I just flew back from England, and boy are my arms tired of the way their middle class sees the world—especially when ours is headed in the same direction. Their media is currently blabbing on and on about Gypsies—sorry, “Irish Travellers”―being kicked off a nature preserve called Dale Farm in Essex that they developed illegally. These welfare nomads have had ten years of warnings to get their shit together but as of September 19th, the local council has finally said enough is enough and will be using brute force to get them out.

The reaction from what England calls its “middle class”—a large tent which includes millionaires such as Vanessa Redgrave—has been gasping indignance. Redgrave claims the Travellers are a “strong, wise, warm, and gentle community.” Her brother died defending the Travellers. Well, the stress of speaking on their behalf gave him cardiac arrest during a speech, which Redgrave blames on his death five years later. Like most of the British middle class (or the “media class” as the working class calls them), she says she feels very passionately about what’s going on and compares the conflict to Hitler’s regime where “minorities were destroyed.” She says she’s confident the authorities will be pushed back and “humanity will triumph.”

She might be right, at least about the “pushed back” part. Hundreds of anarchists and socialists have begun camping out on the farm and are prepared to die protecting these wonderful people.

But despite the romantic notion of these Irish rovers dancing from town to town and clicking castanets, in real life we’re talking about scumbags.

Everyone who’s dealt with “Gypsies” or the dozen or so different tribes affiliated with the word know they’re about as romantic as abortion. I first learned my utopian vision of them was bullshit back in 1993 when I spent some time in Palermo and saw toddlers stationed on highway medians covered in soot and begging for change. All over Italy, I saw dirt-encrusted pickpockets under the age of ten, and few of them had shoes. The only time I’ve ever seen adult male Gypsies anywhere in Europe has been in bars partying their asses off. One Essex cop told me they shut down all pubs in a ten-mile radius of a Gypsy wedding because there is inevitably complete chaos if they don’t. The men drink all the booze, vandalize the pub, and leave without paying a cent.

The Gypsies in Dale Farm are affectionately referred to as Irish Travellers because although they have essentially the same culture as the Roma, they are white and talk very differently (see Brad Pitt in Snatch). Nobody’s sure why the Irish nomads are so similar to their Roma counterparts because it’s been this way for hundreds of years. One theory is the redheads met the brunettes at an annual horse fair in the northwest of England called Appleby which began shortly after Oliver Cromwell’s war against the Irish left so many of them wandering aimlessly throughout the countryside in the 1600s. I personally couldn’t give a shit exactly where one Gypsy culture strays from the other. They all suck and for the exact same reasons. The men are king and do nothing but sit on their asses all day. The women are barely considered human beings. The children rank way below that.

Outside of the children, the primary breadwinners in these communities tend to be the women, but when they are arrested for their various petty crimes, the kids are left with no guardian. Men see looking after kids as beneath them, so the police wind up sending the poor bastards to foster care. It’s not unusual for Gypsy women to use foster care itself as a hustle. They play victim, but their entire income is based on scamming innocent victims.