Anyone with dangerous opinions, keep out

Be quiet, please, class, and pay attention, because we have a lot to get through in the 35 minutes we have at our disposal since Miss Harman rearranged the timetable in the interests, so she claims, of greater efficiency. I will confess to you freely that I do not share her view. No, Jason, that is not confidential, although thank you for asking all the same. What I have said, I have said. I have long ago relinquished worldly ambition and have no desire to ingratiate myself with Mr Blair, still less with Miss Harman.

Now then, current events. What do you mean, Sharon, you don't fancy that William Hague? Do you imagine for a second that he would fancy you, you silly girl? You would need at least three A-levels for Mr Hague to pay you the slightest attention. At your rate of progress I should be surprised if you got any at all. What did you say, Sharon? Politics is boring? The world is not meant to be a source of constant diversion for you. The regulations about social security are extremely boring, but they are very important none the less, as you may shortly discover for yourself, Sharon, if you continue as you are at the moment.

Miss Harman and Mr Blair belong to a select group whose members presumably extend beyond the bounds of the Government and who are excused from voting as often as they would otherwise be required to do "because" - this is the Whips' explanation - "they have young children". Mr Nick Brown, the Chief Whip, and his acolytes have now come up with another category of those who are excused votes, rather as some soldiers are excused boots: those members who need not possess young children but do hold dangerous opinions.

One woman member who came in at the election and was known to be uneasy about Miss Harman's punitive raid on single parents was told to take the week off and spend it in her constituency. This she duly did. At any rate her name does not appear in any of the division lists.

There were four divisions, the procedural details of which need not detain us here. In the crucial one, where the Labour dissentients combined with the Liberal Democrats and the nationalists against the Labour Government supported by the Conservative Opposition, the Government won by 457 to 107. Forty-seven Labour members voted against. But a further 57 did not vote at all. They have not yet been christened "the 57 varieties", as were the participants in a famous defence rebellion many years ago. But they varied between those who sat on their hands and those who simply made themselves scarce, the course followed by several new members on the advice of the Whips.

In the division of March 1979 which brought down the last Labour government, the Irish member Frank Maguire, a publican by trade who stuck, by and large, to his own licensed premises and never aspired to cut a figure on a wider stage, made a special journey across the Irish Sea in order, as he explained at the time, "to abstain in person". I think I was the first to record this. If so, it was one of the few scoops of what I laughingly refer to as my career. It was regarded as highly diverting and very Irish.

But the words contained a lot of sense. Being present and even intervening in the debate (as Mr Harry Cohen did) and then abstaining is surely a positive act, recognised as such in numerous other legislatures. It is quite different from staying away to keep out of trouble. Nor did the size of the rebellion surprise me. It was about the standard number against a Labour government with a large majority, as in 1945-50 or 1966-70. Several Mr Worldly Wisemen predicted beforehand that it would collapse because this was a new party, a disciplined party, a Blairite party, quite different from the rabble of old. I did not believe it. It was largely propaganda pumped out by the Central Committee from their headquarters at Millbank. One had only to do a little light reading in the standard works of reference.

For instance, I remember Mr John McDonnell, who now sits for Hayes and voted against the Government, presiding over packed meetings at the conference in the early 1980s addressed by Mr Tony Benn, Mr Arthur Scargill and similar comrades. Mr McDonnell is not Old Labour as, say, Mrs Gwyneth Dunwoody (another dissentient) clearly is. After all, she is the daughter of the great Morgan Phillips, while he is the son, so to speak, of Tony Benn. So one could go on.

The fallacy is to equate the size of the rebellion with the passing of the Government's business. They are entirely different matters. With a majority of 177 Mr Jack Straw could easily get through his long-awaited Slaughter of the Firstborn (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill, unless the judges intervened under the new Human Rights Act or, indeed, under powers of judicial review which they have already assumed.

Has anyone noticed, by the way, how quiet the judiciary has become since 1 May? Before then hardly a week went by when some minister, usually Mr Michael Howard, was not on the receiving end of a stern judicial rebuke. On 16 December Dr Jack Cunningham is set to promulgate regulations about the sale of beef on the bone whose consequence will be not only to curtail the liberties of everyone but also to throw many small butchers out of business. Have they no funds for lawyers? The National Farmers' Union certainly has enough cash to hire Lord Irvine himself, were he still at the Bar.

There is no parliamentary as distinct from legal reason why the Government should not continue to get its business through. But, as I have said before, the bigger the majority, the greater the likelihood of rebellion and the larger the number of potential rebels. There is no reason why the 1997 House should prove an exception to this general rule, New Labourism notwithstanding.

The 1992-97 Parliament was exceptional. The Conservative backbenchers were rebellious, over Europe and a few other matters, even though they had a precarious majority. They behaved in this way partly because they felt strongly about Europe, partly because Mr John Major's managers were incompetent, not only withdrawing the whip unnecessarily but actually inviting adverse votes by prolonging proceedings in the House for no good reason at all. It does not follow that, because the Tories rebelled with a small majority, Labour are going to refrain from rebelling from time to time because they have a large one.

I hope, finally, that we are not going to hear any more about "expelling" people from the party. Most of this talk has been misleading not so much because it is difficult to discipline 40-odd MPs (though it is) as because the parliamentary party, even under Mr Blair, has no power to expel anybody. All it can do is deprive erring members of the whip and report them to the National Executive Committee.

Leave Jason alone, Sharon. He is a quiet boy who comes here to work. That is quite enough for one morning, thank you very much. If you carry on in this way, I shall have no hesitation about sending you straight to Miss Harman, who, I can assure you, is capable of making life extremely disagreeable for girls such as yourself. You should not assume that she does not have Mr Blair's full support simply because he chooses to keep out of the way.