This Monday, the eviction of hundreds of Travelers, or Gypsies, camped at Dale Farm, in Essex was halted in the High Court. The eighty or more families have been on the site for more than ten years, on land they bought. The Council says that the travelers have broken England’s Town and Country Planning Act by building on land that has no planning permission, and is a part of the “Green Belt” of protected countryside. Dale Farm is one of the largest traveler sites in Britain and critics find disturbing echoes of past persecutions of Gypsies.

Justice Edwards-Stuart stopped the eviction till Friday, for fear that the Council’s bailiffs would overreach themselves. No doubt the judge could see that hounding Gypsy families makes Britain look very bad in the world press.

With Basildon council’s bailiffs threatening to tear down the bungalows and chalets the travelers have built, you might think that Britain has houses to spare. But it does not. There are more than twenty million households in Britain and rising. But each year fewer than 150,000 new homes are built, not enough to replace the existing housing stock, let alone build homes for the growing number of families. The House Builders’ Federation estimates that at the current rate of replacement, each new house built will have to stand for 1,200 years.