RAPID as the recanting has been, the leak revealing Labour's alleged dismissal of Britain's 10 million pensioners as being mostly Conservative voters who are often racist stands to be believed for one reason alone.

For so frequent have been the examples of the party's control-freak obsession with power that its election strategists' writing off oldies as carping Tory-supporting Alf Garnetts whose votes are not worth pursuing is altogether believable -- in that it fits perfectly with the notion that, in its determination to win at all costs, Labour is much more interested in the votes of those who will help it stay in office rather than of those who need help.

Hence the fixation with so-called Middle England and the relegation of Old Labour voters - and, now, the old folk. So much for the party of the people. But in insulting the elderly in this way and drawing their anger over being given a pension increase of just 75p this month, Labour seems to be relating this reaction to the widespread voter backlash to the flood of asylum-seekers who are perceived to receive far better treatment from the government.

If pensioners complaining about this state of affairs are deemed to be racist, it is a charge that government will readily understand, having itself recently experienced the potency of the politically-correct race card, to the extent that it dare no longer refer to 'bogus' asylum seekers though its own figures show clearly that this is what most are.

Yet are the grousing pensioners, really racists or just realists when they speak out at the grim experience of queuing up in the Post Office to get a basic pension that has just gone up by the price of a cup of coffee after they have paid all their lives towards it - any many of them fought and suffered in the last war against the racism of the Nazis - when in the same queue they stand with people who have never paid a penny into the system and see them drawing far more in benefits when their only real allegiance to this country may be its social security system? But, of course, few, if any, of this worlds-apart government will have had that experience.