Coconut insult councillor guilty of racial harassment
29th June 2010
A black councillor who called an Asian colleague a “coconut” during a council debate has been found guilty of racially aggravated harassment.
Shirley Brown, 48, a Liberal Democrat, used the term to describe a Conservative opponent, Jay Jethwa, who backed spending cuts for ethnic minority projects at a Bristol City Council meeting last year.
Mrs Brown, who denied racially aggravated harassment, used the term after Mrs Jethwa proposed to cut funding to the city’s Legacy Commission, which was set up in 2007 to educate people on the abolition of the slave trade two centuries ago.
The biter bit.