IF the House of Lords has a death wish – which I very much doubt – it is certainly going the right way about it.

Earlier this month, the some 200 peers successfully voted to make it much harder for newspapers to investigate corruption – a move which has been universally attacked and, it is hoped, the elected House of Commons will soon correct.

The penalties planned against newspapers by people who claim to be victims of newspaper harassment include, unbelievably, the payment of the aggrieved person’s costs even if he loses the case. What kind of justice is that?

What makes this decision by the House of Lords even more sinister is that many of the peers who voted for it have themselves been exposed by newspapers, either for expenses wrongdoing, or sexual misbehaviour, among other misdeeds.

No wonder they want a toothless press to enable them to get on with their crimes without serious challenge.

The House of Lords is not supposed to be at war with the House of Commons, but be a revising chamber.

However, it is beginning to look very much that hostilities are breaking out.

One hopes that the Commons will overturn this gross injustice.

The unelected Upper Chamber should seriously watch its step, otherwise the elected Commons will be tempted – even with a Conservative Government in power – to drastically reduce their powers, at the very least.

For British Parliament to have passed such a monstrous course of action is unbelievable and must be remedied, otherwise the media will be as hidebound and subject to Government controls as was the case with the Soviet press during the cold war.

Whatever happened to free speech?

IN the Labour Party, traditional members, including many MPs, have become alarmed at the fact the hard-line left-wing campaigning body Momentum, have gained a firm foothold in the National Executive Committee, the Party’s highly-influential and principal policy-forming group.

It is no secret that Momentum (which has never, so far as I am aware, been criticised by Jeremy Corbyn) wants to ‘deselect’ moderate Labour MPs and replace them with candidates who share their own hard left views.

This, of course, makes a mockery of the much-quoted epithet that Labour is a broad church, capable of assimilating all views from right to left.

Momentum seem even more determined than even the militants who tried to infiltrate Labour during Neil Kinnock’s leadership. Kinnock managed to drive them away. It will be much harder to crush Momentum, especially if Corbyn is ‘relaxed’ about them. Trouble, almost certainly, lies ahead.

DONALD Trump has now completed his first year in the White House – and it has been 12 months like no other presidential period. One pledge he has blatantly failed to honour is over golf. He sneered at Barack Obama for the time he spent on the golf course. Trump has spent one day in four playing golf, far more than Obama ever did in his first year.

Just imagine if a British Prime Minister had spent that amount of time playing golf on supposedly working days. He would have been verbally lynched in the Commons.