EU Referendum


EU politics: Roma - a study in hypocrisy


17/11/2013



000a Telegraph-016 Roma.jpg

Wherever they go they are trouble but, by and large, mainland Europe has had to deal with them. Hitler had a solution and not a few contemporary politicians, like this one, think he didn't go far enough.

Now, for the media, this week seems to have been open season on the Roma. The Express is full of it and the Sunday Telegraph is telling us we're on the brink of a race war, with Pakistani immigrants and Roma battling it out on the streets of Sheffield.

While this story attracts more than 3,000 comments – the vast majority hostile to the Roma and immigrants in general - The Observer struggles to reach 200, with its "real story" of Britain's Roma: the poor souls are "excluded, ignored and neglected".

The thing is that, even if that is true – which it probably is – the question is, why is that our problem? And the simple answer is very simple: because we are members of the European Union.

A more complex answer, however, is one to which the European Commission has drawn attention in a number of detailed reports. In April 2011, it offered an "EU Framework for National Roma Integration Strategies up to 2020", basically telling member state governments that many of the estimated 10-12 million Roma in Europe faced prejudice, intolerance, discrimination and social exclusion in their daily lives.

They are, said the Commission, marginalised and live in very poor socio-economic conditions, adding that, "this is not acceptable in the European Union (EU) at the beginning of the 21st Century".

Member States were thus instructed to ensure that Roma were not discriminated against but "treated like any other EU citizens with equal access to all fundamental rights as enshrined in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights". In addition, action was needed "to break the vicious cycle of poverty moving from one generation to the next".

A year later, the Commission was reminding Member States that they had the primary responsibility and the competences to change the situation of marginalised populations, so action to support Roma lay "first and foremost in their hands".

In order to make "a tangible difference to Roma people's lives", Member States needed "to develop and implement an integrated and sustainable approach that combines efforts across different areas, including education, employment, health and housing".

By June this year though, the Commission was complaining that Member State strategies were inadequate, failing fully to assess the needs of Europe's largest minority, with the UK failing on many counts.

This goes to the heart of the issue. To deal with the Roma requires considerable resources, a strategic plan and strong political commitment. But, while the government has accepted responsibility for Roma immigrants, and the need to deal with their problems – by virtue of our membership of the EU which it enthusiastically supports – when it comes to making the resources available, it is nowhere to be seen.

Given that there are well over 200,000 Roma migrants in the UK, and many more expected, serious money is required – probably several hundred million, if not billions. But, in a period of tightening up public expenditure, it would be political suicide for the British government to allocate that amount of cash to an unpopular minority.

Thus, what the government has done is dump the problem in the lap of local authorities, with no significant extra resources being found, requiring harassed local taxpayers to foot the bill. This is especially troublesome for authorities in the Gateway Protection Programme, which accept immigrants dispersed from their points of entry.

Essentially, what we have got here is a classic study in hypocrisy. On the one hand, we have a government extolling the virtues and benefits of EU membership, heedless of the fact that membership brings with it responsibilities and commitments. Thus, when a problem such as the Roma rears its ugly head, the government goes missing, and ducks the responsibilities it, itself, had assumed.

As a result, we get communications from our local authorities telling us that the strain on public services is increasing to such an extent that the Council Tax must go up.  Little research is needed to discover that the extra strain arises almost entirely from inwards immigration of problem communities.

And so it is that UKIP is mounting its high-profile campaign directed at blocking further Roma immigration. But then it is possibly unaware of the ultimate irony. Whatever responsibilities this government might have accepted via the European Union, many of them have been duplicated via the Council of Europe Strasbourg Declaration on Roma, agreed by the Coalition Government in October 2010.

The essence of our problem, therefore, goes far wider than the EU, resting with a government that is taking on commitments without seeking democratic legitimacy, grandstanding on the international stages and expecting us the people to pick up the bill and suffer the consequences.

Then, when we the people have the temerity to complain, we become rascists, bigots and all the other pejoratives that the establishment deem fit to throw at us. But this is not a problem of our making, and we have not been asked whether we are willing to contribute to its solution.

The fact that, if asked., we would probably have said "no" tells us all we need to know about the way we are governed.

COMMENT THREAD