web analytics

Political correctness run ahhhh…oh. Hm.

So there’s this pub in Staffordshire called the Labour in Vain, and this is their sign. They’ve recently changed ownership and the new management is being asked to reconsider the signage.

If you turn your head to one side and squint, you can kind of see what the problem is. Though gramps is actually manning the pump handle and not a rubber hose, as I had originally thought.

Though Britain has more than its share of PC police, a fair bit of this kind of iconography is still around (see: golliwogs). Their history is so different from ours. I guess that explains it. Though there have been sub-Saharan Africans in Britain since Roman times (or at least one, anyway), they were uncommon until amazingly recently.

Britain began encouraging immigration from Jamaica in the Fifties, to help fill a shortage of bus drivers and construction workers. One old lady confided in me that she had never seen a black person until she was a teenager. A black man moved into her London neighborhood, and they would drive around and around the block hoping to catch a glimpse of him. That’s pretty much within my lifetime.

Though it was still too much for Liz the First:

There were so many black people in England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, that in 1596 she demanded that they be expelled from the country.

There was a fear that they might be taking jobs away from English citizens and also a concern that they were ‘infidels’. Yet another edict from the Queen, at first it brought no action. However it was then followed up by a Royal Proclamation, issued in 1601, and a Lubeck merchant, Caspar van Senden, was licensed to remove all ‘negroes and blackamoores’.

And that, my homies, is quite enough of that.

February 4, 2015 — 11:16 pm
Comments: 6