Residents of a South Yorkshire village have reported being “terrorised” by a large influx of Roma migrants, and have warned that “blood will be spilt” unless police step in.
The Express reports that the number of Roma in the village of Hexthorpe has risen sharply over the past few months, from a handful to more than 500. Angry residents now say that riots and violence could erupt unless police do something about the increase in incidents of fly-tipping, late-night noise and threats and intimidation.
Residents say the situation is getting worse day-by-day, with local council workers collecting 16 tons of illegally dumped rubbish in just four days.
They also report large groups of men congregating in the village park and intimidating locals by taunting and jeering at them.
Local resident Paul Adams told the Express: “The immigrants don’t care about the village or our community. All they are here for is the benefits.
“They are loud, aggressive and intimidating. They gather in groups in the park and on the streets. They throw rubbish everywhere, literally out of their windows into their garden, in the knowledge the council will clear it up.
“They need educating in how to be part of the community.”
Another resident, Elizabeth Boardman, said that the village’s previous community spirit had vanished. “Now I wouldn’t walk down the road on my own. I try to ignore them but you get scared.
“If they carry on, people will take the law into their own hands and there will be riots in the streets.”
South Yorkshire Police are now due to run a special operation in the next three weeks to try to calm community relations within the village.
The incidents come just weeks after a national row in which UKIP leader Nigel Farage said that he would feel uncomfortable if a group of Romanian men moved in next door.
After apologising for him clumsy wording, Farage went on to point out that 92 percent of all ATM crime in London is committed by Romanians, and in 2013, 28,000 Romanians were arrested by the London police force. He added that 240 Romanian gangs caused seven percent of all crime across the European Union.
The warning that “blood will be spilt” by local villagers is an eerie reminder of Enoch Powell’s now infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech from 1968.
Though widely misunderstood and often misquoted, Powell, who was then Shadow Secretary for Defence, said: “Here is the means of showing that the immigrant communities can organise to consolidate their members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens, and to overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and the ill-informed have provided. As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood.””
While Powell was sacked the very next day after his speech, a Gallup poll at the time showed that 74 percent of Britons had agreed with it. Latterly, Margaret Thatcher said of Powell that he had “made a valid argument, if in sometimes regrettable terms.”
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