BIG BROTHER giveth, and Big Brother taketh away.

No one will know this more than Jade Goody when she settles down to her post-post-Big Brother life after exiting the house. The show that catapulted her into a pointless kind of fame that saw her earn around Euro5m from endless interviews, spin-off reality television programmes, fitness DVDs and a bestselling line of perfume, has now mostly destroyed her, or rather she has destroyed herself.

Publicists consistently warn that entering the Celebrity Big Brother house has the potential to ruin your career. Jodie Marsh learnt that, Michael Barrymore learnt that, Vanessa Feltz learnt that, George Galloway learnt that, but Jade clearly thought she was immune.

For the few years since Jade became public enemy number one upon exiting the Big Brother house in third place, we forgot how much we hated her. She became Britain's D-list token chav, someone we could laugh at in magazines and tabloid pages and commend for losing weight (her fitness DVDs have sold plenty, even though Goody has caused much of her physical transformation with surgery). But Jade only survived the real world after her first stint in the Big Brother house because the CCTV cameras were no longer on to display how awful she is.

Now, she's even worse. She bullied, screamed at and hurled racial abuse at fellow contestant and Bollywood superstar, Shilpa Shetty, and she has done all of this from a position of power. Jade is not a fat 20-year-old dental nurse anymore.

She is a brand, a millionaire, in her own words, the "26th most inflerential [sic] person in the world." And like all cartoon villains, Jade needs two brainless side-kicks. These come in the form of dopey Jo O'Meara from S Club 7, who mused that the reason people were so skinny in India is because they undercook their food, when Shilpa undercooked a roast chicken (the first time she had made such a dish) and Danielle Lloyd - whose claim to fame involves being stripped of her Miss Britain crown when it was revealed she was shagging the competition's judge, Teddy Sherringham - who thinks that Shilpa should "f. . . off back home."

Over the past week, Shilpa, a fragile, emotional character, who is used to being treated like royalty in India, has been subjected to horrible abuse. "You need a day in the slums, " Goody remarked once, to which Lloyd cackled in agreement, deciding that Shetty should "go home" and that "she can't even speak English properly". The latter statement is even more ignorant given that O'Meara, Lloyd and Goody have only a basic command of the English language. Later, Goody called Shetty "poppadom, " saying it was the only Indian word she could think of.

It's not just the nature of these spiteful remarks, it's the manner in which they are delivered that jars the most. Goody springs up, storms towards Shilpa in an unbelievably over-the-top and aggressive manner. You'd almost swear that Danielle was standing in the corner filming the whole racist happy-slapping, ready to upload it on YouTube to the delight of fellow thickos around Britain. Jade's mother, Jackie, whose time in the house was short-lived due to the fact that - believe it or not - she is even more despicable than her daughter, refused to call Shilpa by her name, claiming that she couldn't pronounce it. Referring to her instead as "the Indian", she asked her whether she lived in a shack.

At one point, even Jade had to pull her up on being rude to Shilpa for refusing to accept the meal she had made for the housemates.

This is not straightforward racism, although it is being articulated in that manner. It is also classic female envy, jealousy, and gang-bitchiness. Shilpa speaks eight languages and has wealth far beyond Goody's Juicy Couture dreams. Class-ism is also at work.

Shetty was born into a wealthy family, the three others had to scrape and struggle to reach the D-list. If Shilpa had less dignity and composure and screamed at Jade like Jade screams at her, then maybe Jade would back off. But Shilpa has been passive to a fault.

As have the males in the house - especially the two most marginalised whom Shilpa is friends with; Jermaine Jackson (black) and 'H' (gay). They are guilty of standing idly by, allowing Jade's steamrolling alpha female rant to dominate the agenda.

To Shetty's credit, despite the fact that she is as emotional, needy and as up herself as most of these contestants generally are, she has retained her dignity and composure, unaware that effigies of Big Brother were burnt in India as Gordon Brown visited the country.

Shilpa eventually confirmed that she thought that the 'r' word was at work, "I'm representing my country. Is that what today's UK is? It's scary. It's quite a shame really, " she said. And when Cleo Rocos said she didn't think Jade's behaviour was racist, Shilpa decided "I'm telling you it is." Big Brother spoke privately to Jade and Danielle about their behaviour and mysteriously, Shilpa later turned up in the diary room retracting her statement that racism was at work. Goody and Lloyd, clearly after speaking to Big Brother behind the scenes, then offered an apology to Shetty. The overwhelming reaction was to be repulsed at such a naked display of cynicism, not just from Goody herself but also from the programme makers who were clearly involved in a manipulative, behind-the-scenes exercise in damage limitation.

But if racism has made all the headlines, there is also another story beneath all of this, the rise of female aggression in Britain and the degradation of femininity. Jade, Jo and Danielle have embraced the most ruthless pole of the Ladette category; a violent, brash attitude that values intimidation, a gang mentality that embraces aggression and foul-mouthed communication, a celebration of ignorance and chav-culture. Even Ken Russell, hardly a model of sanity, called Jade "demented" before walking out of the house. Of course, it must be remembered that Big Brother is about a 'storyline'. There is no doubt that Shetty is being bullied, but as most former contestants bray, a lot of it is in the editing.

Channel 4 thrives on controversy and Big Brother depends on it.

This year, the programme lost half of its audience after the first week.

When racism reared its ugly head, it was in serious trouble. And it's controversy of the most interesting kind. At its most tenuously intellectual, Big Brother is a social experiment. At a stretch, it's a microcosm of current social thoughts and actions, a mirror of a British society, that confines racism to glossy New Labour poster campaigns and fails to confront the problem in a country where racially motivated attacks, murders and riots are commonplace. When Channel 4's chief executive, Andy Duncan, read a statement standing by his decision to keep Big Brother on air ("The debate has become heated, at times the viewing has been uncomfortable . . . but it is unquestionably a good thing that the programme has raised this issue"), one began to wonder, who would have thought that putting a few insecure, egotistical 'celebrities' in a filmed house would show such a piercing and ugly reality?

Whether the substantial increase in ratings will be enough to soften the blow of the Carphone Warehouse dramatically pulling their £3m sponsorship from the programme, and nearly 40,000 complaints being made to the broadcasting regulator, Ofcom, and Channel 4, and now the threat of Hertfordshire Police investigating the allegations of racism, remains to be seen. Channel 4 should survive the storm, but will Jade and Danielle? The latter has lost a modelling contract, and Goody's perfume has now been withdrawn from the shelves.

Jade is a fighter. The fact that she survived her childhood at all - one which involved her mother beating her, giving her a first joint aged five, and on one occasion being so off her face that she forgot she had a daughter - is some sort of miracle. Jade has evolved from 'the pig' - a public hate figure, to a chav darling, and now a public bigot whom the hypocritical tabloids have decided it's time to re-lynch. Is there one last vacuous transformation in her tank? Does she even deserve a return to our affections? And should we punish her for her slurs, when that's all that most of us hurl in her direction?