In a liberal, tolerant society like ours, it's traditionally frowned upon to criticise those whose lifestyle isn't like your own.

But who cares? If the lifestyle of the minority who choose to be different affects no-one but themselves, fair enough.

However, if it adversely affects the majority and is at least partly funded by them, then surely criticism is justified.

And the lifestyle of the gipsies who keep targeting Bradford for their illegal camp sites is affecting the rest of us.

At the time of writing, they are lodged on the Filey Street car park alongside the Shipley-Airedale road and on the adjacent short-stay parking spaces in Hammerton Street after being moved on from various other sites around the city (at considerable legal expense to us, the council taxpayers).

Gradually the land around their caravans is filling up with assorted waste, including countless plastic carrier bags containing who-knows-what, hurled into the surrounding rubble.

When they finally do deign to move on, after still more costly legal action, someone will have to clean up that terrible mess. And guess who will have to foot the bill?

Certainly not the gipsies. They'll be on another site by then, fouling it up and waving a couple of fingers at the rest of us, who they obviously consider to be fools who deserve to be taken advantage of.

And we are fools, as a society, for putting up with the behaviour of these anti-social travellers who value their freedom and independence so highly and continue to enjoy it at the expense of others.

The rest of us, the law-abiding majority, are hide-bound with masses of regulations to govern our behaviour. If we step out of line, we're in bother. But these people never, ever step in line. Yet nothing happens to them.

It's time it did. Maybe for starters the law should be changed so that if they don't move off their illegal parks, on either public or private land, within an hour of being politely asked to do so, their caravans, cars, vans and lorries can be confiscated (under police supervision) and held until they've paid a fixed-price penalty.

And if they don't pay up within a certain time, their vehicles can be sold and the proceeds used to fund the setting-up of official sites around the country where travellers can legally stay, paying rent and obeying rules aimed at keeping the place tidy and hygienic.

And if they refused to stay there and continued to camp illegally...Well, the same thing would happen to them again until at last they got the message.

Some might object to that on the grounds that it would eventually squeeze out the lifestyle of a specialised group of people. But there are some lifestyles the rest of us could well do without.

AT LAST it seems that the BBC has come to its senses and realised that there is no need for it to compete with ITV for the mass market. When the new schedule was announced this week, BBC bosses apparently admitted that "being popular" was not enough.

Some of us have been saying this for long enough, as the corporation has shifted further and further downmarket. It has been very depressing to watch low-lifers holding shouting matches in the studio and an endless stream of "ordinary people" with extraordinary egos glorying in their 15 minutes of fame in countless "docu-soaps" - and all courtesy of our ever-increasing licence fees.

Now BBC1 controller Peter Salmon has said "We want to do more than chase ratings. We have to look across all our strands and make sure we're not deserting the values of public-service broadcasting". And Alan Yentob, BBC director of television, has echoed his sentiments by saying that it's important "to remind people what the BBC is for".

And what it is for, they have apparently decided, is quality drama and education programmes - and even quality drama with an educational slant, like the new series Badger, which stars Jerome Flynn as a wildlife protection officer.

It all sounds very promising. Over the last few years far too much of the BBC's precious resources have been ploughed into making rubbish in an attempt to compete with ITV on its own terms.

Now, at last, the Beeb's men at the top appear to have come to their senses and realised that their blessed organisation doesn't have to do that sort of thing. It doesn't need mass audiences to attract advertising. Its cash comes in whatever it does and it has a responsibility to spend it wisely.

So isn't it much better for it to give viewers a real choice by producing programmes which offer a bit of exercise for the brain? There's already more than enough of the other stuff on the advertising-funded channels.

And there's nothing wrong with it in moderation. But while the BBC was running with that pack, there seemed to be the prospect of very little alternative to a diet heavily bulked up with dross.

Now, hopefully, the Beeb might head back to its glory days and once again be a unique public-service broadcasting organisation for Britain to be proud of.

HAVEN'T YOU been a bit baffled, over the past couple of decades, at seeing vast estates of "executive detached homes" sprouting up all over, usually in green fields?

Where did all the executives come from to fill these homes? How on earth did they manage to come up with the cash to meet the repayments on their £120,000 mortgages - particularly in Bradford, which is traditionally a low-pay area?

That last question must remain, for me, one of the great mysteries of life. But as far as executive-style spreads are concerned, it looks as if the writing is on the wall - not in the form of graffiti but because of the Government's new edict that more new homes must be squeezed on to available land in towns and cities rather than spread out around the countryside.

What's more, they will have a lot less car-parking space per house, and in some areas well served by public transport there won't be any parking space at all.

This is social engineering on a grand scale, forcing people to live in closer proximity and manage with, at the most, one car per family rather than have a lot of space for themselves and a double garage (with room on the drive for the boat and caravan).

They can forget their sit-on lawn-mower, too, because gardens aren't part of this brave new plan.

I foresee a boom in window boxes and hanging baskets - and a big increase in the "neighbours from hell" phenomenon as feuds break out over who gets the limited number of parking slots and who doesn't.

Meanwhile, I shall make the most of my non-executive semi-detached home in suburbia and try not to worry that one day the Government might decide that my back lawn is a luxury and insist that a block of flats be built on it.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.