Content Warning: This blog contains references to racism, forced displacement, slavery, institutional abuse, forced exclusion, state violence, cultural erasure and intergenerational trauma experienced by Gypsy and Traveller people under colonial and state systems.

We live within a colonial system that has, for more than 600 years, labelled Gypsy and Traveller people as criminals, trespassers, and outsiders. A system that actively denied us homes. Denied us education. Denied us safety.

From the 1960s, when Gypsies and Travellers were openly told we were not welcome in schools and communities, to the 1990s, when our children’s hair and bodies were inspected at school gates, our difference was treated not as culture, but as contamination. Our homelessness was criminalised by default — not seen as the result of exclusion, but used as justification for further punishment.

We were sold into slavery and murdered because of our ethnicity. Our traditions were outlawed. Our movement was feared. Our knowledge systems — the wisdom of the old world, passed through blood, land, story and skilled hands — were forced into silence. The message was simple and brutal: conform or disappear.

So we hid. We survived in the shadows. Not because it was safe, but because it was necessary.

And now, after centuries of deliberate exclusion, you suddenly expect us to “catch up.” Now that mainstream education is being forced upon our communities — after being actively denied to us — the racialised trauma your system inflicted is conveniently forgotten. The exclusions. The school refusals. The damaged and hurting children. The generations who were taught they did not belong. None of this is properly recognised.

Let us be clear:

We are behind because you put us there.
We are excluded because you put us there.

Yes, weak apologies for the so-called “Tinker Experiment” are steps in the right direction. But apology without repair is meaningless. Recognition without action is performance.

What is a step in the wrong direction is this:

Councils and statutory bodies now approach Gypsy and Traveller people to “consult,” to “engage,” to “learn from lived experience.” But when we step forward with our time, our knowledge, our emotional labour and our solutions, we are told there is no budget. That we should volunteer. That we should be grateful for the experience. Grateful just to be invited to the table.

Let us say this plainly:

Expecting unpaid labour from a community you have systematically marginalised is not inclusion — it is exploitation.

You do not get to deny us housing, criminalise our way of life, exclude us from education and healthcare — and then ask us to fix the harm for free. You do not get to use charity funding and community goodwill to outsource the work that your institutions are responsible for. You do not get to turn our trauma into your unpaid project plan.

If you can pay consultants, programme leads, diversity officers and advisors, then you can pay Gypsy and Traveller people too.

We are not here to scrape from the edges of a table built on our backs. We are not here to be a tick-box, a photo opportunity, or a “community voice” that is only convenient when it costs you nothing.

Colonial Britain needs to take a long, honest look at itself.

We will no longer be spoken for.
We will no longer be spoken about.
We will no longer be used.

We are still here.
We are resisting.
We are organising.
We are speaking.

Not because your system has changed — but because, as always, survival has required us to evolve.

It is time for:

• Real reparative investment, not charity
• Real power-sharing, not consultations
• Real accountability, not symbolism
• And real respect for a people who outlived every attempt to erase them

We do not want a seat at your table.

We are building our own.