They are called didicoys or pikeys in Kent and they are the subject of an admonishing letter sent to the UK government by the Strasbourg court, which is again venturing into a part of the British psyche where even angels fear to tread.

First the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg told us to allow prisoners to vote in elections, which caused outrage and made our prime minister feel quite nauseous. And now it is telling us to provide didicoys and pikeys with ‘adequate housing’.

Didicoy and pikey, for those of you not familiar with the gamut of race hate words, are pejorative terms that refer to Gypsies and Travellers. These people have been persecuted for centuries and still meet considerable prejudice in Central Europe, to the extent that the improbably named French actress Fanny Ardent produced and starred in a film to raise awareness of their plight.

Gypsies and Travellers were among the victims of the Nazi final solution in World War II, when hundreds of thousands of them were gassed or slave-laboured to death along with millions of Jews, communists, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, resistance fighters and others. (I can recommend a novel on the persecution of Gypsies and Travellers in World War II: Fires in the Dark by Louise Doughty.)

Gypsies and Travellers are still getting a raw deal in the UK, according to a letter that Council of Europe commissioner for human rights Thomas Hammarberg sent to this country’s secretary of state for communities and local government Eric Pickles on 1 March.

Hammarberg wrote that the UK must uphold the rights of Gypsies and Travellers to adequate housing, which is a ‘pre-condition for the enjoyment of other human rights, including the rights to education and health’.

He noted that more than 100 Gypsy and Traveller children were evicted from Dale Farm in Basildon, Essex in contravention of the United Nations convention on the rights of the child. He also writes that around a quarter of the 60-70,000 Gypsies and Travellers living in caravans in the UK are occupying unauthorised encampments because the relevant local authority has not met its duty to find them somewhere appropriate to settle.

He 'calls on the secretary of state to ensure that local authorities are made aware of the UK’s obligation to respect the right to adequate housing for all, including Gypsies and Travellers, and to deploy all efforts to identify sustainable solutions, respectful of cultural diversity.'

How dare an unelected bureaucrat say all this to us, a mature democracy and the home of the magna carta? Well, he is actually reading us the riot act in the form of the European Convention on Human Rights, to which we are a signatory and which maintains that certain rights are due to humans simply because they are humans.

The Convention draws no distinction between humans who happen to be Jews or gentiles, homosexuals or heterosexuals, Communists or Tories, adherents of the Jehovah’s Witnesses or members of the Church of England. All humans are entitled to these basic human rights, the Convention holds, even those who - for example - don’t pay council tax or refuse to live in settled communities.

Treating Gypsies and Travellers right is going to upset a lot of people, not least the good folk of Essex who lived for years in the shadow of Dale Farm. But maybe salvation is at hand in the form of the coalition’s plans to reform the European Court of Human Rights during the UK’s six months’ presidency.

These plans, in draft form, have been leaked before the Brighton Ministerial Conference on 18-20 April. ‘Ministerial’ in this context means ministers from all 47 member states of the Council of Europe, who are supposed to come to Brighton and agree to our prime minister’s plans to streamline how the court works.

More importantly still, the prime minister is to push the idea of greater ‘subsidiarity’, by which he means national courts assuming responsibility for judgments in most cases, leaving the Strasbourg court free to focus on the worst, most flagrant human rights violations. This should mean that the Strasbourg court interferes less in our sovereign affairs, believes Cameron and other Tories, and will mean an end to diktats about giving prisoners the vote and ensuring accommodation for Gypsies and Travellers.

Cameron hasn’t a great track record for getting Europe to follow his lead, but he just might pull it off this time. And we just might see 47 pigs flying over Brighton pier, too.

Jonathan Rayner is a reporter on the Gazette