 An investigation by a top English cricket team into alleged racism in the club has exonerated an alleged abuser after judging that the term packy is just ordinary banter. It's an extraordinary finding from a team in England's top league and the details only make it worse. This is the story as written up on the ESPN cricket info site. At least one Yorkshire player admitted to regularly using the term, I'm not going to say over and over again, so the P word when talking to Azim Rafiq, but he was cleared of wrongdoing on the basis that it was perceived as friendly, good natured banter between the two players. The player also admitted to telling other people don't talk to him. He's a P word asking, is that your uncle when they saw bearded Asian men and saying, does your dad own those in reference to corner shops? Despite admitting recalling that Rafiq broke down in tears at one point, the player insisted he had no idea he was causing a fence and would have stopped if Rafiq had asked. The individual concerned is a current senior player at the club. It really is an extraordinary story. So ESPN, that's the site we're getting this from, report that lawyers who were charged with collecting evidence for the report found comments aimed at Rafiq had been, and I quote, capable of creating an intimidating hostile degrading humiliating or offensive environment and they accepted Rafiq's evidence that he was offended degraded or humiliated. So those were the lawyers who were collecting evidence for this internal report, internal to the cricket club. But the panel who were charged with making conclusions and recommendations, including, would anyone be disciplined for this? They disagreed. That panel included a non-executive member of the Yorkshire board. So according to ESPN, the panel's conclusion state, the panel does not accept that Azim was offended by the other player's comments, either at the time they were made or subsequently. They go on to say that in the context of banter between friends, Rafiq might be expected to take such comments in the spirit in which they were intended, i.e., good-natured banter between friends. So it was not reasonable for Azim to have been offended by the other player directing equally offensive or derogatory comments back at him in the same spirit of friendly banter. Now, this whole comments back at him elsewhere in the story, they said, oh, this guy, he's clearly fine with racial epithets because he called another player a Zimbo. Now, I'd never heard that term before for someone who's from Zimbabwe. Apparently, as far as I understand from the commentary, that's similar to saying an Aussie, is not similar to saying a Paki, saying that this is just banter is ridiculous. Ash, what's your take on what the hell is going on here? I mean, this is like the anti-grave Richard Key's sexism row all over again, when clearly what you have is a very toxic culture in which bigotry is, you know, has the blind eye turned to it because it's seen as part of the banter and part of the relationship between men. And that bigotry, even though it's coded as humor, actually has hugely detrimental impacts on people who are targets of it, whether that's sexism, whether that's homophobia, whether that's indeed racism. And so the fact that it's so central to the culture in and around sports, I think is very depressing. And what you would have hoped is that Yorkshire County Cricket Club would have shown some leadership and said, you know what, we need to wipe the slate clean. We need to say no more of this. We want to have a cultural change. We're clearly a diverse club where people come from all sorts of different backgrounds, and they need to feel welcome. And that is a real failure of leadership on the part of this panel. And the fact that they deviated, I think, so dramatically from the findings of the investigation team and the lawyers, I think also tells you that perhaps that they've got a particular interest in in drawing a veil over this culture rather than disinventing it with sunlight and getting it out in the open, tackling it head on and saying no more of this. So it wouldn't surprise me if there was actually more going on to the surface, perhaps more people implicated various forms of sexist or racist or indeed homophobic behavior. And that's why there's an attempt to brush this all off as friendly banter. And I just want to say this thing about friendly banter because you know what, Michael, I'm not in the business of trying to police how friends relate to each other. Okay, everyone's got different levels of tolerance for humor, which sort of, you know, treads these lines of offensiveness. That's going to differ from friendship group to friendship group. And that's perfectly fine. But even within the context of friendly banter, which involves a bit of teasing, a bit of joshing, a bit of making fun of someone, I could say, for instance, do your hair makes you look like Tweety Pie? That would not give you the right to call me a packy. All right, these are not of the same order. And this whole business of, well, he would have been expected to take this in the spirit of friendly banter and the spirit in which it's offered. Well, I think that any time you mobilize a slur against someone, you have to be pretty damn certain of how they're going to take in if they are indeed driven to tears as this cricket player was. I think that's the point where you go, no matter how I thought I meant this, it was clearly received in a different way. That is my fuck up. Maybe I won't go around calling people slurs all the time in the interest of cracking a joke. But the fact is that didn't happen, right? That level of upset in the tears went ignored. And indeed, it seems that there was a pattern of these kinds of jokes being made against this one particular South Asian cricket player. So I think that tells you something about how toxic the culture is. And the stuff about friendly banter is just a flimsy excuse for why it is people turned a blind eye to it for so long. The panel, not only did they say it's banned between friends, but they said Rafiq might be expected to take such comments in the spirit in which they were intended, i.e. good natured banter between friends. So it's basically saying if he was offended, you know, that's completely his fault. And actually, it's pretty unreasonable that he even got offended. Maybe he should just grow some thicker skin. Maybe the unnamed player who abused him has now been dragged through the mud just because he's too overly sensitive. It seems extraordinary that that would ever get written down. You know, I can imagine that being said in a boardroom by some sort of racist reactionary people in the higher echelons of a cricket club. But actually thinking that's a sort of legitimate thing to write in an official report does kind of beg a belief. I know that the English Cricket League or the English Cricket Board are going to come in and sort of have a look at this. Do you imagine this will be overturned, Ash? I think that if they've got any sense of PR, self-preservation, then it will be overturned because it is, as you say, so egregiously victim blaming that it can't really stand up in the court of public opinion and rightly so. One of the things I want to say is that we have a tremendously contradictory attitude towards racism in this country. Because on the one hand, we have this idea that what racism is is when somebody says a slur. So then if you don't say the slur regularly, whether that's Paki or the n-word or something else, then you go, well, I couldn't possibly be racist. I just don't want my daughter to marry a Muslim. So that's the one sort of end of it, which is unless you say the slur, you're not racist. And then on the other hand, we actually have a remarkably high tolerance for when people do come out and say racist slurs. You had Jeremy Clarkson being caught on camera using the n-word for a version of Eenie Meenie Miney Moe that I had never heard in my life, which involved saying the n-word. You had Carol Thatcher, Margaret Thatcher's daughter, I think when doing some of the coverage for Wimbledon, allegedly referring to a tennis player of color as a goalie walk. There is a tremendously high threshold for this kind of behavior. Because then when it comes out, particularly when it comes out that this language was tolerated within quite elite spaces, people start bending over backwards to start talking about how within that context, it was okay. It wasn't okay. It absolutely wasn't okay. And if it was okay, then you wouldn't have reduced someone to tears in the first place. If it was okay, then you wouldn't have people saying, why the hell is Jeremy Clarkson saying the n-word? You wouldn't have said people decrying Carol Thatcher for the use of the word gollywag. But that goes right to the heart, I think, of this, you know, I think very duplicitous understanding of racism that we have in this country. One is we say it's all about the slurs. We also have hypersensitivity when it comes to certain forms of language. And then on the other hand, when the slurs do actually come out, we go, oh, it was just banter. It was fine. There was no, you know, real malicious intent behind it. I don't actually care what your intent was if you're saying the word packy, unless you are literally South Asian and you're one of those people who think that should be reclaimed. Personally, I don't think it should. But that's just the difference of opinion. Unless you're South Asian, you think should be reclaimed. It's not for you to say ever zero context.