Just before the second term launches, consider one thing the first has done. Catch it before it departs into the maw of another mandate where all is forgiven and much forgotten. See what power did in one particular zone, which I'm still prepared to call the moral sensibility of ministers. Not only have their arteries hardened and their consciences grown dull. That's to be expected under the weight of office. More startling is how easily the gates of perception, their sense of what they are doing, have been closed and locked.  When they came to power, one principle they seemed unbreakably attached to was a detestation of racial prejudice. Equality of racial justice and hostility to ethnic discrimination were ideals that united old and new Labour. To men like Tony Blair and Jack Straw they were articles of faith, which lay behind both the swift abolition of the Tories' primary-purpose rule challenging migrant spouses to prove they had any right to join their partners, and the later setting up of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry. To Blair and Straw it is unimaginable that they could be party to anything but the most impeccable correctness in all matters that touch on race.   Yet they have been. Two weeks ago, I wrote about the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000, which outlawed ethnic discrimination by public authorities but made an exception for the immigration service. I unearthed a ministerial order which authorised immigration officers   to treat people of certain nationalities - unspecified, but to be identified at the future decision of ministers and officials - worse than other people. Replying to the critique, Straw pleaded a mere drafting technicality and termed my attack "bizarre".   But this order was only a beginning. There has now been a second one, dated April 23, which extends the reach from nationalities to what it describes, in its own headline, as "discrimination on ground of ethnic or national origin". This time the ethnics in question are listed: "a) Kurd, b) Roma, c) Albanian, d) Tamil, e) Pontic Greek, f) Somali, g) Afghan". All persons of these origins are now to be subject "to a more rigorous examination than other persons in the same circumstances". They can be detained, questioned and rejected, as a class, more freely than other people because they are now deemed prima facie more likely to be illegal immigrants or bogus asylum-seekers.   They have something else in common, however. There is no Kurdish passport, there is no Roma passport. Identifying these people can be attempted through little more than their personal appearance, plus some inference from the flight or possibly boat they arrive on. So, not only is the bar on collective discrimination being ditched, but a peculiarly vicious form of sorting is written into statute, whereby immigration officers herd together anyone who looks like a Kurd or a Tamil or a Pontic Greek - regardless of whether these   come, as Tamils do, from Sri Lanka, Canada, India or even the UK - and impose special oppression on them.   Ministers' handling of this law went through two phases. The first, during passage, was to pretend it was benign. The only purpose they cited was to make it easier to discriminate in favour of, say, Kosovan refugees. When pressed by Liberal Democrats such as Lord Lester, that was the scenario they repeatedly mentioned. They were lying. It is quite apparent from the April 23 order that what they wanted all along was the power to authorise state-sponsored mass exclusion of certain ethnic groups, without regard for individual justice, on a scale never before seen in this country.    Phase two came last week. The new law, said Barbara Roche, Straw's minion in charge of immigration, was merely giving formal shape to a practice that had been going on a long time. She was almost flippant in her incredulity that anyone should complain about a long-established pattern of ethnic selection. She talked about the need for "objective evidence" against each migrant. But no one has explained how a Roma is meant to overcome the ethnic evidence against him, especially in view of the further sub-clause in the order which states, almost incredibly: "If the information [needed to pursue an application to enter] is not available in a language which the person understands, it is not necessary to provide the information in a language which he does understand."   Three conclusions can be drawn from this. First, whether or not ethnic selection went on before, it has now been systematised. If an apparent Kurd, or potential Roma, or notional Pontic Greek has by some oversight not been discriminated against, ministers may want to know the reason why. Immigration controllers are now on formal notice as to which ethnic and national origins are especially unwelcome in Britain. Their conduct will be policed by someone called a "race monitor", but only retrospectively and without attention to individual cases. The monitor is plainly a PR stooge in the making.   Second, as the government's contribution to present discontents over asylum, this is political cowardice on a grand scale. No one disputes the need for immigration control. But faced by the mighty force of Ann Widdecombe, Blair and Straw are evidently terrified of electoral punishment if they can't match her rhetoric of national alarm with measures of ethnic hostility. Though all these politicians avow their respect for genuine cases, it's the tritest lip service. Straw collaborates with Widdecombe in a discourse from which only the Lib Dems stand aside, that stigmatises asylum itself as presumptively a bogus concept, eating away at the resources of the fifth largest economy in the world.   Third, something unpleasant has happened to Labour in power. For all sorts of reasons, they need to win the election. I hope they do. They're the only plausible choice on offer and defend several important policies that will probably, given time, make this country a better place. But their immigration regime shows not only that they've become, in a vital area, as bad as the Tories, but that they have lost their intellectual as well as moral faculties. They appear not to know what they're doing. They sincerely believe they do not favour ethnic discrimination. Straw, the posturing anti-racist, thinks any challenge to his law can only be "bizarre". He is surrounded by a party that seems to believe the same - barely a squeak came out of it when the law went through.   Such, it seems, is today's corruption of power: not so much a conspiracy of self-interest as the building of a wall of righteous self-belief. A power-driven certainty that, because one is who one is, one can by definition do no wrong. This law of ethnic punishment is a disgrace. Perhaps only a party infused by belief in its own anti-racism would have the nerve to smuggle it past the frontier that separates a decent country from a shameful one.