Last month I wrote that while I'd like to visit certain cities - Tokyo, Mumbai and Havana among them - before I die, I'd rather go on a biking tour of Sunderland than visit Dubai. There was a lively response. The correspondence included:

a) two separate invitations to take biking holidays in or around Sunderland;

b) an offer of an all-expenses-paid trip to Dubai, which I declined as I really would rather go to Sunderland, and because the e-mail invitation included the phrases “you prick” and “I'll make you eat your words”;

c) a dossier of evidence from an investigative journalist asserting that, if anything, I should have been more forthright in complaining about the exploitation of Asian workers in the city;

d) a 900-word article in The National, a Dubai newspaper, which rather flatteringly remarked that I had the air of a young V.S. Naipaul, but rather unflatteringly pronounced me “the most fatuous columnist in the world”;

And e), an e-mail from a reader that began with the complaint that The Times of London used to be a great newspaper until it started paying lip service to political correctness by employing useless ethnics in the name of positive discrimination, and if I liked Mumbai so much, I should jolly well get back to where I came from ... etc.

At the time I deleted this last message without thinking: racist e-mails are rare, a tiny proportion of the bewildering barrage of abuse and praise that is an unavoidable part of this weird job, and life is too short to converse with lunatics. But I found myself dwelling on it this weekend in the light of Prince Harry's video diary in which he calls one of his Sandhurst colleagues a “Paki”, and the broader question it ultimately raised, namely: is Britain a racist hellhole?

A foreigner monitoring media coverage of Harry's outburst would probably think so, given that the third in line to the throne considers it acceptable to use “Paki” as a nickname, and Clarence House seems to think that there is nothing intrinsically offensive about a word that has for decades been associated with racial intimidation, brutal discrimination, having faeces put through your letterbox and getting your head kicked in by skinheads.

But I must say that in my personal experience Britain isn't racist. Which is not to suggest that I haven't experienced racist moments during my life: there was the time when a senior columnist on another newspaper confused me with an Asian IT help-desk assistant and asked me to fix his computer (I fixed it - then continued to do so for months, to avoid having to explain his original mistake); the editor on another newspaper who repeatedly left messages meant for another Asian reporter on my answering machine; the job interview in which the interviewer asked how often I went home to visit my parents and guffawed when I said once a fortnight (“You go back to India every two weeks?!”); the taxi driver in Hull who warned me to “be careful in town” because “asylum seekers aren't very popular in 'ull”; the toddler in Dudley who took one look at my brother, then at me, before glancing at his mother and remarking: “Look Mum, Pakis!”

But, frankly, none of these incidents was serious, the kind of thing that might provoke a civil rights march. Moreover, these slights have been balanced out by occasions when my ethnicity has proved beneficial. The first opportunity I got to write for a national newspaper, for instance, came from someone who stated out loud that he had worked with many Indians, admired their work ethic and wanted to try me out for that very reason; and I'm sure that there have been other occasions when I've been put on judging panels, pushed to the forefront of corporate photographs or offered certain bits of work because organisations have wanted a brown face on board to look diverse and tolerant.

Of course, my experiences are far from typical. I grew up in a ghetto in the first town in Britain to struggle with mass immigration, but escaped early and have been surrounded by intellectual ponces ever since. But that's the point. Racists are thickos. If Stephen Fry, say, had been filmed doing what Harry was caught doing, we'd have something to worry about. But let's face it - Prince Harry isn't going to be giving Melvyn Bragg a run for his money any time soon.

The racist e-mails I receive are almost always illiterate, strewn with misspellings, woeful grammar and absurd logic. More often than not, as was the case with the message mentioned earlier, people will make no effort to conceal their names, and send the message from their work e-mail address, which seems a suicidally stupid thing to do in these PC times. I would only have to copy it to their boss and they would be suspended before they could utter the phrase “employment tribunal”. In the case of the aforementioned e-mail - and this is truly confusing - the correspondent was as ethnic as I am.

And this is why I think our country's periodic race rows, such as the one dur-brained Prince Harry has sparked, are important. They serve to illustrate to the general public how racism is a dying activity, as niche as Morris dancing, just as much a by-product of being thick as dribbling and entering TV phone competitions.

Jade Goody, a woman who famously asked “Rio de Janeiro, ain't that a person?” and “Do they speak Portuganese in Portugal?”, set the bar in this respect when she caused an international incident by being racially abusive towards Shilpa Shetty on Celebrity Big Brother two years ago. Though it arguably takes an even more profound level of dimness to use a racial epithet when you are third in line to the throne, subject to permanent frenzied press scrutiny, working for an organisation that is attempting to attract ethnic minorities, and video yourself doing so. Excellent work, Your Highness.

sathnam@thetimes.co.uk

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