News Shorts & Other Busyness

Blue Rabies In Wiltshire

Squall 5, Oct/Nov 1993, pg. 25.

There must be something about the County of Wiltshire that breeds ‘em rabid. One of the two national headquarters of Operation Snapshot, the police’s computer surveillance network monitoring the movement of Travellers, is based at Devizes in Wiltshire and The Chief Constable of the county, Walter Given, is a publicly verbal anti-Traveller (see News of the Sqews in this issue).

Mysteriously, the other Operation Snapshot headquarters is at Penrith in the County of Cumbria, not nationally noted as a Traveller hotspot. But perhaps all can be explained when it is remembered that the present Chief Constable of Cumbria was once the Chief Constable of Wiltshire, a police force reprimanded by the courts (not too excessively you understand) for the hysterical violence they laid on the travellers in The Battle of the Beanfield in 1985, captured in glorious blood-red technicolour film and shown on Channel Four.