No doubt the Buckingham Palace press office is so accustomed to having to apologise for Prince Philip's "gaffes", as the tabloids like to call his compulsive racism, that they prepare apologies in advance whenever he is let out alone: "The Duke regrets any offence caused by his reference to [slitty eyes/cannibalism/whatever] and now accepts that his comments, intended to be light-hearted, were inappropriate." We long ago ceased to expect better of him. Similarly, anyone who still expects the would-be mayor of London, Jeffrey Archer, to talk either truth or sense has simply not been following his career sufficiently closely.

Still, was there not a certain smugness in the media response to Philip's "made by an Indian" sneer and a large dollop of delight at Archer's making such a prat of himself with his ridiculous claim that black women were once fat and badly dressed but were now "staggeringly beautiful"? After all, the press seemed to be saying, this is post-Macpherson-report Britain. Racism is plain bad taste and these antediluvian throwbacks are out of step with the times.

But how thin our respectable non-racist veneer proves when it is challenged by something more knotty than buffoons such as Philip and Archer. We all know the name of Louise Woodward, the British nanny accused of murdering the child she cared for. Her face, her hair, the village she came from, are known to all who watch television or read papers. Yet what do we know of Manjit Basuta, the 44-year-old mother of three from Slough accused of the same crime in Los Angeles and now awaiting sentence? Staggeringly beautiful or not, she simply has not made headlines in the same way.

We closely watched the trial of two British nurses, charged with murder in Saudi Arabia, for any sign of judicial impropriety. Yet the fate of five British Muslims convicted of terrorism in Yemen on the flimsiest of evidence, and facing long prison sentences, fails to excite attention even though the "confessions" for which they will be imprisoned were secured by torture. Somehow their plight seems less important.

Nor can we yet claim to have more than the most superficial understanding of the lessons of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry. Last week a broadsheet newspaper reported that crime had soared 35 per cent since the Macpherson report on the Lawrence murder investigation. The argument, expounded at length in a concerned leader column, was that since publication of the report in February and its criticism of "institutionalised racism" in the Metropolitan Police, officers had been afraid to use stop-and-search powers on people from ethnic minorities for fear of being accused of racism, with the resulting increase in crime.

The chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation was quoted to back up the paper's thesis, commenting that officers were increasingly reluctant to tackle suspects from ethnic minorities and felt undermined by an anti-police culture at the Home Office. No evidence for a causal link between the reported crime figures and police fears of being accused of racism was adduced. It was simply assumed and asserted that if the police stop harassing black people and crime increases, there must be a connection.

It turned out not to be the whole story. A few days later the Home Office released an independent report on the effect of police stop-and-search powers. In fact, more criminal suspects were being arrested and charged following an overhaul of the use of the powers in seven pilot areas in London. Stop-and-search was still proving rather effective. The good news was that the Metropolitan Police had improved its "hit rate". The bad news for ethnic minority groups was that black people were still five times more likely to be stopped than white people. Not much cause there for concluding that the police have stopped targeting black people. Yes, they can be congratulated on arresting 18 per cent of those stopped and searched as opposed to 11 per cent before the overhaul of their methods, but it still means that 82 per cent of those stopped have done nothing wrong.

This government has made good political capital out of new deals, even if it is sometimes difficult to quantify their success. Here then, is an old problem desperately in search of a new deal. As Gavin Mensah-Coker argues on page 17, we need bravery of the kind brought to bear on the problem of Northern Ireland and a grand intervention on the scale of the 1976 Race Relations Act.

It won't change Prince Philip or Jeffrey Archer, but a non-racist Britain would be a fitting ambition for a new millennium.

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