This chapter provides an account of the formation in the 1960s and development of the Gypsy Council and its successor organisations (Figure 2.1). Most accounts of the origins, trajectories and achievements of Romani organisations concentrate upon the story of how they interacted with state authorities and what result they had upon the overt policy and actions of the local and central state and, more recently, transnational organisations. Over the last 25 years narratives have been set within the banal discourse of the ‘NGO’. Although the phrase ‘non-governmental organisation’ appeared in the UN Charter of 1945 (in a rather different context), the acronym NGO was popularised only in the 1980s, through the abbreviation of the somewhat more euphonious acronym the ‘QUANGO’, or ‘quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation’. That phrase, first used in 1967, was itself acronymised only in 1969 (Pifer, 1987), but was picked up by right-wing governments, such as the Heath government (1970–74) in the UK as the welfare state staggered under the twin shocks of the oil price rises and the rapid growth in the number of old-age pensioners and sought to outsource welfare provision to independent agencies that it nevertheless had to fund. Acknowledging that they were only quasi-autonomous, however, meant that the government was still held accountable for their performance. Neoliberal discourse swiftly dropped the ‘quasi’ bit, and reinvented government as the righteous, avenging popular regulator of the agencies that perpetually failed to manage the poor on the budgets they are given. The modern use of the term ‘NGO’ invites one to consider them only in relation to governments. How strange it is that at the very moment when the last major version of state utopian authoritarianism lost legitimacy in 1989, the neoliberal ascendancy was able thus to appropriate an inverted vision of the ubiquity of the state. Most of the Romani organisations bravely and ineffectually (according to some) taking grants across Europe to cover for the failings of the welfare state might better be termed ‘wholly non-autonomous fully funded non-governmental organisations’ (WONNAFFUNGOs).

The Gypsy Council, from its foundation in 1966 down to its local offshoots, and the two Gypsy Councils which dispute the title to be its legitimate successor today, have never been one of these WONAFFUNGOs.