Operation Traveller Vote

By Grace Preston, Senior Policy Officer

When we began the plans for relaunching Operation Traveller Vote, we had truthfully planned for a much later election, but since Rishi Sunak announced the date of July 4th, we have been working around the clock to ensure that every Romani (Gypsy), Roma and Irish Traveller across the country feels empowered to use their voice.  

We started with launching our Manifesto 2024, which we were working on in partnership with our valued community members. The Manifesto aimed to consolidate some of the major issues and inequalities faced by Romani (Gypsy), Roma and Irish Traveller communities and provide a future government with actionable steps to tackle these inequalities.  

Dr David Smith (Professor at Anglia Ruskin University) one of our trustees on the launch of the manifesto said: “When politicians speak about inclusive agendas, they mean inclusion for only some but not for others. We want to see an agenda for government which is inclusive of Romani (Gypsy), Roma and Irish Traveller who up until this point have been left out of these discussions.” 

We then as a team attended Appleby Fair, it was truly a great weekend for all the team, where we spoke to so many community members about the importance of using their voice. The event was an excellent opportunity to connect with people, share valuable voting information, and encourage everyone to make their vote count. We got a chance to interview the incredible Billy Welch who organises Appleby Fair, keep an eye on our socials to see when that drops.  

In our efforts to get as many people registered as possible, we travelled up and down the country partnering with Romani (Gypsy), Roma and Irish Traveller organisations to hold voter drive events. We want to give a wholehearted thank you to all the organisations we worked with, Connecting Roma, Travelling Ahead, LEEGDSGATE, HERTSGATE. We also visited sites across London and we want to thank all those we spoke to for their hospitality.  

We worked alongside the Electoral Commission to host an online voter drive to reach a wider group of people and you can see the entire event on our Youtube page. We want to thank the Electoral Commission for their commitment to leveraging their wider platform to help community members use their voices.  

With only a few weeks left until the election and the deadline for registration having passed we will refocus our efforts on helping people contact their parliamentary candidates and ensuring all political parties are aware of our manifesto.