The Roma 'Hordes'
Bulgaria and Romania joined the EU in 2004. On New Year's Day 2014, after transitional controls were lifted, Bulgarians and Romanians including Gypsies, gained the same rights to live and work in Britain as other EU citizens. On that day the Daily Express ran the headline 'BENEFITS BRITAIN HERE WE COME!' And, suggesting Roma migrants were all criminals, the Daily Star trumpeted: 'NEW YEAR'S THIEVE!' On that same day, like the legendary brave Dutch boy putting his finger in the broken dike, Keith Vaz MP, Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee, went to Luton Airport to face the 'flood'. Only two Romanian migrants got off the plane. Both had jobs lined up, one as a doctor in Essex the other, Victor Spirescu, in a car wash company.
Attacking the 'alarmist and insulting' media campaign against Romanians, Dr Ion Jinga the Romanian Ambassador commented: 'It seems that a new version of Waiting for Godot is being reinvented by part of the British media who are desperately waiting for the arrival of millions of Romanians after January 1st 2014.' The ambassador felt it necessary to explain that 'Samuel Beckett's best known play Waiting for Godot is an absurdist comedy in which two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, wait endlessly and in vain for the arrival of someone called Godot'. I thought Bravo! Would an English politician have had the nerve to mention such a 'highbrow' work for fear of losing populist cred? Thank goodness for Europe, including Romania, and people coming here from the rest of the world, to widen our horizons, sharpen our wits and jolt us out of our complacent, philistine, post-imperial insularity.
Again, on New Year's Day 2014 in London, UK border agency police swooped on Roma Gypsies in the Marble Arch underpass. They rounded them up to deport all those whose papers were not in perfect order.
Gypsy Music: The Trumpet Shall Sound
I recently read an inspiring book by Garth Cartwright: Princes among Men: Journeys with Gypsy Musicians (Serpent's Tail, London 2005). He describes his travels through the Balkans, where he met many of the superb Gypsy musicians who kept their music alive even when in Soviet times it was discredited for not being socialist-realist:
Tomorrow, May 6th is the day of the Gypsies, one they can mark as their own, St George's Day.
Ederlezi in Romani. Gergyovden in Bulgarian.
Djurdjevdan in Serbian. Gjurgjovden in Macedonian.
Hidrellez in Turkish. George is the catch-all saint of the Balkans yet to the Roma, why he's theirs.Ederlezi… is a hymn to the community's survival.
On the evening of May 5th Roma communities across the Balkans rise and come out to play.
We are fortunate to be able to hear this increasingly appreciated music in Britain from the Roma musicians who have come here. They are even teaching Brits to play it. One Brighton band, Fanfara, began learning to play from Roma musicians on visits to Romania and Serbia, as well as in workshops when some of these musicians came to the Brighton Festival. Fanfara was the first British band invited to take part in the Guča International Trumpet Festival in Serbia. They wore white as 'peace ambassadors'. At the festival the sound of trumpets was loud enough to raise the dead.
At least, it proved you can't kill the spirit.