Just in case you didn’t hear it on the news – point of information: it wasn’t on the news – the leader of the House of Commons and MP for the 19th century Jacob Rees-Mogg today announced that MPs were to be given an additional month’s annual leave. Yes, you read it right. An extra month, taking their allocation to 64 days a year. For the time being, your actual workers are entitled to a statutory minimum of 20 days a year, until Boris Johnson declares that lazy workers are holding back the country and scrapping that law altogether. You know he will.
That 64 days of leave is a misleading figure, though. In reality, MPs can take far more time off than that. They don’t actually have a contract of employment at all. To all intents and purposes, they can come and go as they please. Only the party whips can tell MPs they need to be somewhere to vote, or to speak in a debate, if necessary. If they take a lie-in from Monday to Thursday and don’t even bother to go to parliament on Friday, no one can stop them. This is the sheer hypocrisy of our parliament.
These figures look even worse when you look even deeper. MPs will take an extra week’s leave at Easter and during the summer. The summer recess of parliament will allow MPs 35 working days off work. Better still, you’re in a place which decides its own annual leave conditions.
I have been around long enough to know that some MPs work incredible hard and others barely work at all. I can honestly say that in all the time I have been able to vote in general elections, which is 40 years, only Doug Naysmith, the former Labour MP for Bristol North West, put in the really hard yards for his constituents in the places I lived. For the rest, it was either a vehicle to climb the slippery slope or a nice little jolly provided you were never found out.
The rest of us can apparently work harder for less. For MPs, they can do as much or as little work as they see fit. When they next tell you, “we’re all in it together”, some are more in it than others.
