The History Scrutineer

I recently made the mistake of choosing to tolerate the company of several Englishmen over the course of a few beers within our usual hangout on the corner of Hang Buom and Hang Chieu – nestled deep inside The Old Quarter of Hanoi, Vietnam’s capital city. I suppose the alcohol had instilled far more amiable tolerance in me and given that none of my international drinking gang were present at the ‘Bia Hoi’ where fresh jugs of cold beer are poured and delivered at something as unbelievable as 70 cents or less (western prices) – I welcomed the Englishmen to sit next to me and engage in conversation.

All was going fairly fine up until the moment in which ‘racism’ finally came up – as it would, due to their being English. If it wasn’t this topic, it would have been immigration, knife crime, football or one such other loathsome, beaten to death topic that this particular nationality has spent decades harping on about. Decades harping on about and yet not five minutes spent actually tackling the more political issues – I might add.

Due to my fierce dislike of the English (I was raised in England for most of my childhood and recently survived a 14 month and 11 day ‘sentence’ there as an adult) and perhaps on account of the alcohol taking a slightly less joyous stance, I blurted out: “well the English are completely racist”.

Ten minutes later and after enduring a moronic diatribe from an Essex geezer and clueless interjections from a Londoner – mixed race, ironically, I had been told that “because you wasn’t around in the 70s you don’t understand nothing”, “you’ve been brainwashed”, and my particular favorite “what you don’t realize is, we’d only call a black man a nigger or a wog for a laugh and they knew it”.
“How very comical, mate”, came my response.

I reminded the Essex geezer that around the beginning of our chat, he’d shared a story with us of how he was apparently beaten up by policemen in the 1970s or 1980s when they found out he was half Irish somewhere on England’s south coast. According to him, that still did not mean that the English were racist. Nor did ‘Arab bashing’, nor did pushing envelopes filled with excrement through the mail slots on the doors of black houses, nor did English neighbors banding together and signing petitions to prohibit blacks and Asians from moving into their area, nor did all those signs hung up in the past stating “no blacks, no Irish, no dogs” and (ridiculously) nor did the British Empire, itself.

It was decidedly obvious almost immediately that these two fellows were not of the intellectual calibre and possessed zero knowledge of historic practices such as ‘buck-breaking’ in Jamaica… which I shall allow the reader to search for elsewhere if they’ve the stomach to find out (unless, dear reader, you are already familiar with such evil). This, being something committed upon African slaves by solely their English masters.

I tried to recommend the following book to the mixed-race fellow who ended up belting out various Vybz Kartel tracks with me at a deserted karaoke later on in the evening, once I’d managed to shake loose of the Essex fellow… the more egregious and adversarial of the two. Anyway, this following book, written by Scottish-Jamaican writer, poet and rapper ‘Akala’ shall leave no doubt whatsoever in the reader’s mind that there are plenty of racists from England.

Akala, in his most well-known of rap tracks, slugs out lyrics such as:

“Daily, up to the eighties, people spitting in my pram because I was a coon baby”.

I shall post the video below for it is the most educational rap video you could ever watch and listen to.

There was in fact a third Englishman, previously unmentioned, who was caught between chatting to someone else who’d sat by his side and keeping quiet on our ‘debate’. Once I’d finished my karaoke session with the Londoner, the third chap, around the same age as me just like the Londoner, asked “what was that disagreement you were having with the lads earlier?”

“Oh, they reckon the English aren’t racist mate.”

“That’s like saying there’s no nuts in a bar of snickers mate”, he chuckled.

It is obviously and needless to say that not all the English are racist yet enough are and always have been to make the generalization. It was only yesterday that I came across these words written by George Padmore:

“Towards all peoples of whatever race the British have built up a characteristic attitude of cultivated aloofness, but most Britons, irrespective of social status, display an added aversion to peoples of darker skin”.

“Most colored students coming to England politically unconscious and with great illusions about British democracy and hospitality, drummed into them by their missionary teachers at home, soon have all this nonsense knocked out of them by boarding house and hotel keepers”.

George Padmore (28 June 1903 – 23 September 1959, Arouca, Trinidad And Tobago) born Malcolm Ivan Meredith Nurse, was a leading Pan-Africanist, journalist, and author. He wrote the above words sometime pre WW2 yet the attitudes he described of the British were still prevalent enough for a millennial like me to have witnessed growing up in the UK.

For the foreseeable future, I shall be sticking to my international beer gang, such as the two South African fellows caught in what looks like surveillance footage with me! No, merely a Philippino friend capturing us with his phone from a hotel balcony. The two SA gents are under no illusion concerning British racism, I shall say to end on. I suggest this particular article on The History Scrutineer for further reading:

https://thehistoryscrutineer.com/2025/04/07/british-concentration-camps/