THE best part of the furore over Carol Thatcher’s sacking was the number of people saying it is OK to be racist – as long as you do it in private.
What someone says or does in private matters more than anything else, because it reveals the true person.
Anyone remember the secret video of the five young men allegedly involved in the slaughter of Stephen Lawrence?
The world was shocked at the language they used in the privacy of their own homes, the way they stabbed pillows with knives, as if they were black people.
According to many Asian and black people, the term “golliwog” is highly offensive.
What right does anyone have to disagree with those who know what they are talking about?
It is almost always the white man or woman who scoffs about how politically correct we have become – the ones who have NOT suffered as a consequence of such language.
Moreover, it has now become distinctly uncool to worry about offending people.
In fact, the Jonathan Rosses of this world earn their millions by doing just that.
And don’t come back to me saying Mr Ross has changed his ways.
He may say he has.
Wouldn’t you – if an £18million salary was under threat?
For a start, people such as Carol Thatcher and Jonathan Ross, who are in a position of power and influence, should never assume the rest of us are fair game for ridicule.
But they do.
The BBC, for once, has done the right thing dropping Carol Thatcher from The One Show.
The fact that she refused to say she was sorry only added insult to already considerable injury.
As for the morons who have come out in force saying that, as children, they once owned a gorgeous golliwog they adored – give me peace.
I am of that age as well.
I remember, as a child, sitting at the breakfast table with the Robertson’s jam and the golliwogs on the label.
Robertson’s of Dundee, no less.
But those were different days – before people such as Nelson Mandela, just before Martin Luther King and after Mahatma Ghandi, before the worldwide clamour for human rights.
Things have changed. We have, supposedly, moved on.
But a few people have failed to make any progress at all.
It is amazing how often they are so-called celebrities, almost always commanding massive salaries for doing very little other than opening their mouths and placing one large chubby foot right inside.
Racism is not funny.
Not when it involves having your children stabbed to death in the street because of their skin colour.
Nor is it so funny when it comes to employment and the fact that, in many offices the length and breadth of Scotland, there are no black employees and, incidentally, very few disabled ones.
The same rules apply in the world of the able-bodied when it comes to employing anyone less than perfect.
Would you believe that in the 21st century, more and more people are victimised just because they are seen as different?
Every day, there are crimes directed against people because of their actual, or perceived, race, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, disability or gender
They are called, to use the jargon, hate crimes.
Campaigners have tried to introduce stronger laws to stop this tsunami of crime but the ditherers who object to legislation do so because they say it would target people because of their opinions, in other words, because of what they do or say in private.
Back to dear old Carol.
Using a terms such as golliwog is just the tip of the hate crime iceberg.
Yes, it is just name-calling but, boy, does it start the prejudicial ball rolling.
At one end of the spectrum there is the joke.
At the other end there is murder.
And that is definitely not funny.
Speaking of NOT being funny, take Jeremy Clarkson, another overpaid presenter who needs a spare room for his ego.
He just happened to describe our dear prime minister as a one-eyed Scottish idiot, enraging disabled people the length and breadth of Britain.
If we lined up the number of people in this country who had used derogatory terms about anyone different from themselves – whether it be religion, skin colour or disability – the queue would stretch from here to Timbuktoo.
That does not make it acceptable. What it does make it is common, very common.
Yes, we may have become far too politically correct but there are STILL people out there who do not understand why the terms they use are in fact derogatory.
Carol Thatcher had been a regular contributor to The One Show – a nightly magazine programme on BBC One – which is, incidentally, no great champion of equal rights itself, since, out of a team of 200 employees, the number of black people is, at the last count, one.
Also, Ms Thatcher is in good company.
In 2005, Prince Harry went to a party, dressed in a German Afrika Korps uniform, with a swastika on his arm, openly mocking the millions massacred by Hitler.
His latest blunder was to use the word “Paki” when referring to a fellow soldier he claimed was a friend – shades of the awful Jade Goody and her dismissive adjectives for Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty.
That is one row Channel Four will never forget.
In many ways, it is ironic how politically correct we have become; how we will no longer tolerate golliwogs on jam jars; how Enid Blyton’s Noddy books actually had to be relaunched with all the golliwogs recast as goblins.
But being PC is really an act, a face we put on for the benefit of others.
Consider the vociferous row about what Carol Thatcher said and compare it to the relative silence following a litany of black kids, starting with Stephen Lawrence, who have lain, bleeding to death, on the streets of Britain, after being stabbed by someone in a racist rage.
It is a massive problem.
In the case of Carol Thatcher, I have to say I blame the parents.