Letter: How New Age travellers abuse the right of valid protest

Sir: Further to yesterday's leading article, may I draw your attention to a clause in the Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill that has received little notice? I quote from the Explanatory and Financial Memoranda that preface the Bill's first printing:

Clause 76 enables the Secretary of State to declare to be a new prison any floating structure which is vested in him or under his control and also enables any building or floating structure provided by a contractor to be a prison.

Is this what the Government plans to do with the thousands of new 'criminals' its anti-trespass 'law' will create? In this case, more law seems guaranteed to provoke less order.

The young and the dissident require more than a fair hearing. They are fully entitled to their fair share of space and freedom in which to evolve their own future. Nothing they do could be uglier than Mr Howard's 'solution'.

Meanwhile, I, for one, will carry on trespassing, in evidence that this land is everybody's land, and in hope that there must someday come a fair share-out according to need, not greed.

Yours faithfully,

GILL BARRON

High Bentham, North Yorkshire

11 October