"I just do it to upset the Guardian," joshed Godfrey Bloom on BBC Radio 4, "defending" (we'll come to that) his comment on aid, and bongo bongo land. "I love it." Gah, the fiendish intelligence of the man. He's like a superbreed. If we get upset, it only pleases him; if we don't get upset, who will tell him what is wrong with his remarks?

Not James Naughtie, that's for sure. Arguing on the Today programme, the Ukip MEP said of his remarks about bongo bongo land: "There is no such place, of course, is there? Like Ruritania. Or the third world. Where is the third world?" He could search Wikipedia for this, of course, rather than asking rhetorically on national radio, but it would involve reading 300 words and digesting a certain amount of complexity, so there's a chance he'd have a stroke.

He continued: "If I've offended anybody in bongo bongo land, I shall write to the ambassador at the court of St James." His point was that a reference to a made-up country could not offend any rational person. (There is an ancillary attempt to make himself sound posh by using the stiltedly correct form of "ambassador to the UK". His self-fashioning isn't really our problem, but spare a thought here for the people who sometimes have to meet him.)

This would have been a good time for a presenter on a current affairs programme to make the following points. "bongo bongo land" is not a made-up country in the sense that he just made it up. Otherwise, he could have just said "we give all this money to poo-poo land". Bongo bongo land is, as anybody knows, a derogatory reference to the former colonies of the UK. This is also to be found on Wikipedia. I suspect the MEP of purposefully avoiding the internet for fear of reading anything that interrupts his line of reasoning.

It is, therefore, racist: it conflates countries and races whose distinctions he believes needn't be respected because they are not important. The words themselves are intended to underline the savagery and otherness of these nations. Overall, it's an attempt to portray most of a continent (and if you refer to his original speech, Pakistan as well) as an undifferentiated mass of uncivilised people who have just enough sophistication to rip us off by spending our money on sunglasses, but otherwise are happy with their drums.

It's actually rather an extreme position. It isn't good enough to find it amusing, as Naughtie did. It is fine to find it amusing in a bar after a port and lemonade, if that's your thing. In public discourse, to broadcast these ideas and leave them unchallenged is effectively to endorse them. Ukip supporters are probably as annoyed as lefties are by the feeble, metropolitan "I don't need to disagree with you, I find you amusing!" stance; but annoying Ukip is not the same as arguing against them.

The problem is that some of our debating muscles have atrophied. For a long time it has not been acceptable to try to stratify humans by race and denigrate some races with words that really only make you look stupid. Nor has it been OK to say that women should clean behind fridges, that students you've invited to Brussels are thick but have nice tits (he has form, Godfrey Bloom) or that Germans are all Nazis.

I loved the political correctness era – I loved not having to explain why racism was irrational, and women weren't any more disposed towards domesticity than men were. It saved so much time. I wish I'd mended the roof while the sun shone, written a novel, cleaned behind my fridge. But the downside was that the arguments died, so that now, when a Ukip candidate claims that society can't afford disabled children so they should all be compulsorily aborted, or that Africans were bad because they "sold their brothers into a slavery that Britain was the first to abolish", I cast around for my ready reckoner anti-eugenics argument, my non-racist history of the slave trade, and they're just not there. I wasn't expecting to have to use them this century. I stashed them in my loft.

So I'm annoyed about that, and I sometimes find myself dispirited that so little progress has been made. Bloom could be straight out of the 1930s, the 1890s, he could be explaining the necessity of the Bloemfontein concentration camp. But progress is a systematic process of thought and debate. One angry guy can't drag it back, any more than he can halt climate change by calling it "nothing more than a hypothesis" (I wish he could!).

If there's one thing Bloom may be right about, it's the people in rugby clubs and pubs who he claims agree with him. I doubt their numbers are significant. But there will probably always be a rump that waves away terms like "human dignity" as so much leftwing blarney; who think foreigners are fundamentally different and are worth less, who think it's important to clean behind fridges, and furthermore, that women should be doing it; who think if they're ever caught out they can call it a joke, and that their joke will be hilarious.

Do you dignify this pantomime? Most Ukip representatives are just trolls, throwing out the most unpleasant thing they can think of, with the specific and sole purpose of upsetting the people they like the least. React, and it encourages them, some people say. But I no longer agree. Bigots roam more freely and noisily than they have for three decades. It's more important to be ready than to be cool.

Twitter: @zoesqwilliams