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Douglas Ross and the war on Scotland’s Travellers
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“‘Tinks’, ‘pikeys’, ‘gyppos’: racist names, you can take that,” George Stewart told me recently. “But organised racism, that’s the worst.”

George was born in Elgin, in the north-east of Scotland, in the 1950s. From the age of 13, like his ancestors before him, he spent his life on the move. In 2010, he and his family bought a plot of land back in Moray, the council area that surrounds Elgin, where they planned to establish a Traveller site.

But there was a problem. The chair of Moray’s planning committee was soon to be an ambitious young Tory named Douglas Ross.

“He waged a campaign to get rid of us ... I was flabbergasted,” said George, who claimed that he and his family repeatedly saw Ross at the bottom of their drive, taking photos of their home, and that “he was going round the farms” asking people to sign a letter saying “they didn’t want us here”. Speaking to the local paper in 2011, Ross called his attempts to stop his constituent from establishing a Traveller site a “battle”.

The Stewarts’ neighbours rallied to their support. A rival letter was circulated, backing their application, which got more signatures than the one opposing it. Eventually the Scottish government approved the site. But more striking was Ross’s response to the decision: “I am disappointed and frustrated that we seem to have to bend over backwards for this ethnic minority,” he said, in 2013.

Today, Ross leads the Scottish Conservatives. His attitude towards Scotland’s Gypsy/Traveller community is no secret: when he was first elected an MP in 2017, he notoriously said that his number one priority, if he were prime minister for a day, would be “tougher enforcement against Gypsy Travellers”. But the extent of his history of persecuting Travellers has never been properly explored. Until now.

“He quite clearly had an issue [with Travellers], it was quite vitriolic at times,” recalled Gordon McDonald, an SNP councillor who also sat on the planning committee Ross chaired. “He was very fierce in his arguments against them.”

In 2010, Ross voiced opposition to a different site on the grounds that it was too far from urban centres, saying “I have concerns about the ability to manage and control the site if it is in a more remote and rural area.” But in 2013, his committee ruled that Traveller sites would not be allowed within a kilometre of existing settlements, a policy described to me by Traveller community elder Lynne Tammi as “apartheid”.

Ross would later use his position as chair of the planning committee to ask officials what would happen if the council took the “novel approach” of refusing to host any sites for Gypsy/Travellers. He was told that his Traveller site ban would breach basic human rights laws.

In three weeks’ time, Scotland will vote in what many have called the most important election in the history of the modern Scottish parliament. If pro-Independence parties get a majority, it will widely be seen as a mandate for another referendum.

Just as they did in 2016 with Ruth Davidson, the Conservatives are trying to sell their new leader as a candidate to unite the country against such a vote. But Douglas Ross has built his political career not on bringing people together – rather, on prying open one of Scotland’s oldest and deepest racist fault lines.

I put the findings of my research to the Scottish Conservatives. A spokesman said: “These historic accusations are false. They do not accurately represent Douglas Ross’s work as a councillor, his time on the local planning committee, or his views. At all times Mr Ross acted within the Councillors Code of Conduct when he chaired the cross-party planning committee.”

The decline of Scotland’s Travelling community

To understand Ross’s actions we need to see attitudes in their full context. In 2015, a third of respondents to a survey said that Gypsy/Travellers shouldn’t be allowed to be primary school teachers in Scotland. A similar proportion said they would be upset if a close relative married someone from that background.

Yet because the persecution of nomadic communities – elsewhere in the world, as well as here in Scotland – is violently underreported, this is a context it’s easy to forget. It’s a window into the human experience that, too often, we choose not to look through.

Anti-Traveller prejudice was my first experience of racism. I don’t remember the ‘N-word’ or the ‘P-word’ being thrown around at my primary school in the Angus Glens, 90 miles south of Moray. The ‘T-word’, on the other hand – ‘tinker’, a slur for Scottish Travellers – was common, usually spat out with a nasty adjective attached.

Travellers were people we encountered; some of the children probably even came from Traveller backgrounds, though they didn’t admit it. Every summer, we’d see the camps – I can still remember exact spots – as families arrived to pick berries and tatties. But you don’t see them anymore.

It’s not just Scotland’s Travellers who are being made sedentary. Semi-nomadic Inuit cultures are melting as the world heats. The Chinese government is violently forcing hundreds of thousands of transhumant pastoralists to settle. Moken Sea Nomads in South-East Asia struggle to travel because of borders and bigotry. From Middle Eastern Bedouins to American Apache; Australia’s Spinifex to Patagonia’s Kawésqar canoe people, itinerant cultures everywhere are being fenced and tethered.

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