YOUR article on gypsies and the astonishingly racist comments in your online comment was absolutely sickening. With attitudes like these Hitler would have felt at home in Britain today. Let’s not forget that gypsies were the second largest group killed during the holocaust.

Gypsies make a mess, but then every one makes a mess. I worked as a gardener on an expensive high rise housing area in the west end of London and the first job I had every morning was to clear up the rubbish the film stars and millionaires living there threw out of their windows. Nappies, detergent packets and drug paraphernalia were among the daily haul. Middle-class people living in the suburbs of Swindon regularly throw grass mowing and other garden waste into the hedgerows and ditches near their houses and close to where I live people throw builders' rubble and garden waste into the shrubs that surround local parks.

It is complained that gypsies do not pay tax, but the amount of tax they avoid is like a grain of sand on the beach compared to the amount of tax that millionaire tax exiles avoid.

People often ask how could Serbians ethnical cleansed areas of different groups or how the Germans could have assisted in, or complied with the final solution, and I would say this issue proves that British people would do the same here and now. What else is not supplying sites for gypsies, then criminalising them for going on private land and then taking away their caravans and leaving them homeless? That is what one of your correspondents is proposing. Shame on you.

STEVE THOMPSON Norman Road Swindon