Labour played its own version of the "asylum card" yesterday when the Home Secretary, Mr Jack Straw, promised to impose a cap on the number of people allowed into Britain.
On Friday the Prime Minister, Mr Blair, accused Mr William Hague of "opportunism" over Tory plans to detain all asylum-seekers in secure camps while their applications were processed.
However, Mr Straw yesterday betrayed Labour's fear of being outflanked on the issue, promising a government clampdown and a "ceiling" above which people would not be allowed to enter the country save in "exceptional circumstances".
Mr Straw suggested the Labour government would negotiate with other European countries on an agreed level in the "low tens of thousands" region. "There is a limit on the number of applicants, however genuine, that you can take," he told the Observer. "You can argue about how many thousands it is, but it is a matter of thousands, not millions. However compassionate you feel about the consequences of civil war, most of these consequences have to be dealt with in the region where the conflict is taking place."
Refugee groups strongly condemned Mr Straw's proposal, which they said would breach the United Nations Convention on Refugees and violate their human rights. Ms Jean Candler of the Refugee Council said: "It is the individual's basic right to seek asylum. Is Jack Straw really suggesting that anyone who comes after this ceiling has been reached will be turned away? It would surely contravene people's human rights."
But Mr Straw was insistent in his interview that a quota system would work. "There is a ceiling and it has to be measured in thousands, and people have got to accept that. There are practical ceilings and these practical ceilings need to be allocated and dealt with more rationally," he said.
Labour hopes to dent further the Tory attack on asylum - like the euro, one of Mr Hague's more "populist" campaign themes - when new figures to be released later this week show a slowdown in the numbers entering Britain. The figures are also expected to show a faster rate of processing asylum applications.