A group of British expatriates in Australia, fed up with being stereotyped as hygienically-challenged chronic complainers, is pushing to have pejorative comments about "poms" classified as racial discrimination. British People Against Racial Discrimination (BPARD) has launched a legal action to ban a television advertisement featuring "an overweight, pale, balding man in a Union Jack T-shirt cringing in fear at the offer of a cold beer".
BPARD, which is run by a committee of 14 and claims to have branches in Perth and Melbourne, said yesterday through its spokesman, David Thomason: "The Oxford Dictionary classes Pom as being derogatory, just like wog, wop, dink, dago, coon and abo."
Apparently they don't stand much chance of being taken seriously.

(Btw, are Poms just the English, or would Scots and Welsh be classified as Poms?)

Posted by: Jim | | Fri Dec 1 15:05:07 2006

Shouldn't we be asking you that?

Posted by: acb | http://dev.null.org/acb/ | Fri Dec 1 18:28:17 2006

I'm hoping that some other Australians (or expatriate Britons) clarify this. My suspicion is that, as far as Australians are concerned, fine distinctions don't matter, and anyone from Great Britain is a "pom", just as anyone from anywhere on the Mediterranean is a "wog". Though perhaps there would be some Scots/Welsh Australian residents who would take objection to being lumped in with the English like this. Perhaps it's time for a debate?

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