INSIDE PARLIAMENT: Major brings House down against Blair

Conservative backbenchers broke with strict Commons practice yesterday and applauded John Major after a Question Time performance of studied aggression.

The Prime Minister parried an attack by Tony Blair on rail privatisation, exploited Labour divisions over scrapping Clause IV and, with the aid of a friendly questioner, revealed a former Opposition transport spokesman as a beneficiary of share options in a privatised bus company.

Opening the exchanges, David Winnick, Labour MP for Walsall North, asked why Mr Major had refused to allow the Nolan committee on standards in public life to into the funding of political parties.

"Is it because they would soon discover the underhand, shabby way that the Tory party collects a lot of its money. Knighthoods and peerages to many of those who give the largest donations?"

But Mr Major said the disgrace in party funding was the Labour Party's dependency on trade unions who bought direct influence of their votes. "We will see it again on Clause IV as the old, unreconstructed Labour Party comes to the rescue of the new Labour Party," he said.

With Conservative MPs baying for some reaction on the public ownership clause, Mr Blair turned to the railways and tried to hold the Prime Minister to his statement a week ago that he was just as committed to maintaining the existing through-ticketing service.

Mr Major said the rail regulator had made perfectly clear he was considering responses to his consultation document. "I will wait and see what proposals the regulator has."

But Mr Blair countered: "The question is, what is the Prime Minister's own position?" Brian Mawhinney, Secretary of State for Transport, had said any reduction in through-ticketing was unacceptable. Would that be the Government's position?

Mr Major said he would want to be satisfied the outcome of the consultations improved the service available on through-ticketing. "I am not satisfied at present with the service British Rail has offered over many years. I intend to see it improved and that is what privatisation will achieve."

Taking a third bite, Mr Blair said when the public saw £700m spent up to now on privatisation, cuts in timetables and now a possible cut in through-ticketing, was it any wonder they did not want British Rail broken up and sold off?

To Tory laughter, Mr Major replied: "Mr Blair has an unsuspected sense of humour. I had not imagined, after the turn and turn-about in his transport policy on BR in the last few days, that he would have had the brass neck to suggest that we, incorrectly,had changed the position we have taken on through-ticketing.

In two effective Tory contributions, Paul Marland, MP for Gloucestershire West, said Labour's agriculture spokesman [Gavin Strang] was a member of the Government which in 1975 lifted the ban on export of live animals for slaughter, and Henry Bellingham, MP for Norfolk NW, pointed out that Peter Snape, a former Labour transport spokesman, would make a large profit - possibly £40,000 - from the flotation of West Midlands Travel, once a "sleepy nationalised industry". Mr Major hoped the West Bromwich East MP would do very well out of the flotation.

Europe threatened briefly to break the Prime Minister's stride when Alistair Darling, a Labour Treasury spokesman, asked if he still believed Jacques Santer was the right man to be president of the EU Commission after he had attacked the "bad faith" of states trying to keep everything under national control.

Mr Santer yesterday told MEPs in Strasbourg of the benefits of a single currency and made clear he wants Britain's social chapter "opt-out" removed.

Was the Prime Minister "guilty of yet another gross error of judgement?'' Mr Darling wondered. Mr Major said the new Commission would be judged by its performance. "But as I have indicated before ... I believe the high tide of federalism in Europe is passed."

Euro-sceptic Sir Peter Tapsell, MP for Lindsey East, contrasted Mr Major's recently declared opposition to further constitutional changes at the 1996 Inter-Governmental Conference with what he said was an admission by Mr Blair he would agree to reductions in British parliamentary sovereignty.

Picking up on Mr Blair's rebuke of the "infantile incompetence" of Labour MEPs who placed an advertisement calling for the retention of Clause IV, the Prime Minister replied:- "I'm rather surprised at what Mr Blair has to say about handing more powers tothe European Parliament in view of the low opinion he's recently expressed of some members of it." Tory MPs were ecstatic.

The House went on to give a Second Reading to the Finance Bill - by 318 votes to 277, a Government majority of 41 - implementing the November Budget.