re talking back in the 1970s when so many more things were pleasant. It is now a filthy, rundown, dilapidated slum which should shame us as a country, except that there are so many of these hell-holes now that we are kind of past shame. Visitors talk of watching young children chasing rats in and out of the frowsy houses. Some 43 per cent of the residents were not born in the UK and 70 per cent of families are in some way ‘deprived’. There is a very high unemployment level, of course.
The benighted area – known primarily for its cheap housing – is divided into ghettos: Romanian Roma here, Slovak Roma there; over the road you’ll find Bangladeshis and round the corner Pakistanis. Within the Roma communities knowledge of the English language is sketchy, because they all have their own shops and cafés where everybody speaks their language. The communities keep very much to themselves while of course energetically contributing to the ‘diversity and richness’ of Harehills. In West Yorkshire there has been a steady rise in the number of Roma families having their children taken into care, according to a report from Bradford a couple of years ago.
Why are they here? And how are they contributing to our economy, apart from through richness and diversity? It is a remarkable thing that Romanians now constitute our fourth largest source of immigrants, having overtaken the Irish – and they are rapidly catching up on Poles. The last census suggests that there are 530,320 Romanians in England and I would venture that a great many of them are Roma. Some 20 per cent of the population of Romania has emigrated in the past 25 years.
The other reason is that in 2014 the stupid coalition government we had at the time – Cameron ’n’ Clegg – removed all labour restrictions imposed on Romanians and Bulgarians and half a million of them did indeed arrive in our country. Cameron did this, of course, because he was required to by a new European Union edict, but it was also extremely profitable because suddenly the UK found itself in receipt of a vast reservoir of very, very cheap seasonal, itinerant and unskilled labour. Kept the wages of the indigenous Brits down, too – so win win!
And now, ten years later, we have places such as Harehills where these poor people are still holed up and becoming increasingly resentful. That is what we have stored up for ourselves. And we knew it at the time.
Comments