WHUMP! Down it goes, hard on to the table -- the race card is played by Home Secretary Jack Straw against Tory leader William Hague as the row over asylum seekers escalates.

Having been brandished by others already -- to the extent that Labour politicians daren't speak any more of 'floods' of refugees or say that most are 'bogus' -- the card is now snatched by Mr Straw and played against Mr Hague.

He's pandering to the National Front, says Jack.

He's like Enoch Powell, says Denis MacShane, Labour MP for Rotherham.

If you ask me, what he is really doing is giving Labour the willies as they look at getting a right clobbering in the local elections tomorrow - and subsequent nightmares that lots of Labour seats will be lost in a general election a year afterwards. And all because what Mr Hague is pandering to is the voters' deep concerns about asylum seekers -- more than 100,000 of whom are in the queue for processing and thousands of whom are being spread around the country at considerable public expense when, as the government itself was saying prior to embarking on its timid self-censorship, most are bogus applicants.

In claiming that this flood is out of control and that it must be curbed -- the Tories want new applicants held in detention centres -- Mr Hague may well be exploiting people's anxieties in the quest for votes.

However, he is only practising a well-established political art, is he not?

He is, nonetheless, simply telling the truth when he speaks of a flood that is out of control and does not shy from the word 'bogus' where it applies.

It is for voters to judge whether this is disreputable, but is not Labour's attempt to brand him as an extremist, who is indulging the likes of the racist National Front, a sinister tactic aimed at shutting down the debate on a serious issue and their alleged failure to deal with it -- by seeking to frighten Mr Hague into shutting up?

Pardon me, but what I thought Mr Hague said was that failure to confront the problem was what was likely to hand ammunition to extremists like the National Front.

And isn't that exactly what these attempts to gag him with imputations of racism amount to?