I welcome the news that the England rugby union coach, Eddie Jones, has apologised for publicly calling Wales a “little shit place”. He’s right: there are no excuses. Being Australian, however, he could perhaps be forgiven for moving to England and thinking such anti-Welsh sentiment is par for the course. His comments come in a long tradition of unpleasant and abusive language about Wales and the Welsh – often so horrible that his own comments, sadly, don’t seem all that egregious in comparison.

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There’s the late AA Gill, who described us as “loquacious, dissemblers, immoral liars, stunted, bigoted, dark, ugly, pugnacious little trolls”, and was reported to the Commission for Racial Equality. There was Anne Robinson, who on The Weakest Link asked: “What are they for? … They are always so pleased with themselves.”

Jeremy Clarkson, naturally, said: “It’s entirely unfair that some people are born fat or ugly or dyslexic or disabled or ginger or small or Welsh. Life, I’m afraid, is tragic”; AN Wilson: “The Welsh have never made any significant contribution to any branch of knowledge, culture or entertainment. They have no architecture, no gastronomic tradition, no literature worthy of the name.”

There’s Rod Liddle, of course: “miserable, seaweed munching, sheep-bothering pinch-faced hill-tribes”; Roger Lewis of the Daily Mail, who called Welsh “an appalling and moribund monkey language” (depressingly born in Wales, too); and Tony Blair’s “fucking Welsh” (contested by him – but I’m not buying it).

This is just recent history, of course. There’s the nursery rhyme: “Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief/ Taffy came to my house and stole a leg of beef.” In 1682, William Richards called Welsh “native gibberish”. In 1847, the royal commission on Welsh education: “The Welsh language is a vast drawback to Wales and a manifold barrier to the moral progress and commercial prosperity of the people. It is not easy to over-estimate its evil effects.” That’s right: evil.

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Replace Wales or Welsh with any other race or ethnicity in the above comments and they are exposed for what they are: bigoted, xenophobic, colonialist nonsense. Yet somehow English people seem to think that they can get away with it in a way they just wouldn’t if they publicly said the same thing about any other minority. Jan Morris wrote in 2009 that mockery of Welsh people is “the last permitted bigotry”, and little seems to have changed in the intervening decade. Last month Robert Peston was widely praised for asking: “Why do many who would hate to be called racist think it’s OK to make casually nasty anti-Welsh remarks? Happens all the time. I hate it.”

I hate it too. You see examples of low-level anti-Welshness everywhere. There are the inevitable sheep jokes, the snickering “Bless you” after a Welsh world is pronounced, the references to phlegm, calling Welsh a “useless” language. My father once wrote an eye-rolling letter to the New Statesman regarding Will Self’s use of the phrase “welshing on a bet” – which should be “welching”. To the magazine’s credit, it published the letter. But this was a subtle example of someone who should know better exposing their own ignorance in a press that remains depressingly Anglocentric.

There are myriad examples of such ignorance. But the one that stands out to me was the widespread snooty dismissal by English journalists as made up of an anecdote about a woman in a hijab confounding a bigot by speaking Welsh on a train. None of them, clearly, had ever been to Cardiff.

It smacks of a residual colonialist insecurity at sharing an island with a minority whose language you cannot understand

Don’t get me wrong – these subtle examples don’t send Welsh people running home to their mams in tears; we are a tough people. But they do betray an attitude that, at its most extreme, amounts to xenophobia, pure and simple. And often on the part of liberal English people who would be horrified to be called racist.

Anyone with a cursory familiarity with the history of Welsh oppression will know why. It smacks of a residual colonialist insecurity at sharing an island with a minority whose language you cannot understand. But while hundreds of years ago that will have seemed threatening to the English imperialist world order, now such defensiveness just makes you look pathetic. So what if a small number of people speak Welsh? What’s it to you? Why do you care so much? Is a part of you ashamed to be monoglot, aware that to the rest of the world, it looks a bit, well, low-achieving?

Some readers will no doubt be wanting to point out that anti-English sentiment exists in Wales too. It does, and there is no excuse for that either. I grew up near a cottage upon which the words “Go home you English twat” had been daubed. My mother once ejected a colleague of my father’s from the house for telling a particularly unpleasant joke about Englishmen and onions. It’s not OK. It never has been. Much of this is an (unjustifiable) reaction to oppression, not a manifestation of it.

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There are lots of wonderful English people who move to Wales, who do their best to learn Welsh, and who fall in love with the culture. Unfortunately, there is also a particularly unpleasant type of English person who moves there for reasons of “white flight” (an interesting analysis by the LSE essentially predicted a vote for Brexit partially as a result of English migration into Wales).

Similarly, there’s a reason Welsh-speaking areas such as mine voted to remain – we feel we have more in common with the continent and are suspicious of imperialist attitudes. Talk to any Welsh person and they’ll know exactly the type – they’ll tell you how they moved from Birmingham because you no longer hear English on the streets there, and will then be affronted when the whole pub switches to speaking Welsh in disdain at their racism. They’ll complain on TripAdvisor about people speaking the language in the restaurant they visited; moan to broadsheet newspapers that their kids have to learn Welsh at school.

I don’t know what the answer is, except to continue challenging such prejudices when they arise. Otherwise liberal people can try to educate themselves about anti-Welsh prejudice, perhaps by reading the inevitable comments underneath this article. But until a thorough self-examination takes place and English imperialist attitudes are properly put under the microscope, the bigotry will continue. And Brexit seems to indicate that this sense of cultural superiority won’t be going away any time soon.

• Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist and author