The actions of Basildon council, along with their Government supporters, are quite remarkable. They would seem willing to spend some £18m evicting the Dale Farm Travellers, using a legally dubious argument pieced together from outdated planning law. In the process, they are happy to take on the UN and UNICEF, Amnesty International, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, and even the US State Department (their April 2011 UK human rights report mentioned the case of Dale Farm).

The planning law their case is based on is, as it happens, recognised to be outdated by their same Government supporters. George Osborne, with the willing cooperation of housing and planning ministers Grant Shapps and Greg Clark, has cooked up the draft National Planning Policy Framework. A document described, in no uncertain terms, as ‘a dud’, by National Trust chief Sir Simon Jenkins.

Patently, Green Belt planning guidelines were not primarily designed to legitimise forced removals of Gypsies and Travellers. Nevertheless, this is how the regulations have been consistently used by Local Authorities up and down the country. Indeed, the very purpose of those guidelines, to ‘check the unrestricted sprawl of large built-up areas’, is being undermined in the draft NPPF document, with no small help from the private-sector housing lobby.

The economic growth promised because of this, if it actually materialises (which George Monbiot and others have pointed out is unlikely), will in any case not be at all sustainable. Neither will it produce affordable housing, as those housing companies lobbying for change naturally have a primary interest in their profit margins, and do not have at heart the interests of those who need housing but cannot afford deposits or mortgage repayments.

Meanwhile, it has emerged that Basildon council were not merely overconfident, but actively duplicitous in their dealings at Dale Farm. The land the Travellers have been denied planning on was never Green Belt in the first place. It was, long before the Travellers bought it in 2001, converted into a brown-field site, a scrap yard to house hundreds of cars.

Ray Bocking, the former owner of the site, alleges that the council themselves authorised (or were at least complicit with) the laying of hard-standing, and contracted Mr Bocking to store cars there. Aerial photographs from the 1990s clearly show the scrap yard on the eastern side of Dale Farm, the side where the ‘illegal’ Traveller settlements are now based.

That Basildon council knew of this is almost certain (and if they didn’t, it is a display of fabulous incompetence). It appears to be a breathtakingly orchestrated cover-up, an attempt to redefine the Dale Farm scrap yard as ‘Green Belt’, so that Irish Travellers could be easily evicted.

If these allegations are true—and the aerial photographs of Dale Farm from the 1990s look quite convincing—Basildon council will have, willingly or otherwise, misled the High Court and the Court of Appeal, and perhaps even the Prime Minister. Such was their success that even counsel for the defence of the Travellers was convinced the land was Green Belt.

If the eviction is averted at Dale Farm, this still leaves the need to address the dire situation faced by many Gypsies and Travellers in the UK. Prejudice and racism is tolerated against them much more than against any other minority group. According to Dr John Coxhead, criminologist at the  University of Derby, ‘prejudice towards Travellers in the police is not only accepted, it’s expected’. In 2008 the High Court ruled that Basildon council’s treatment of the Dale Farm Travellers had been prejudicial; this decision was not revoked in the subsequent appeal.

Gypsies and Travellers have some of the lowest rates of health and education in the country, and this is not helped by their consistent uprooting by councils; children are bullied and struggle at schools, although education levels in the community are increasing.

In a bizarre twist of fate, the housing minister Grant Shapps suggested that the rising tide of homelessness—an overall increase of 17% in the last quarter, compared to the previous year—could be helped by councils housing the homeless in caravans and mobile homes (as well as, in a stroke of brilliance, houseboats). A cruel irony for the many Gypsies and Travellers in the country, and particularly for those worried about whether their right to stay at Dale Farm will be revoked.

But in an important sense, we should not let Dale Farm distract us: the wider picture is bleak. The conditions for many Gypsies and Travellers are often desperate, their lives blighted by prejudice and ill-treatment. While there are some—a growing number—who stand as advocates for them, those in power seem willing to prolong prejudiced treatment, and even resort to allegedly duplicitous manoeuvres to achieve their ends. The problem is much larger than one site in Basildon.