Workers Together

Levenshulme, south Manchester, is the place of choice for around 500 Roma people, mainly from Romania.  Ramona Constantin arrived from Romania in 2009 she could not speak English and sold The Big Issue in the North to get by. Now a mother of three and a teaching assistant.

She says she has been given a chance in this country, a place she regards as "my home, no matter what others say".

Ramona is not alone. Several years ago there were only a handful of families in Levenshulme from Romania. Now there are around 2,000 Romanians in Greater Manchester.  Unlike in Sheffield where senior politicians warned of serious unrest, there has been no similar talk here.

"We have been invited now by Sheffield and other cities to come and talk about our experiences,"  Professor Yaron Matras, who leads the Romani project at the University of Manchester, said. "What we have done here anybody can do; there is nothing very special about us."

At nearby Gorton Mount Primary Academy where nearly seven out of 10 pupils are from an immigrant background. In year five, only five out of 26 children are from a white British background. Results from English and Maths are better than the national average.

Seven years ago, Daniel Moise arrived in the suburb when he was 12. He now works as a youth worker. He feels the Roma are still misunderstood and children refuse to say they are Roma "because they are afraid they will get bullied", adding: "Most of us have a job. We are only looking to get paid to help our family.”

Politicians are inflaming community tensions with anti-Roma rhetoric, an alliance of Tory, Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs has warned.

MPs on the all-parliamentary party group on Gypsies, Travellers and Roma sounded the alarm about provocative language as a prominent Tory council leader suggested some Roma are planning to come to the UK to "pickpocket and aggressively beg". Philippa Roe, of Westminster city council, blamed Roma in central London for already causing "a massive amount of disruption and low-level crime", including defecating on doorsteps but failed to provide evidence to back her claims.

Andrew George, a Lib Dem MP who is chairman of the group, said "They already exist in an environment of deep prejudice and community tension anyway. This is just setting them back after making some progress in some of the areas in which they have improved their relations.”

David Hanson, the shadow immigration minister, said the government has ignored calls to strengthen existing legislation that could stop employers from undercutting British employees' wages by recruiting from overseas...such as extending gangmaster legislation to areas such as catering and tourism, and particularly focusing on recruitment agencies which are recruiting solely from eastern Europe. Those are other measures we could be doing to focus on low-skilled immigration," he said.