Way, way late to this one but I'm guessing here you've never lived next to "travellers" have you?
If you had you would have another story to tell. Im a lefty liberal, but in the mid 80s they came to South Hackney, to the bit of green between my block of council flats and the next one. They were there 2 weeks, in which time they
- mugged my 80 year old next door neighbour of her pension money coming out of the post office on Broadway Market
-set fire to my mates van who had an extremely modest house moving business
- stole from every shop in our street, started fights in every pub. Yes them, they looked for the fights, every time. One pub got done for having a "No Travellers" sign in the window, for some stupid reason they'd picked his pub where they were all going to go
It just went on and on. Back then, I was 25 or so, and as groovy lefty as you like. After that 2 or 3 weeks, I modified my stance. "Even the most liberal person, if they have to live near travellers, will change their views."
Since then, on a couple of occasions, the above has been shown to be true for me. Guardian reader types, friends of mine who thought I was being a cunt before came up against pikeys and found themselves fucked, for one reason or another, similar to the above (I havent mentioned the half of it before, the human shit everywhere, the babies with unwashed bums, the rubbish everywhere...)
Like I say, come back to us on this matter when you've lived next door to these people