IF EVER there was a ridiculous storm in a teacup, it is that which has led to Home Secretary Jack Straw facing a police probe over his attack on criminal gangs of travellers who, he said, masqueraded as traditional gypsies to trade on public sentimentality.

The ludicrous upshot is that the Home Secretary, acknowledged across the community for his positive attitude to race relations, ends up being reported to the Commission for Racial Equality by an assertive arm of the race lobby.

Yet what is even more absurd about this is that, apart from the cloistered academic sorts and blinkered race relations activists who have criticised his comments, most people accept that what he said is right.

Notably, even his Shadow counterpart, Ann Widdecombe, supports him.

For what Mr Straw attacked was not all travellers or gypsies, but just some - those who, just as he said, think they have a licence to commit crimes because they label themselves travellers.

Indeed the only reason they are travellers is to escape retribution for their crimes or for their shoddy "work" as asphalters or tree surgeons or whatever.

And has not everyone living in the real world had experience of the trouble, nuisance and menace this sort cause?

And do they not in the process - unlike Mr Straw who made a clear distinction - blacken the name of all travellers and most unfairly for the decent, law-abiding travellers?

Mr Straw was simply calling a spade a spade.

We are sure that if he needed to provide his critics with instances of the bad behaviour he has condemned, he could provide it by the caravan load - many of them from his own constituency.

It is refreshing to find politicians who will not be gagged by political correctness.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.