Hannah Spencer, the Green MP for Gorton and Denton, used her first ever intervention at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday to ask whether MPs should be drinking before they vote – and was shouted down by irate colleagues while doing it. The Prime Minister declined to answer the question, instead pivoting to a joke about Green leader Zack Polanski’s houseboat council tax bill.
Spencer’s question was straightforward. The response it received was not.
What she asked – and what the chamber did
Spencer was elected in the Gorton and Denton byelection in February, as we reported in our Labour leadership crisis coverage. She came to PMQs with a specific and evidenced complaint about the culture she had found on arrival at Westminster.
“In Gorton and Denton we have to pay full price for our pints, but here, for some reason, it’s cheaper,” she said. “Some MPs drink before voting and that really shocked me when I came to parliament, because it is our workplace.”
She then posed her question directly: “Does the prime minister agree with his own MPs who have defended their right to drink cheap alcohol at work, or does he agree with me that MPs shouldn’t be drinking on the job given we vote on huge things like the climate crisis, disabled people’s rights, housing, child poverty?”
The chamber’s microphones picked up what came back. “Get a life.” “Sort your policies out.” Spencer was interrupted repeatedly while speaking.
She had already flagged the issue publicly last month, telling PoliticsJoe: “You can smell the alcohol when people are in between votes.” That comment caused a stir at the time. The PMQs intervention caused a louder one – though louder in a specific direction.
The numbers the chamber apparently did not want to hear
Spencer’s question is not fringe politics. As we reported in our YouGov polling on MPs drinking, 76% of Britons say it is unacceptable for MPs to drink before votes. 52% say it is completely unacceptable.
Westminster’s parliamentary bars cost taxpayers £7.4 million annually. Strangers’ Bar sells pints at £5.45 – nearly £2 less than the pub across the road – and still runs at a £56,000 annual loss despite paying no rent on its premises. An NHS worker who drinks on shift faces disciplinary action or dismissal. A teacher who drinks before a lesson faces the same. A bus driver, a pilot, an anaesthetist.
The “get a life” response from MPs being asked to consider this comparison is, in its own way, informative.
Starmer’s non-answer
The Prime Minister’s response to Spencer’s question was to not answer it. “There are going to be different views on whether people can enjoy a drink here or not,” he said – a sentence that manages to be both technically accurate and completely evasive simultaneously.
Rather than address the substance – whether subsidised alcohol in a workplace where people vote on national legislation is appropriate – he used the occasion to attack Green leader Zack Polanski.
“The Greens think that their leader walks on water,” Starmer said. “Turns out, he just lives on water and doesn’t pay his council tax.”
Polanski was forced to apologise last week after it emerged he had not paid council tax on his houseboat in London. The apology came at an awkward moment for a party whose central appeal is that it represents a different, more authentic kind of politics – and whose gains in the May local elections, as we covered in our election results piece, included winning Hackney’s first directly elected Green mayor.
The houseboat line will get the headlines. Spencer’s question – whether MPs should drink before voting on child poverty legislation – will not. This is, arguably, the more significant of the two stories.
The question parliament does not want to answer
Spencer is a new MP asking an obvious question that the majority of the public agrees with, in an institution that has decided the answer is “get a life.” The prime minister, asked to take a position, made a joke about someone else.
The YouGov data is clear. 76% of Britons think MPs should not drink before they vote. The people who could act on that – the MPs themselves – responded to the suggestion by heckling the person making it and then deflecting to an unrelated attack.
Zack Polanski’s houseboat council tax is a legitimate story and a genuine embarrassment for the Greens. It is also, in the context of this particular PMQs exchange, a convenient distraction from a question nobody in the chamber appeared to want to discuss on its merits.
Spencer asked whether MPs should drink before voting on the climate crisis, disabled rights, housing and child poverty. Westminster’s answer, on Wednesday, was to shout at her and change the subject.
