THERE was understandable furore this week over the tweet sent out by Danny Baker the BBC radio presenter.

The shocking tweet, which was removed, showed a black and white picture of a couple holding hands with a chimpanzee dressed in clothes captioned ‘Royal Baby leaves hospital’. He was immediately sacked by the BBC.

Whilst his apology on Thursday may not have been sincere to some people, a day later he posted that ‘it was a genuine, naive and catastrophic mistake’ and added, ‘I would like once and for all to apologise to every single person who, quite naturally, took the awful connection at face value.’

Let's be honest the tweet was racist and I did not like how some people were trying to defend that fact that it wasn't in anyway. Or that it was about class.

Now, at what point should a person be forgiven for posting something which was clearly racist? Is it okay to post something like this and then state that you didn’t know it would be construed as racist?

If someone is in a position of influence and is not aware of what might be deemed offensive then that person is either very stupid or very misinformed.

I can’t believe that someone involved in the media at that level would not know that the royal baby was of mixed race. Didn’t we have countless articles pertaining to this very thing for two days?

I do think, however, that Mr Baker should not be made out to be a racist, as some has have suggested. He's just been very naive and ignorant. 

More locally we had a former councillor suspended by the Conservative Party over ‘allegedly racist social media posts’.

Former councillor Konrad Tapp shared a post clearly-marked English Defence League (EDL) attacking the Muslim veil on Facebook.

First of all, it was important that the Conservative Party made a stand when such posts are revealed.

Here, we have someone who has either not looked at the EDL labelling or has not bothered to realise this was produced solely to target minorities. Do we now label this gentleman as some raging Islamophobe or realise that maybe he did it out of ignorance?

It is difficult to criticise someone without knowing what that person’s intention is.

What is does reveal is that despite us all having access to the web and the most amount of information at our fingertips than at any point in history we still have people who cannot see what is and what is not offensive. That says more for a person’s state of mind more than anything else.