Oddly enough, when I was working for a living, I did not have access to a bar during the time for which I was being paid. I certainly went to the pub on a lunchtime for a pint or a glass of wine – some of this really did this as a matter of routine in the old days – but when working, my office was a booze-free place. Imagine going to work for the public sector and having access, throughout the working day, to a subsidised bar? I suspect your actual regular members of the public would be mortified. There is one example where this literally happens andthere are suggestions that the new government wants to get rid of the bar and ensure employees concentrate on the jobs they are paid, by us, to do. And the Daily Mail – the Daily Fucking Mail – is furious.
The ‘newspaper’ reports that Labour wants to get rid of the bars which MPs regularly access when they are doing their jobs in the House of Commons. I don’t know whether the story is actually true because you never really know with the Mail – I always assume it’s a lie until I learn otherwise – but just say it is.
An MP currently earns a salary of £91,000, plus expenses. It’s a tidy sum, for sure, but I am not using this particular blog to reopen a debate on whether it’s too much or not enough. My thought is that if an MP wants a drink, then go to the pub in their dinner or supper break. Don’t slink away from work into a bar that’s actually on the premises to neck a few jars which you and I are helping to pay for.
I am the last person in the world to call on anyone to not have a pint of foaming ale or a glass of Viognier, for example, but there is, or rather there isn’t at the moment, a time and a place. I would like my MP to be focused and, I would like to think, sober enough to enact the policies on which they were elected, rather than staggering around the Strangers’ Bar, waiting to be helped to the nearest lobby to vote by one of the whips.
As ever, I would caution my loyal reader as to the accuracy of any story in the Mail and its motives. I sense an element of misogyny at the top of the story which refers to Keir Starmer’s chief-of-staff Sue Grey, where she is described as ‘formidable’ and an ‘enforcer’. She was chosen because Starmer and the Labour Party saw her as the best person for the job. I say this because the same misogyny applies to Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, who is loathed by the right wing newspaper editor class because she is a successful working class woman. The Mail readership, which is overwhelming old, middle class, female and, I would suggest, reactionary must presumably wish that the likes of Grey and Rayner went back to the kitchen after sorting out the housework. I am not joking. But I digress.
How about ensuring that MPs are in office in order to represent the people and not in it for themselves? After the last government, which spent 14 years lining its own pockets and those of its donors and supporters, wouldn’t it be good to return to a time where politicians were there to serve us? If they want to spend their days on the piss, or taking on loads of lucrative jobs on the side, why not get another job and leave parliament to those with honourable motives?
The Hate Mail suggests Sue Grey is being a ‘killjoy’. If encouraging MPs to do their jobs is being a killjoy, then bring it on.
