Learning something new about blue octopi

In apologising for attacking an innocent student on X, Baroness Foster introduced me to a concept that I had previously been utterly unaware of, that a blue octopus is a known antisemitic trope.

Now, I have to admit that, as a non-practicing Catholic, living in the county town of rural Suffolk with its very small Jewish population (there is a Suffolk Liberal Jewish Community, formed comparatively recently), this might well have passed me by. I did attend synagogue for a number of years, and perhaps it came up and I forgot about it. But one of the things about Ipswich is that we have a very prominent blue octopus, Digby, the litter picking octopus.

He's a bit of a thing here. You'll find him on street sweeping machines, on dustbins, and most obviously of all, on the wall of the old R & W Paul Ltd building at St Peter's Dock.

And it's not a recent thing, he's been there for more than a decade. He's so renowned in the town that, when they refurbished the children's playground in Holywells Park, they included a Digby the Octopus seesaw.

Now I may have views about the competence (or otherwise) of Ipswich Borough Council, but I don't think that they, or the people of Ipswich generally, are antisemitic. Sometimes, a blue octopus is just something funny and amusing, rather than sinister and offensive. And perhaps, just perhaps, Baroness Foster may have learned that it is better to check first rather than display her evident prejudices on social media.