THE LORDS' LESSON FOR LABOUR'S NEW MPS: DARE TO SPEAK YOUR MINDS

It's embarrassing. Here we are, stern critics of the ermine-clad brigade
sitting there unelected in the House of Lords, applauding their courage and
perspicuity. First it was the revolt of the Labour peers, joining
cross-benchers and a smattering of brave Tories to vote for amendments to
the Competition Bill to allow proper testing of Rupert Murdoch's pricing
policies. Now it's the decision by the Lords' Science and Technology
Committee to set up an inquiry into the case for decriminalising cannabis.

Led by the former vice-chancellor of the Open University, Lord Perry of
Walton, a group of peers is to look dispassionately at the drug and the
contexts in which it is used. Far be it from us to anticipate the outcome.
Suffice it to say that a lot of other distinguished people have, on
examining the arguments and consulting their own experience, concluded that
the law as it stands is not only ineffective but unsound. To judge by the
track record of the Science and Technology Committee, as of other
specialist investigations by the peers, there is every reason to expect
Lord Perry's team to respond to the weight of argument and evidence and
reach pretty much the same conclusions as the Independent on Sunday has
lately been campaigning for.

Of course that does not alter any fundamentals about the Lords. A modern
democracy has no need of the hereditary principle and ought to look with
suspicion on government by appointees. What we have witnessed this week is
action by a small group of liberal-minded peers, who know that ultimately
what they do and say stands to be countermanded and contradicted by the
Government and its supporters in the House of Commons. The House of Lords,
moreover, still contains many silent, whipped government placepeople, those
sit-on-their-hands Tories, purposeless Anglican bishops, not to mention
coachloads of hereditary landowners and peers-by-descent, who turn up only
to collect their attendance allowances and when they do speak sound as if
1832 were but yesterday.

It won't do to say that lordly liberalism in itself makes a case for
dividing lawmaking into two segments, granting powers to an older, wiser
second chamber, in order to revise or challenge the decisions of the
principal legislature. It is plain that the peers have been made to look
good only because the House of Commons lately has looked so supine. The
problem is partly that of the historical condition of the Tories -
defeated, unimaginatively-led and (still) fatally riven on Europe. They
resort to character assassination in place of policy development, quibbling
in place of the sustained assault that Labour's plans for Britain deserve
(not because they are flawed, but because they will be better thanks to
criticism).

But the problem is more Labour's hegemony and the way the Blairite project
seems to have reduced MPs to mere automata. It is a paradox. With that huge
majority in the Commons, MPs - one might think - could relax a bit,
exercise their cerebella, let fly an occasionally radical thought. Instead
the whips patrol the corridors like warders around an Alabama chain-gang.
Labour MPs cry into their beer and bemoan their fate - but totally off the
record, old chap.

Sometimes, however, there are glimmerings. The anti-Murdoch forces in the
Commons are mustering, their ranks said to include even such proto-New
Labourites as Giles Radice, fighting the revisionist fight (as one
commentator put it) while Tony Blair was still in nappies. Yesterday
Margaret Hodge, till now loyal in thought word and deed, sank her teeth
into the flesh of Chief Inspector Chris Woodhead, despite the entree he
enjoys at No 10. Whether Mrs Hodge's committee is right to single out
Ofsted in this way is not the issue: this kind of work is what backbench
specialists are supposed to do.

Is this evidence that the worms are beginning to turn? No one is advocating
parliamentary anarchy nor the abandonment of party discipline in pursuit of
the Blair government's central goals. No one is saying that executive
government can be effective without being able to rely on guaranteed
support in the lobbies. But none of that means they cannot challenge
ministers and their prejudices, especially on issues which are far from
central to this Government's existence.

Labour MPs should have asked more searching questions about the purposes of
British armed forces in the Gulf. They have every right to ask Mr Blair
just why preserving the friendship of Rupert Murdoch is so necessary. It is
open to them to quiz Mr Straw on his unargued hard line on soft drugs. If
the old men in the Lords can do it, why not the younger men and women in
the Commons?