Anyone who was not on Mars during the whole of April now knows that after the recent televised Monaco vs Chelsea game, football pundit Ron Atkinson when he thought he was off mike, had this to say about Chelsea defender Marcel Desailly:

"He's what is known is some schools as a fucking lazy thick nigger".

As soon as Atkinson's impropriety came to light he offered his resignation to ITV, and ITV accepted. His contract with the Guardian has now also been terminated by mutual agreement. Some  argue that the loss of two lucrative media contracts is an excessive penalty for Atkinson to pay for his racist remarks. But Atkinson knew himself that he had to go. His trade is talking about football. As soon as he, an experienced, well liked and respected football pundit, made his offensively racist comment about one of the many black players in the game, his position became untenable. Nor will it have helped that the broadcast was being fed live to the Middle East including Dubai and Egypt.

Atkinson's speedy resignation is possibly the only credit which he takes from the affair. For let us not beat about the bush. Let us not talk, as some apologists in the media and elsewhere have been doing, about an "unfortunate gaffe" or a "careless remark". Live on national television (whether intentionally live or not), Ron Atkinson described a black football player as a "nigger". Using the term "nigger" in the year 2004 is about as racist as it is possible to be.

His comment was not merely a casual slip of the tongue, which might have mitigated if not excused his offence. Rather it was made in a deliberate and premeditated manner. If Atkinson had wanted to make the point that he considered Desailly lazy, a suitable four letter word was available to him. But for him to tack the term  "nigger" on to the end of his sentence suggests that he was making an entirely different point.

This unforgiving stance has nothing to do with political correctness or thought control or some of the other apologist nonsense which has been bandied about, for example, on Hibs.Net's message board, and doubtless on a hundred other fans' message boards, since Atkinson made his comments. Racism is a slur on football and a slur on society. The use of the term "nigger" in whatever context, public or private, is racism pure and simple. No excuses will be entertained. If any of us were to use the word at a Hibs game within earshot of the police, we might find ourselves liable to arrest under the provisions of the Race Relations Act.

Although a very few of the posts which I saw on Hibs.Net made my buttocks clench in disgust, it was heartening that the overwhelming majority condemned Atkinson's comments, even if there was a wide range of views on whether the punishment fitted the crime. Someone suggested, for example, that an allowance should be made for the fact that Atkinson was of a generation and social class where such language was commonplace, and that an apology should suffice. Although I am not sure of Big Ron's vintage, I cannot remember a point in my 54 years on the planet when the term "nigger" was other than deeply offensive.

I do not know Mr Atkinson personally, so I must accept the claims of those who do that it was out of character for him to use such a word. But that is not the point. When respected public figures like Big Ron do use such words in public and we fail to take the matter seriously, other racists unfortunately get the impression that it is acceptable to use them. Well, it is not acceptable. It is not acceptable to call Desailly a nigger, it is not acceptable to call Doumbe a nigger, it is not acceptable to call De Vries a nigger, it is not acceptable to call anyone a nigger.

Do not be fooled into thinking that there are no longer any apologists out there for this sort of thing either. Anyone listening to Talk Sport on radio the day after Atkinson's comments would have heard their presenters, almost without exception, trying to exonerate Big Ron for his unfortunate and uncharacteristic slip of the tongue.

Atkinson's defenders have been coming out with the usual chestnuts like why it should be deemed acceptable for a black man to call another black man a nigger but not acceptable for a white person to do the same, or why we do not see similar outrage when a black person uses the term "white boy" or whatever. Even the films of Quentin Tarantino have been called into service as evidence for the defence. Life is not Jackie Brown, however, and Ron Atkinson is not Samuel Jackson.

Would there have been the same fuss if Atkinson had made similar comments about a continental player? I reckon that a reference to a lazy thick kraut or frog or dago might have seen him in a similar spot of bother, but I do concede that the black skin factor ensures maximum publicity and criticism for perpetrators in the current political climate. This may be partly because German or French or Spanish resident in the UK are not often attacked and beaten in British streets for no other reason than the colour of their skin. Such incidents unfortunately still take place all too regularly in many UK cities and towns.

Football is one of the best practical demonstrations in today's society of the fact that a person's ability and worth is not in any way determined by the colour of his or her skin. Yet even at Hibs games you can still hear the occasional idiot shouting racist remarks and insults at black players. Encouragingly, it is becoming much more common for other fans to challenge the racist culprits and finger them for eviction from the ground. Good on those fans who think it is wrong and are prepared to stand up and say so.

It is not so long ago that some fans at some football clubs thought it was good clean fun to make monkey noises and throw bananas at black players, and that some clubs while not condoning such behaviour did not actually bother to do too much to stamp it out. Progress has been made however and we are slowly moving beyond that sort of thing. But sorry, Ron - the fact that some people think it even marginally excusable to call a black player a nigger, in any circumstances, shows that football and society still have a bit still to go. And that is why, as to your credit you quickly and fully accepted, you just had to go.

Big Ron, along with aides, following his interview with Mr Petrie for the vacant manager’s post.