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Douglas Ross and the war on Scotland’s Travellers

How the Scottish Tory leader has prised open one of the country’s oldest and deepest racist fault lines

Douglas Ross and the war on Scotland’s Travellers
In 2017, Douglas Ross said 'tougher enforcement against Gypsy Travellers' would be his priority if he were PM for a day | SST / Alamy Stock Photo
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“‘Tinks’, ‘pikeys’, ‘gyppos’: racist names, you can take that,” George Stewart told me recently. “But organised racism, that’s the worst.”

George was born in Elgin, in the north-east of Scotland, in the 1950s. From the age of 13, like his ancestors before him, he spent his life on the move. In 2010, he and his family bought a plot of land back in Moray, the council area that surrounds Elgin, where they planned to establish a Traveller site.

But there was a problem. The chair of Moray’s planning committee was soon to be an ambitious young Tory named Douglas Ross.