Dark Albion: A Requiem for the English by David Abbott

Author:David Abbott [Abbott, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
Published: 2013-12-13T16:00:00+00:00

You are Welcome to Bristol

One coconut and some Somalians

AMONG the likes of me, Bristol has long been known chiefly for its two football clubs, Rovers and City, and the rhyming slang associated with the latter. ‘Bristols’ (it is always used in the plural) means ‘titties’. Other clubs with ‘City’ in their name have also been used to the same effect, with evidence that ‘Manchester Cities’ came first, but ‘Bristols’ is now used exclusively, almost certainly because of its alliterative similarity to ‘breasts’. Peter Mayle used it in his Hotel Pastis: A novel of Provence: ‘You’re at the movies, right? By your side is a very tasty young lady you’ve had your eye on for weeks. Tonight’s your big chance. You’ve got your arm round her, within striking distance of her Bristols. This. Could. Be. It.’

But now Bristol has become known for something far more sinister than a bit of harmless slang.

Bristol City Council’s website states: ‘Bristol has a changing population. New communities are settling in central parts of the city and beyond, bringing both advantages and new challenges around cohesion and integration.’ In other words, the town is being swamped by settlers, creating insoluble problems.

Bristol has the highest proportion of Somalians of any city in the country and of any local authority outside London, and the third-highest Somali population in absolute terms behind London and Birmingham.

And it made headline news when two ethnic Bristol councillors went to court in the most ludicrous court case in British legal history.

On February 15th 2010 the case of Regina v Shirley Brown was heard by Bristol magistrates. Councillor Brown, a Liberal Democrat on the city council, stood accused of being a bit rude to a member of the Conservative Party. The official charge was causing racially aggravated harassment, alarm or distress, and I should mention at this point that the Conservative in question, Cllr Jay Jethwa, is South Asian via Uganda, and that Brown is black (so to speak).

A year before, the council was discussing the city’s Legacy Commission, which was created to atone for Bristol’s role in the slave trade. Atoning for slavery was an expensive business, for which the commission required £250,000 a year from the council. Cllr Jethwa said it was pointless posturing, a waste of money ill-afforded in a recession, while black Brown was of the opinion the commission was worth every penny. Black Brown said to Jethwa, ‘In our culture we have a word for you… coconut.’

A human coconut, you see, is someone who is brown on the outside but white on the inside, who is an ethnic but promotes the interests of Whitey. It is a racial slur that goes back at least as far as 1988, when the influential political organisation Black Section expelled Janet Boateng, a former Lambeth Council firebrand, for being one. Millions of inhabitants of Britain consider it an insult. Another version is ‘choc ice’.

The Chinese have their own variant - ‘banana’.

Like so much else in the race relations industry, the insults all go one way.

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