News

Seldom can a government planning circular have excited such fury. Yet somehow planning circular 1/94, issued presumably in all innocence by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, scaled the heights of tabloid hysteria. No surprise that the circular concerned a minority group, this time gypsies and travellers, whose interests it was trying to uphold in a minimal way. The Sun and the Daily Mail were in their element, the latter speaking of towns "blighted by travellers".

It was a reprise of the tabloid line on asylum seekers, which has succeeded in whipping up prejudice across middle England, often in places that never see an asylum seeker from one year to the next. Fear of the stranger has much to do with it, rationality very little. The planning circular merely attempts to repair some of the damage done by the Conservative government in 1994 when it abolished councils' duty to provide sites for travellers. It can only improve the current chaotic arrangements, to the advantage both of travellers and their host communities. None of which was apparent in the Sun and the Daily Mail, whose frequent targeting of minorities ought to be a fit subject of study for the Press Complaints Commission.