England football stars would be well within their rights to walk off the pitch if they are racially abused during Euro 2012, the chairman of the Professional Footballers' Association said on Sunday.
Clarke Carlisle said he would want to walk off the pitch if he received a torrent of racial abuse and he hoped his teammates would support him.
Uefa, the governing body, has said players who walk off the pitch during the tournament in Ukraine and Poland in protest at racial abuse will be handed a yellow card.
Speaking on BBC1's Andrew Marr Show, Mr Carlisle said that during a visit to Poland last month he witnessed racial abuse and hooliganism in a league derby, only having been told by the local police chief there had been no reported incidents in the past 16 months.
He said: "The reality and what we are being told and is reported is vastly different.
"As a player, if you see that the officials aren't handling the situation then you are well within your rights to walk off the pitch in my opinion.
"Nobody should be abused in their work place, especially not racially. We don't want any form of discrimination at all in football. This is going to be a real test of Uefa to see if they have empowered their officials to take control of these situations.
"If you see that the referee is taking control of it. If he has stopped the game and it is one or two individuals and they are being sorted out, or if it is a group and he is taking the players off the pitch to sort it out, then you'd be happy because you know it is being dealt with."
But asked what he would do as a player if racial abuse was not being dealt with by a referee, he added: "If it happened to me I would want to walk off the pitch because I don't think anybody should be abused in their workplace and I would hope that my teammates would support me."
Earlier, shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander said players have the right to walk off the pitch.
Writing in the Mail on Sunday, he said: "Referees have the power to stop the game should any racist incidents occur - they should use it and be backed by the governing body when they do.
"However, if a referee ignored blatant racist abuse, and the England players or the management felt justified in walking off, they should be supported."
Mr Carlisle also backed England manager Roy Hodgson after England defender Rio Ferdinand was not selected as a replacement for the squad.
Hodgson claimed there were "footballing reasons" for omitting Ferdinand from his squad, but there had been questions about whether the Manchester United defender's exclusion was as a result of Chelsea player John Terry facing charges of racially abusing his younger brother, the QPR player Anton Ferdinand.
Mr Carlisle said he accepted Hodgson's assertion that he could not call up Rio Ferdinand as a bit-part player who might not get a game during the tournament. He said he hoped Hodgson's explanation would "put to bed a lot of the unsettling rumours that had been flying around".
No British Government ministers will be attending England's Group D games in Donetsk and Kiev amid anger over the treatment of jailed opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko.
The move comes after other European countries including Germany and France announced that senior politicians would boycott games played in Ukraine, which is co-hosting the event with Poland, unless the human rights situation under President Viktor Yanukovych improved.
Today, Mr Hague said the Government would not make a decision on whether ministers would attend matches in the latter stages of the tournament until it was known whether England had successfully negotiated its group.
He said: "We have concerns about Ukraine. It's possible for the Ukrainian government to improve the situation. If we get to the latter stages, we will announce what we will do then.
"We are not laying down specific conditions but if there is an improvement, we will know improvement when we see it.
"We will all be able to judge that when we see it. That may be unlikely over this relatively short timescale so I don't want to hold out any prospect of this changing from as things stand at the moment.
"But as I say that all we can do at the moment is announce our position for games that we know are taking place."