UK government may have illegally given Roma asylum; intense anti-Gypsyism in the British press
12 April 2000
According to an article in the British daily Mail of March 5, 2000, British authorities may have provided asylum status to Ms Maria Nistor, a Romanian Romani woman, in exchange for receiving reports from Ms Nistor about other asylum seekers. A spokesperson for the Home Office reportedly admitted receiving reports from Ms Nistor, but denied that she had been recruited. The article stated that there was no record of Ms Nistor’s having claimed asylum. Immigration officers had reportedly stated that she had completed asylum application paperwork.
Beginning March 9, 2000, the British press ran a series of intensely racist articles on Roma, especially Romani beggars from Romania. Although even mainstream media stooped to anti-Romani hysteria, by far the worst offenders were Britain’s tabloid press, especially the Sun and Evening Standard. For example, the Sun wrote on March 14: “Kind-hearted Brits are helping gipsy beggars buy themselves palaces. The Romanian spongers rake in up to twenty pounds sterling an HOUR of our hard-earned dosh — and send it straight home. And their relatives spend it building ornate 12-bedroom mansions around the capital Bucharest — where most people live in tiny flats and earn twenty pounds sterling a WEEK. Yesterday, Sun reporter Andrea Busfield [...] visited a group of gipsy palaces at Sintesti near the capital. Only a handful of the mansions had been completed. The rest stood half-finished, waiting for the next cash boost from British taxpayers. [...] The Sintesti scam is run by a gold-toothed gipsy nicknamed The Bully-Basher, head of the Caldasar clan. [...] And as more bogus asylum-seekers are finding every day, the quickest route to riches is in Britain — where every dole cheque buys another truckload of brick and mortar.” Although it is unclear whether any of the Roma concerned have applied for asylum in Britain, the Sun linked the issue of “Gypsy beggars from Romania” to ongoing public debates on refugees in Britain: “Britain has become the laughing stock of Europe for giving asylum seekers huge handouts while our own people struggle. [...] Why are so many Romanian gipsies being allowed into Britain when their country is not even at war?”
Allison Pearson, writing in the Evening Standard of March 15, elaborated, justifying present xenophobia with past racist fantasies: “At the fiendish Angel junction near where I live a band of wiry, raven women, small children tucked efficiently under their arms or clinging to their long skirts, weave in and out of the traffic, holding out their palms to strangers. [...] As a child, I was told not to give money to gipsies because, if I remember rightly, they were dirty beggars, bad luck, stole nice people’s babies and — a clinching detail, this — lived in caravans. [...] my grandmother’s uncharacteristically harsh words on the gipsies come back to me the more I observe our local troupe in action. The children at the Angel look drugged, or maybe just numb, a state to which their mothers — if mothers they be — appear sullenly indifferent. And they ARE dirty — cheeks streaked with grease from the fumes. Their eyes have that black-hole quality we saw in those toddlers peering from their cots in the Romanian orphanages. They are not just sad, these children; they already look lost to the world, props in some degrading spectacle of which you fear they may be dimly aware. According to staggering reports in this newspaper, props is precisely what these children at the Angel may turn out to be. A gipsy township in Romania is cheerfully dispatching beggars to England, complete with scripts for their own little asylum-seeking drama. The aim is to drag out the application as long as possible and, meanwhile, send the profits home.”
Attempting greater detachment, The Independent wrote on March 13 on government officials responses to “aggressive beggars”: “The Home Office minister Paul Boateng said it was ‘unacceptable’ that Romanians were begging on the streets and the Tube in London. ... Sir John Stevens, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, has said he will operate a ‘zero-tolerance’ policy to all beggars, promising to sweep them off the streets, and Mr Boateng said Sir John had his ‘100 per cent’ backing, whatever he decided to do. The minister added: “‘There is an increase in the number of gypsies from Eastern Europe on our streets who maintain that this is part of their traditional lifestyle.’”
(Evening Standard, The Independent, The Sun)
