Lewis Hamilton, the McLaren’s British driver was jeered and insulted at the Formula 1 testing weekend, at the Catalunya Circuit near Barcelona last month. Grotesquely, some people blacked up and wore T-shirts saying ‘HAMILTONS FAMILLY’. Just how racist is Spain?

Well, it’s not the first time Spaniards have shown contempt for non-whites in sport, is it? Remember Luis Aragones? Back in 2004 he was caught on camera calling Thierry Henry a ‘black s**t’. The Spanish Football Federation dilly-dallied as long as before reluctantly fining him some trivial amount. But ¡Dios Mio! Luis Aragones was and still is coach to the national team! Any British club manager caught being racist would have been sacked in seconds: a national team manager who disgraced himself like that would be hung out to dry in the press for a month. Rightly so: how can they manage if they care about colour before performance? How can they represent a country while sneering at the non-white people in it?

Given the apathy that met Aragones’ bigotry, it wasn’t surprising that an England-Spain friendly a few months later saw the crowd doing monkey chants at England’s black players. As before, the rest of Europe was disgusted, the English FA outraged, Britain’s then Sports Minister complained officially; and the Spanish were, largely, indifferent.

More recently, in 2006, Barcelona striker Samuel Eto’o threatened to walk off the pitch after a horrendous barrage of abuse from Real Zarragona fans. Real Zarragona were fined (hurrah!) a mere £450: in football terms, very small change.

Don’t imagine this issue is trivial. Isabel Martinez from SOS Racismo (a Spanish anti-racism body) said, “The things that happen on a football field or in motor racing are a reflection of the reality of day to day life in Spain.” She’s right: the stuff you see is an indication of what you don’t see. A few years ago Amnesty International did a report on racial abuse and torture by the Spanish police: a catalogue of deaths, rape and assaults. The reaction of the Spanish authorities? They dismissed it; Rajoy said it contained ‘major inaccuracies’, and that was that. The fact that neither the Spanish Government, nor the social services nor the courts keep records on racial incidents speaks volumes. They aren’t counting them because they aren’t interested. If racism raises its ugly head the authorities shrug and look the other way. And we know where that leads: gross injustices; resentments; broken communities, wasted human talent, trouble. We know because Britain (and America, Germany, France, etc) has been there already.

Britain has had decades of immigration, plus its bigger Empire bringing closer and more complicated relationships with non-Europeans. Britain has come through a painful process of condoning, then ignoring and finally largely (if imperfectly) facing up to the idiocy of racism and the damage it does to everyone. But until 1975 when Franco died immigration into Spain was almost non-existent. Since then it has boomed: in the last 10 years alone the number of migrants (including us, of course) has increased by over 400% to about five million. That is a lot of change for any society: change brings fear, and fear brings resentment and aggression.

But isn’t it depressing that Spain doesn’t want to get pro-active and learn from the past mistakes of others? Wouldn’t it be refreshing for Spain to grasp the nettle now? There has been some positive reaction to the incidents I’ve described. The Spanish motor sport federation, RFEA ordered the circuit owners to make sure it doesn’t happen again: the Circuit Director talked about new security measures and made an explicit appeal to fans to behave properly; earlier incidents led to the Government reviewing racism and xenophobia laws and football clubs backing anti-racism initiatives. But every positive seems to have come reluctantly from the threat of loss of face or finance: Madrid’s 2012 Olympics bid was embarrassed by the football incidents, while FIA, Formula One’s international body have now threatened to take the Grand Prix from Spain if there are further incidents of open racism. It’s so sad that it’s the fear of penalties, not the courage of conviction, prompting action.

That’s the most depressing thing about all this: the eagerness of Spaniards to dismiss them as not really racist, or racism as unimportant and no worse than name-calling, certainly not a big issue. Many Spaniards seem to condemn racist incidents as a lack of taste rather than something more grossly immoral. But this isn’t the generous Spanish tolerance at work: tolerance for hatred is mere apathy and moral cowardice. Ludicrously some Spaniards have even claimed that the use of the word ‘black’ in catcalls is merely descriptive. How come they don’t shout insults including the word ‘white’, then? Even Ramon Pradera, the director of the Circuit said of the Hamilton incident that it was only 4 or 5 fans. That might have been the number photographed blacked up, but didn’t Pradera notice, like reporter Marco Consejo did ‘about 3,500 fans in the main stand’ joining in the abuse?

Worst of all was the comment of Jaime Martin, F1 editor of La Marca, who stated, “ It’s certain that the insults were racist, but if Lewis was bald the insults would have related to his baldness.” Talk about missing the point! Bald people occur in every community so they don’t tend to suffer en-masse discrimination: black people do. Bald people, to my knowledge, have never been excluded from sport, or suffered discrimination within it: black people have. Some men are (sadly) embarrassed by their receding hairline, but it would be sick to be ashamed of your race. The only shame in relation to race is the shame of there being people who use it as an excuse for exclusion and hate. And Spain’s real shame is being slyly racist, as least enough to let them get away with it.