Last week, people in the U.K. got to take a break from worrying about the Islamization of their country. Instead they were offered a fresh chance to ponder the massive influx into the scept’red isle of Eastern European gypsies – or, to use the politically correct term of the moment, Roma. First, Labour Party MP and former Home Secretary David Blunkett, in a rare departure from the usual see-no-evil establishment rhetoric, acknowledged the “frictions” between gypsies and natives and worried aloud that it would eventually kindle riots. “We have got to change the behaviour and the culture of the incoming community, the Roma community, because there’s going to be an explosion otherwise,” Blunkett said. “We all know that.” The next day fellow Labourite Jack Straw, also a former Home Secretary, agreed, admitting that he and his colleagues in government had made a “spectacular mistake” in 2004 when they permitted unrestricted labor immigration from new EU member states in Eastern Europe. (The only other countries to do the same were Sweden and Ireland.) Straw & co. thought that only 13,000 people would come; the number turned out to be more than a million, with a quarter million immigrants arriving in 2010 alone. Alas, in addition to the hundreds of thousands of Poles, Czechs, and others who moved to Britain in sincere search of work, there was a small army of gypsies who came to beg, steal, and freeload.
Until recently, to be sure, things didn’t seem as dicey in Britain as in France, where gypsies have established sprawling encampments in and around major cities, all of which have turned, in no time at all, into ordure-suffused, rat- and lice-infested trash heaps. And whenever officials, if only out of concern for the public health, have tried to get the situation in hand, the media have served up sob stories like one put out by the Associated Press last year: “The camps weren’t much to begin with….Rats ran rampant and fleas gnawed on young and old alike….But they were home – and they were better than the new reality for thousands of Gypsies who have been forced into hiding after France launched its latest campaign this week to drive them from their camps.” Rarely, it seems, do the journalists responsible for this sort of drivel ever ask the gypsies questions like: “Um, if you’re going to live in this place, why can’t you at least try to keep it sanitary?” No, it’s almost always either implied or stated outright that, if the gypsies live in such filth, it’s because they’re poor and oppressed; virtually never is it acknowledged that this way of life is a fundamental element of gypsy culture.