LABOUR backbenchers did not rebel against the Blair government in sufficient numbers to prevent war on Iraq, major curtailments of civil liberty, the privatisation of air traffic control, the abolition of student grants, or benefit cuts directed against single mothers and the disabled.

Yet last night the Brown administration could not muster a parliamentary majority to overturn a Liberal Democrat motion allowing Ghurka veterans to live in Britain.

I’m not commenting here on the merits of the substantive issue; I’m opposed to immigration controls and recognise that Nepalese service personnel have as much right to reside in the UK as anyone else.

But the point is that the 27 Labour MPs who voted for the Lib Dem position – and the dozens more who abstained – did so in response to a campaign led by the Daily Telegraph and a kukri-wielding Joanna Lumley, plainly motivated more by reactionary jingoism than support for open borders. The comparison with votes on what should be core ideological concerns for democratic socialists is surely instructive.

Meanwhile, it appears there is more trouble in store shortly, with the imminent publication of MPs expense claims before the July recess. The Daily Mail seriously reports fears that three Labour MPs are contemplating suicide, as a quick recce through the hotel receipts will show them up as infidel spouses.

Tough it out, guysk don’t top yourselves. Nine times out of ten, the average missus/hubbie will forgive a dalliance or two, if only for the sake of the kiddies.

I somehow suspect that most adults will take the view that politicians’ love lives are their own affair, as they did after that little John Major-Edwina Currie bombshell. What will hurt rather more will be revelations of double claims for the hotsheets hotel rooms.

In the mid 1990s, Labour and the entire left rightly castigated those Tory MPs found to have accepted a few hundred quid in plain brown envelopes as their reward for tabling parliamentary questions.

I suppose an argument could be made that it is slightly less morally reprehensible to accept bungs from the Phoney Pharaoh than it is to scam the taxpayer directly, if only because no political favours are involved.

But what is depressing is the persistence of low-level peculation. MPs seem not to have twigged it, but they are in fact on a better than decent middle class wedge that should run to all reasonable household bills and then some.

Yet some seem determined to cream off a few extra bob by any means necessary. They sell their integrity not in return for a six figure sum, in the manner of certain members of the House of Lords, but for less than the price of a made-to-measure suit, the better to facilitate a clandestine bonk.

Several commentators today draw parallels to the fag end of the Major government and where we are today, something I myself did last year.

It is worth noting that at no time in its history, prior to the rise of Blair and Brown, would it even have been conceivable for a Labour government to find itself in such a situation.

The left’s ethical standards have traditionally been higher than those of the corrupt and business-funded political right. But then, not the least effect of business-funded New Labourism has been the erosion of basic labour movement morality.