Twenty years ago Bradford Council's ruling Labour Group tore itself in two over its adopted policy of non-harassment of gipsies/itinerants/travellers.

Terminology was all-important; in those days the word you used was thought to define your political attitude. Gipsies' was neutral; travellers' implied sympathy; but itinerants' suggested hostility.

The T&A tended to employ either gipsies' or itinerants'. Editorially, the paper did not agree with the politics of those Labour councillors and agitators who tried to railroad Bradford into adopting special policies for the people whom they described as travellers'.

Eventually, the issue cost the Labour group power. They lost two local by-elections at Odsal to Eric Pickles's Tories; two other members of the group defected to the Tories and at the local elections in May, 1988, the Bradford public, fed up with the issue, narrowly voted the Tories back.

In the early 1980s more traditional members of the Labour group wanted Bradford to acquire designation - the power to move on illegally-camped travellers.

Had this been granted (under Section 12 of the 1968 Parliamentary Act concerned with itinerants) itinerants would have been obliged to do one of two things: settle on official sites or apply to private landowners for permission to camp.

Bradford's application failed because West Yorkshire County Council - which Mrs Thatcher abolished in 1986 - chose to play politics with the issue and turned it down. This made Bradford vulnerable to the arrival of more and more itinerants.

Nowadays the police have powers under Section 61 of the Public Order Act to move on trespassers who have been asked to leave; caused damage to the land or used threatening or insulting words or behaviour and who may have returned to a site within three months of being told to leave.

The police may arrest anyone they reasonably suspect of committing an offence without obtaining a warrant.

These powers however, according to a ruling by Mr Justice Collins in 1998, must be employed judiciously to travellers as they would to a member of a settled community. The police should not stop and search vehicles without good reason.

It is these powers that Bradford South MP and Home Office Minister Gerry Sutcliffe said the police were not making full use of.

During 1986/87 the Council had a select committee devoted to gipsies and travellers. The Council also used ratepayers' money to fund two schemes devoted to gipsies: the Bradford Travellers Project, a welfare and literacy programme set up in 1984 that got £46,000 over two years, was followed by Roadside Stop.

The latter, ostensibly a literacy and welfare programme, got in excess of £20,000. But it had another agenda, which was to bring in as many itinerants to Bradford as possible, including troublesome Irish tinkers, and make the travellers' issue political.

Between 1973 and 1976 the Council established two official gipsy sites at Esholt and Mary Street. The only other official sites in West Yorkshire were one in Leeds and one in Wakefield. While other West Yorkshire local authorities protected their borders against unwanted incursion, Bradford Council's Labour group went the other way.

In 1986, after abolishing the Lord Mayoralty (and then retracting the decision after a T&A campaign) they issued a 12-point Gipsy Charter according itinerants rights as well as obligations. Items ten and 11 committed Bradford Council to non-harassment of "travelling people camping on Council land where there is no alternative use for the land and where there are no genuine causes for complaint for residents in the immediate vicinity.

"Where it is necessary to ask travellers to move from a site, the Council will do this wherever possible through discussion and mutual agreement rather than through the courts."

What happened could have been foretold, indeed it probably was. Illegal camps immediately appeared near Poplars Farm First School, at Newby Square, and Roundell Avenue on the Bierley Estate.

Residents were furious. Labour councillors turned on one another as letters of protest rained on the T&A. The councillor chairing the Travellers and Gipsies Select Committee was Bob Martin, a quiet-voiced even-tempered man motivated by a genuine desire to, as he said, give gipsies a fair crack of the whip.

"I don't like anybody at all being disadvantaged or suffering because of what other people are doing. If there was a nuisance, environmentally, I would do something about that. I have never advocated illegal encampments; I want adequate provision," he told the T&A.

But the story going round was that others were encouraging illegal encampments to force the hand of the Labour group.

Political activity at that time in Bradford, especially on the Left, was far more in evidence than it has been for many years. Unofficial alliances would gather, coalesce over particular issues and then dissipate.

Socialist Worker Party members, Militant Tendency, ban-the-bombers, anarchist humanists or radical feminists could be called upon providing that the issue was thought to expose the hypocrisy or oppression of the status quo.

Barry Turner, then a Labour councillor for Bradford Moor, was by common consent on the Left of the ruling Labour group. He was inclined to regard gipsies as victims.

"There is a great lack of knowledge between us and these people. If we were talking about any other ethnic group you would be falling over yourselves to have a meeting. Gipsy people are not problem people. They are people with problems," he said.

In 1983 £10,000 was spent evicting illegally-parked gipsies. In December, 1984, county council workmen complained that gipsies were defecating on council-owned land at Bowling Back Lane where 42 caravans were parked.

The Council revealed that since 1977 it had spent £84,000 evicting gipsies, clearing up after them and mounding' vacant sites to prevent caravan access.

On several occasions I went out with a photographer to look at some of these vacated sites, including forecourts of disused car showrooms. In every instance these sites looked as though they had been left in a worse state than when itinerants had moved on to them.

Belatedly in March, 1987, the leadership of the Labour group, in closed session at City Hall, authorised Council officers to repossess Council-owned land where gipsies had parked without first getting permission to do so.

Apart from consideration to council tax-paying residents, many people feel it is time to say that Bradford simply cannot afford to have bands of itinerants wandering around and parking up wherever they feel like it.