No, Baroness Warsi, it is not acceptable to call people ‘coconuts’

Many mad things are happening in British politics right now. But can we please not overlook how utterly wild it is that Baroness Sayeeda Warsi seems to think she should have the right to make racial quips about her own colleagues without facing any consequences. Forget flatgate. Never mind Angela Rayner’s blouses from rich donors. Right now, nothing better captures the cant, arrogance and ocean-going smugness of our batty elites than Warsi’s hissy fit over being investigated for giving a nod to the racial slur ‘coconut’.

Warsi is a former Conservative minister. She was co-chair of the Tory Party for a couple of years. She now sits in that chamber of retirement-age bloviators who meddle in the making of laws despite having never won one soul’s vote: the Lords. She’s all over the papers today after resigning the Tory whip on the grounds that the party has moved too ‘far right’. This fit of pique, this noisy flounce-out, follows the Tories’ launching of an investigation into ‘offensive’ comments she made.

What were those comments? It was more an image, actually. A couple of weeks ago, Warsi took to X to post a pic of herself drinking from a coconut through a straw. Now, if someone posted such a photo from a beach in Barbados, no one would bat an eyelid. But Warsi’s pic was taken here, and, more importantly, she posted it following the acquittal of Marieha Hussain for holding up a placard depicting Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman as ‘coconuts’. ‘This one’s for Marieha Hussain’, Warsi tweeted alongside her insufferably puffed-up coconut-sipping: ‘Many many congratulations.’

Is it just me or was that truly appalling behaviour from a peer – or anyone? I cannot even begin to fathom the thought process behind posing with a coconut and a turbo-smug look on your face on the day someone was acquitted for branding two of your own party comrades as ‘coconuts’. This is some Mean Girls shit, unbecoming not only of a 53-year-old politician with a law degree from Leeds, but anyone over the age of majority.

To be clear, I fully support the acquittal of Ms Hussain. Readers will recall that she’s the 37-year-old schoolteacher who was hauled before a court on a trumped-up public-order charge after attending a ‘pro-Palestine’ demo in London with a placard showing Sunak and Braverman, the then PM and the then home secretary, as coconuts falling from a tree. We all know what coconut means: black on the outside, white on the inside. Shorter version: racial traitors. It’s a vile sentiment, no question. But a matter for the law? No way. Freedom of speech must include the freedom to hold and spout foul views.

By the same token, no copper should lay a finger on Warsi for her coconut tweet. It is not a crime to be an idiot on the internet. The Conservative Party is a different matter, though. It is well within its rights to investigate Warsi. You cannot relish in people’s racialised piss-taking of members of your own party and then reach for the smelling salts when your party says: ‘Hold on…’ If I were to go online and call Tom Slater a self-hating cracker, a backstabber of the white race, they’d hardly roll out the red carpet for me at spiked HQ. I thought this kind of thing was widely understood? Was I wrong?

It is my belief that ‘coconut’ is a racist insult. For a start, it can only be used about people of colour. Us whites are spared this slur – only black and brown folk are its victims. It is fundamentally an accusation of racial betrayal. It depicts certain non-whites as racial quislings, unscrupulous sellers of their own ‘black soul’ to please white society. It implies that there’s only one right way to be black or brown, and that any black or brown person who deviates from this strict path becomes ‘white’, becomes spoiled. If you’re too conservative, too studious, too iffy about immigration, too supportive of Israel, you’re a ‘coconut’ – that utterly dehumanised vision of the ethnic-minority person whose sins against his own race are so legion that he morphs into the enemy.

The ‘coconut’ slur always makes me wince, partly because there was a racist kid at my school who used it. Alongside other words, unrepeatable here. He spat the jibe at black swots or Asian boys with too many white mates. Even to witless 14-year-old me, it sounded awful. If someone had told me back then that one day a peer would happily hint at this slur, and be cheered for doing so (Warsi has thanked X users for all their ‘lovely messages’ over the past 24 hours), God I would have been depressed. We thought race-based insults were on their way out. How wrong we were.

It is a testament to the conceit of bourgeois identitarians that they seem genuinely horrified that Warsi is being investigated for the coconut tweet. Aren’t investigations into offensive comments only meant for honky riff-raff and big-boned gammon? Warsi is even playing the victim card. She’s suggesting that the interrogation of her comments is proof of her thesis that ‘Muslims Don’t Matter’. Come off it. You’re not being investigated because you’re a Muslim but because you seemed to take delight in the denigration of a Hindu (Sunak) and a Buddhist (Braverman) as ‘coconuts’. Do Hindus matter? Do Buddhists? Does anyone apart from Warsi?

‘Coconutgate’ raises some troubling questions about 21st-century Britain. It seems to me that what we have here is not anti-racism, but a new, chilling belief that while some forms of racialised insult are bad, others are okay. Where old-fashioned race hatred is unacceptable, hatred of ‘racial turncoats’ is cool. Where writing off black people as problematic is a huge no no, making fun of black people who hold the ‘wrong’ beliefs is fine. Where throwing bananas at black footballers is gross, throwing the image of a different fruit, the coconut, at black politicians is celebrated. Call me old-fashioned, but shouldn’t we never judge a person by their skin colour?

The ‘coconut’ controversy points to a terrifying new direction for identity politics. It seems that some in the upper echelons of society want to preserve for themselves the right to make racial judgements. Coconut-bashing, ‘anti-Zionism’, whispers about ‘Hindu privilege’ – these are the means through which certain movers and shakers cling to their own right to think racially even as they condemn those in the lower orders for doing likewise. For those of us who detest racial thinking in all its forms, there are battles ahead.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy