The English language, spat out in a dribble of bile and asterisks, has rarely been so abused. The most graphic exponent of the new art of coarse speaking is Roy Keane, the Manchester United captain, whose memoir explains how he deliberately injured the Norway international, Alf Inge Haaland. 'I'd waited long enough. I f***ing hit him hard. The ball was there, I think. Take that, you c***.'  Noel Gallagher's thoughts on the American music industry, as delivered to the  New York Post, sound even further removed from the vernacular of Jane Austen, while, at the Edinburgh fringe, the comedy writer Barry Cryer has denounced the relentless crudeness of this year's offerings.   The contagion has seeped into such outposts of the community as Crazy George's discount furniture store in Chatham, Kent, where Peter Moore, a customer, demanded of a trainee manageress: 'Who's the f***ing bitch who had a go at my missus?' Sentencing Mr Moore for abuse, Judge Keith Simpson suggested that it would be no bad thing if the courts were empowered to wash out the foul mouths of miscreants with carbolic soap, assuming it was still available.   If carbolic was not remaindered around the time that shower gel got invented and Anthony Buckeridge's 'fossilised fishhooks' stopped being the literary expletive of choice, then the Royal College of Nursing could use some. The case of Pat Bottrill made all other examples of offensiveness seem mild. Her sin was to mention 'ten little niggers' in an allusion to the Agatha Christie novel whose characters, much like RCN delegates on a coffee break, disappeared without trace. Instead, Ms Bottrill vanished after her resignation as chair of the governing council was accepted by the American head of the RCN, Beverly Malone.   The linkage between US sensibilities and the N-word is established. Some time ago, an American lawyer was reportedly forced to give up his public post when a member of a lecture audience took exception to his correct use of the word niggardly, meaning stingy or miserly. Even when better semantic logic applies, offending people is subjective. Those who agree with the  Times , which serialised Roy Keane's book, that his thuggish musings are the imprimatur of 'tormented genius' might take umbrage at Gwyneth Paltrow's line on British men, or  Thought for the Day's affinity for God.   Defending insulting behaviour is, by contrast, simple. The term 'nigger', as thoughtlessly used by Ms Bottrill, is different from the same word screamed from the Millwall terraces by thugs with plankton brains. If Ms Bottrill had been the Alf Garnett of the bedpan, her lapse might have looked different, but the fact that she was horrified enough to relinquish her post was proof of innocence.   The shame is that no colleague or superior was brave or wise enough to point out that the fuss over her error was spurious nonsense. Other examples include the complaint about Home Office Minister John Denham's reference, at the Police Federation Conference, to 'nitty gritty'. The charge that the phrase referred to a debris, mainly composed of lice and left in the scuppers of a slave ship after a voyage, came as news to black people, lexicographers included. No case to answer.   Conversely, it was incontrovertible that Ann Winterton should lose her Tory frontbench post after telling a joke at a rugby club dinner about Pakistani citizens being ten a penny. Her humour was dire, her speech premeditated and her timing, the day after the British   National Party won three council seats in Burnley, atrocious.   The only mystery on racial sensitivity is why bodies like the RCN choose to court the derision of the Right. The Bottrill case tapped into the familiar vein of scorn for imagined legions of politically correct, hatchet-faced lentil-slurpers who forbid the use of spoon (Cockney rhyming slang for coon) and frown on Wodehouse's reference to 'good eggs' (ditto). Fabricating examples of weird behaviour, such as Brent Council's non-existent ban on schoolchildren watching the Queen Mum's funeral or Islington teachers singing 'Baa Baa Green Sheep', seems hardly necessary when the RCN obliges with the genuine article.   Every fuss about political correctness masks the fact that, in schools and offices, there is too little attention to anti-racist education and training, not too much. Each new furore validates right-wing prejudice. There is another danger. At best, care over racial etiquette produces the sort of changes that make Agatha Christie's novel title and free golliwogs with jam jars look prehistoric. At worst, it is an anaesthetic to the liberal conscience. Attention to detail is a smokescreen against having to admit what a racist society this can be.   Terror of uttering an inappropriate word or venturing into the minefield of racial humour suggests awkward distance rather than inclusiveness. Atoning for any lapse by allowing some sacrificial victim, like Ms Bottrill, to be singed on the bonfire of the sensibilities is pointless. Such patronising gestures are unlikely to reassure those who couldn't give a stuff about RCN internal politics but who worry about having swastikas daubed on their houses or excrement posted through their doors.   Mantras of equality, diversity and ending institutional racism easily translate into the illusion of progress that isn't there. A white man is still three times more likely to get a professional job than a black one; only 3.7 per cent of prison   staff and 3.1 per cent of police officers come from ethnic minorities. Hysteria may be the fault of the ignorant or the malign, but every bogus bit of scaremongering by doomful prophets of population explosion bears testament to a liberal failure properly to explain why, humane considerations aside, immigration is an economic necessity.   That inability is rooted in taboos and confusion. Under a new paradox, equality legitimises unfairness. Raj Chandran, of the Commission For Racial Equality, was right to decry Ms Bottrill's departure, but the commission's recent record is even less glowing than the RCN's. Gurbux Singh's Roy Keane moment, in which he got drunk on corporate hospitality before bullying and threatening police officers, secured him a 120,000 pay-off and strangely muted criticism.   The commission, now casting round for a new head, has been tainted. Government largess for Mr Singh only underlined the suspicion that the CRE, overly keen on PR and occasionally inept, is more in thrall to the Home Office than to clients in serious need of back-up. Our treatment of asylum-seekers sometimes borders on the barbaric. Tension mounts in cities and beyond. In rural Devon, racial incidents rose by 20 per cent last year, and the far Right is out for blood. A mood of fear is building in the media. Clamp down on immigration. Bring back capital punishment for paedophiles, and blame any resistance to the politics of vengeance on what ranters still deem the lunatic Left. Such retributive nonsense is made worse by unkind or absurd behaviour posturing as purity of heart.