One of the characteristic eccentricities of the House is for Conservative Members to say, to reactions of amazement, shock and horror, that they intend to support a Conservative motion of no confidence in a Labour Government. By some magical means, they translate that into a ready understanding with some constituents—they do not give the exact number—with whom they have spoken and who give them full support.

That is characteristic of the Tories. They are not acting from principle. Their principle is opportunism. As the Prime Minister pointed out, the SNP put down a motion and the Tories went into action to follow it up. The Tories did not produce their motion for any reasons that they could adduce about the state of the nation or the economy. All that they have done is to go round doing the sort of wheeler-dealing of which they accuse us and counting the votes among the minority parties. When they start criticising us for wheeler-dealing, they should remember that that is exactly what they are doing as a cloak for their own inadequacies.

The Opposition often betray a duality of standards. I was staggered to hear from my hon. Friend the Member for Fife, Central (Mr. Hamilton) that the chairman of the Conservative Party could be receiving £30,000 per year from Pirelli, a company which is apparently overcharging the Post Office by £9 million a year. If that is right, what about the Tory chairman taking some individual responsibility? The Tories are the party of individual responsibility. They believe in a hierarchical system. They complain that the highly paid have to pay too much tax. Was their chair-man, Lord Thorneycroft, derelict in his duty because of the tax burden, or was it simply because of the system that they support in which the top elite seem to get away with virtually anything, but if a group of gravediggers in Liverpool come out on strike they are accused of dereliction of duty, even though they are only ordinary working people on £40 or £50 a week? That is an interesting duality of standards.

I hope that in the next few weeks the Tory attitude towards trade unions and trade unionists will be brought out into the open. While the Tories bitterly criticise trade unions, a large number of Tory Members are in the tightest organised closed shop in the world, the Inns of Court, the archaic and old-fashioned system of education which perpetuates the class system in our legal profession. They are busy lining their pockets as fast as they can with parliamentary adviserships and company directorships. But what do they say to ordinary working men and women such as lorry drivers and local authority employees? Those workers are told that they must work full-time, work harder and pull their belts in because rates are too high. All the time those Tory Members are busy accumulating as much as they can. Their philosophy is that of greed and they are busy supporting it.