George Monbiot’s reply is at:
http://www.monbiot.com/2013/01/10/as-it-happened/
where he writes:

As It Happened …

January 10, 2013

A letter to the Travellers’ Solidarity Network.

By George Monbiot, published on http://www.monbiot.com, 10th January 2013.

Dear Travellers’ Solidarity Network,

You have made some grave allegations about me on the grounds of a radical misinterpretation of an article I wrote. It is hard to understand how you could have misread it so badly, but I’m prepared to believe it’s an honest mistake.

You accuse me, among other faults, of racism; of “imply[ing] that all Travellers are stupid and bestial”; of believing that it’s impossible to be “open-minded about Travellers”; of constructing “a generalisation of Travellers”; of “serv[ing] to criminalise an entire group of people”; of “encourag[ing] the perception that all Travellers are thieves”; of “delegitimis[ing] reports by Travellers of police violence; of turning the victim into the accused”; of seeking revenge and of acting maliciously.

These are extremely serious charges, and I would have hoped that, for the sake of your own credibility if nothing else, you would have ensured that they were well-supported before making them. I challenge you to show where I have said or implied any of these things. Your account of the story I wrote is pure fiction.

My views of the situation concerning travellers are contained in the following articles, and they have not changed since I wrote them:

http://www.monbiot.com/1995/05/15/britains-cultural-cleansing/

http://www.monbiot.com/1999/11/04/criminally-different/

http://www.monbiot.com/2003/11/04/acceptable-hatred/

I have long argued against the kind of racism, generalisation and persecution of which you are accusing me. However, I do not accept that this defence must extend to pretending that all travellers are at all times virtuous. Nor do I believe it trumps the duty to tell a story truthfully and well.

What I described was exactly what happened. I made no generalisations, no implications, no comments on travellers at all – except one: “Travellers … were often – and for good reason – wary of telling people much about their lives.” My article sought to make no points, draw no lessons, extract no morals. It was an account of a remarkable coincidence – nothing more, nothing less. What you read into it simply was not there.

I see the man I met as part of life’s rich tapestry, and have no malice or feelings of revenge towards him. After I lost my coat, I bought a new one of the same kind; it wasn’t expensive. Every community contains a wide range of characters, and it seems to me that travellers are no different in this respect from anyone else. I made no claim to the contrary.

When I first read your response, it struck me as so crazy that it was not worth answering. But it has been picked up by other people and circulated online, and has become the basis of a new tranche of hatemail. You have made some very serious false accusations and attacked someone who has a long history of support for your cause on an entirely groundless basis. I am writing to ask you to put the record straight. At the very least I’d ask you to publish this letter on your website.

Yours Sincerely,

George Monbiot

I don’t find anything in Monbiot’s article to suggest that all Travellers are thieves because one particular individual apparently was. I don’t see any generalisation of this sort at all, just a story about an individual. Perhaps he didn’t go out of his way to say that this man was NOT representative of his group but that isn’t the same as actually saying or suggesting that he IS representative. Consequently, I don’t think the accusations of racism are at all fair.

As I understood it, the article was not about Travellers in general but rather about liberal guilt and anarchist naivety. It was about how a group of people who thought that they could found a community based on dialogue and understanding, rejecting all violence and coercion, reacted when some individuals moved into that community who didn’t share their nice, bourgeois, liberal sensibilities. They found that their community was lacking a mechanism to deal with such individuals, so they had to resort to the mechanisms of the state, the Police.

That is the only moral of the story that I can see. Beyond that it was just a story about a coat and a coincidence — an “it’s a small world” moment. I find that the article is actually quite sensitive to the individual involved, it acknowledges the hardships he has likely endured at the hands of the Police and so on and indicates no enduring malice towards him. Consequently, I find this whole storm-in-a-teacup rather shameful.

“Racism” is not a term that should be thrown around so loosely and baselessly.