Hearing Sir Nicholas Soames huff and puff on the Today programme today about the importance of the House of Lords made me smile. This is a man best known for his outdated attitudes towards women (one of whom famously described having sex with him...

"Appleby Fair should make my people happy, and the settled people happy, that's the balance I try and strike", Billy Welch, an English Romany declares, sitting in his caravan up on Fair Hill, from where he organises much of the activity at the iconic gypsy gathering. This is Billy Welch's...

Module One of the judge led Leveson inquiry into the culture, practice and ethics of the British press following the phone-hacking scandal at News of the World, took evidence in Module One of the relationship between the press and the public. The list of core participants, many of...

I've been reporting about gypsies and travellers for on and off six years ago, since I first visited the iconic Dale Farm site in Essex, just east of London, for the Economist in 2006.

At that time Dale Farm had just experienced its first real threat of...

Yesterday my children and I were in a council-run adventure playground not far from Finsbury Park, in North-East London. The children there reflect the diversity of our neighbourhood - black, dual heritage, like my own children, Asian, white, all mucking around with the odd spat about territory in the sun....

Every few months in the UK (and in the US and elsewhere, for that matter), there's a shocking news story about a sustained, and often fatal, attack on a disabled person. It's easy to write off such cases as bullying that got out of hand, terrible criminal anomalies or regrettable...