“Hey, Gypsy woman! Look into your crystal ball,” sang 1960s crooner Ricky Nelson while pondering his romantic future. Few of today’s Roma are under any illusions about what lies ahead, and it’s certainly not romantic. Comments from Italy’s new interior minister, Matteo Salvini, have caused a minor stir. He’s commissioned a “census” of Italy’s 130,000 Roma and hopes to expel the foreign ones, admitting he’s “unfortunately” powerless to do anything about Italy’s indigenous Roma.



Salvini’s pronouncements are nothing new. Eight years ago the president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, targeted Romanian and Bulgarian Roma for deportation. Then the outcry felt greater and the international backlash was considerable. (Sarkozy ended up bribing the Roma back to Romania at the cost of €300 a head, but the plan backfired when many took the money and left France, only to return.) Right now we’re living in strange times. What hope does an unsavoury Italian minister – the same man who has prohibited the docking of migrant rescue boats from the Mediterranean – have of shocking the world when President Trump has only just been shamed into prohibiting the separation of immigrant families at America’s southern border?



That’s especially true of the Roma, a group nobody seems to care about. Can anybody even recall the violence against their community in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary; ongoing attacks that eventually led to a 2017 European court of human rights verdict that ruled that the state’s failure to act appeared to legitimise the abuse? The last whipping boy of Europe, the Roma have no middle-class voice, no homeland, no leverage on the international stage. Yet they’re the European Union’s biggest ethnic minority.

Society has become good at retrospective remorse recently, and rightly so. Britain regularly apologises for our role in the slave trade and Germany has worked hard at coming to terms with the holocaust. But how much collective sympathy do the Roma get? They were the last officially enslaved people on the European mainland. The chattel of landowners and the church, Romanian gypsies were only fully emancipated in 1855-56, just before Wallachia and Moldavia united to form Romania. Then the incentive was less compassion and more a fear of condemnation on the international stage.

Romania has the largest Roma population in Europe, with some estimates putting it above 2 million. Like Sarkozy, Salvini mainly targets those who are Romanian and certainly eastern European, (the EU’s 6 million Roma mainly live in the former communist states). There, they bump along at the bottom of society. A century ago, Romania’s Jews were refused citizenship and persecuted for simply existing; today, the Roma have taken their place.



Once home to proportionally the largest Jewish minority in Europe, there are now scarcely 3,000 Jews in Romania – most went to America and later Israel. But the Roma don’t have an Israel, and America certainly won’t be welcoming them any time soon. Along with the Jews, they were targeted in the Holocaust but those who survived had nowhere to go. They are citizens, but in name alone. Ghettoised and regularly subjected to forced evictions, the lot of the Roma is dismal. I know, I’ve spent time with them. Childbirth really is often their only means of receiving legitimate government handouts and with just 9% of Roma children finishing high school, their prospects are bleak. Communism’s mass industrialisation obliterated a way of life that was dependent on cottage industry and local knowhow. Forget distorted stories about Gypsy-scammers who build shiny palaces, the vast majority are on the breadline. In neighbouring Bulgaria (home to about half a million), anti-Roma attacks are increasingly commonplace. So some head west. “We make more money begging here,” they’ll tell you, and that’s not saying much.

The community is averse to the census, so there’s no definitive Roma population statistic for Britain, ditto France (it is thought there are about 200,000 in the UK, perhaps more in France), yet there are frequently newspaper campaigns against their presence, stories written about Fagin’s children and pickpockets, and they are subject to overzealous police raids. Western society generalises about the Roma and vilifies them in a way we wouldn’t dare refer to any other minority. Back in Romania, people feel sullied by the impact this diaspora has on their national image. “They’re Tigani, not Romanians”, is the common refrain.



It’s the 21st century – even 10 years ago there was hope that might mean progress and compassion, but in today’s Europe the discourse has hardened. Having allowed refugees into Germany, even Angela Merkel is fighting for her political life, and Britain is leaving the EU thanks in part to an anti-immigration campaign. What hope is there? Sadly, Italy’s Salvini knows this. His comments against Europe’s most vulnerable community were calculated to increase his popularity. Some Roma will be expelled, they might head back to eastern Europe, and the problem will get worse. Castigating Trump on Twitter is easy, but, closer to home, isn’t it time we faced up to the uncomfortable truth that no one wants the Roma?