On Friday afternoon, as District Judge, Vanessa Lloyd, read out a not-guilty verdict, cheers and whoops erupted from the public gallery at Westminster magistrates’ court. On the floor of the courtroom, a nine-month-pregnant woman named Marieha Hussain instantly broke down in tears. The ruling was the culmination of an almost year-long ordeal, which saw 37-year-old Hussain lose her job, have her family’s home address exposed by tabloid newspapers, and her reputation tarnished.
The charge Hussain faced was of a racially aggravated public order offence — undoubtedly a serious crime which warrants handling with the utmost care. But in the case of Hussain, this could not have been further from the truth, and the absurd episode is a disturbing tale of judicial overreach, media harassment and political posturing.
The problem began in November last year, when Hussain was one of around 3000,000 people to attend a pro-Palestine demonstration in central London. After marching for around three hours, she was stopping to give her children some snacks, when a passerby asked if he could take a photo of the placard Hussain was holding.
On one side of the placard was a cartoon of Suella Braverman, then the Home Secretary, dressed like Cruella de Vil from 101 Dalmatians. The other side, now infamous, was a drawing of a palm tree with coconuts falling off it. Stuck over two of those coconuts were the faces of Braverman and of the then-prime minister Rishi Sunak.
Hussain’s case throws into sharp relief the hypocrisy of the anti-cancel culture movement
Hussain didn’t think anything of the photo, until, on the drive home from the demonstration, she got a message from a friend saying that the photo had been posted on X by an anonymous Right-wing blog called Harry’s Place and was going viral. “It doesn’t get more racist than this,” the post said. “Among anti-racists you find some of the worst racists of them all.” Below was a reply from the Metropolitan Police, saying that they were “actively looking for” her. The post has since been viewed more than four million times.
Hussain volunteered herself to the police station three days later, and was arrested in May of this year. In the intervening months, tabloid newspapers published information about her family and the cost of her parents’ home. After a decade in the profession, Hussain also lost her job as a secondary school teacher. She was pregnant throughout almost the whole of the ordeal.
It was inevitable to anyone of intelligence that Hussain would eventually be acquitted. The placard, as the judge ruled, was "part of the genre of political satire", and had "not proved to a criminal standard that it was abusive". It barely needs mentioning that, as any person of colour will tell you, calling someone a “coconut” cannot meaningfully be understood as a racial slur. At best, it is teasing, at worst, mildly offensive.
So one would imagine, then that the “coconut trial”, as it has become known, would have been the ultimate standard bearer case for the freedom of speech brigade. An innocent woman’s life was ruined for having the audacity to mock two of the most powerful people in the country. But, on this front, there has been a conspicuous lack of outrage. In the case of someone who has actually fallen foul of police overreach, the pundits had little to say. Hussain’s case throws into sharp relief the hypocrisy of the anti-cancel culture movement — hypocrisy too, which extends to Sunak and Braverman, whose government had been on the frontline of that very culture war, but who have stood by while Hussain was punished on their behalf.
The case is also part of an alarming trend of ethnic minorities being policed for the use of intercultural language. “Being from an ethnic minority background does not provide a defence to racially abusing someone,” a Crown Prosecution Service spokesperson observed in connection with one case.
While being a person of colour certainly does not preclude one from being racist, it doesn’t take a PhD in sociology to understand that there is a difference between a word being reappropriated within an ethnic group, and a word being used as a pernicious slur from the outside. It is obtuse to conflate the two.
In his closing remarks, Rajiv Menon KC, defending, tapped into another deep frustration with the case. "That Marieha Hussain of all people is being prosecuted for a racially aggravated offence whilst the likes of Suella Braverman and Nigel Farage and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – aka Tommy Robinson – and Frank Hester are seemingly free to make inflammatory and divisive statements ... is, I'm afraid, incomprehensible to many people," he said. Quite.
Outside the court after her victory, Hussain said: “The damage done to my reputation and image can never be undone.” It is important that she is proven wrong.
