Alcohol and British parliamentary tradition

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On August 13, the town of Clacton returned Reform UK’s poster boy Nigel Farage to Parliament, allowing him to declare victory over Coun Binface, who the Guardian describes as “a parody candidate dressed as an intergalactic rubbish bin.” 

If you don’t follow British politics, that paragraph will have sounded odd. Just nod as if it made sense and stay with me. In another few seconds, you’ll have forgotten all about it. 

Farage won 63% of the vote and Count Binface won 26%, which is impressive for a guy with a trash can on his head. Whatever’s left over was divided among the other 32 candidates. 

Breaking with tradition, Farage stayed away from the high-point event where the candidates line up on stage and the winner is announced, along with the number of votes each candidate got. He said the police had advised him that “a plot was under way to embarrass him [in some tellings, this becomes a threat to his safety] when the result was declared. The Guardian understands that the force did not advise Farage not to attend.”

The BBC understood the same thing but I’ve lost the link. Would you settle for the Huffington Post? Same understanding. Same police force, plus a quote from the Reform UK chair calling the election a “great victory.”

In a separate explanation for his absence, Farage said, “Damned if I’m going to stand on a stage having won a resounding victory , , , to be demeaned and humiliated by nobodies.”

Admittedly, appearing with Count Binface might have been embarrassing, but no one needed a plot to make that happen, and it was Farage who set up the by-election by resigning from Parliament so he could run for the seat he’d just vacated, all of which is what opened the door to a contest with Binface.

The theory goes–and it’s convincing–that he resigned to derail a parliamentary investigation into a £5 million gift he didn’t declare. And a report–sorry, the article I’m relying on doesn’t name it–says Farage’s team told him that resigning would end the investigation. In which case, he might want to think twice about relying on his team next time.

The investigation restarted almost immediately and will have, I’m sure, taken in several other financially iffy actions by the time you read this, making the by-election as pointless and as expensive (£250,000) as it was entertaining, but I’m not writing about financial scandals today, kidlets, I’m writing about alcohol. More specifically, about alcohol and Parliament, because Farage–who’s often photographed holding a pint as if it’s his best and only friend–will waddle back to the booziest workplace in this beer-loving land. 

What am I talking about? It turns out that drinking during working hours is not only not frowned upon in Parliament, it’s subsidized. In 2014, Parliament’s bars and restaurants cost the taxpayer £6 million. 

It’s a funny thing, but when the Conservatives were on their everybody-has-to-make-do-with-less rampages, they don’t seem to have cast an eye on that line in the budget. 

Beer. Compliments of Wikimedia, photo by Len Rizzi, cut by Jan Kameníček. What does “cut by” mean? Haven’t a clue.

 

Did I just make all that up?

No. By one count, the Houses of Parliament have nine bars on site, along with nineteen restaurants and cafeterias and one lone coffee bar. Included in that count is the Members’ Smoking Room. Members’ means it’s not open to the public. Smoking means nothing. It’s now non-smoking. But it does serve booze, as do, I believe, the restaurants and cafeterias.  

Some of them are open to the public, assuming they’ve gotten passes allowing them to be there. Others are for MPs and staffers, and at least one bar and one restaurant are for members of the House of Lords only, protecting them from rubbing elbows with mere elected officials. Some eleven years ago, the Lords refused to save taxpayer money by sharing a catering service with the Commons. It would have forced them to drink an inferior brand of that over-priced fizz known as champagne.

I mean, honestly. The insult. 

The booziness of the Westminster work culture landed in the news recently (not for the first time–it’s hardly a secret) because of a study by the Institute of Alcohol Studies. Among other things, the study mentions wine at breakfast meetings and alcohol flowing throughout the day. Soft drinks are so rare at events that MPs and staff members struggle to find them.

 

The non-financial costs

The impact of all that drinking includes sexual harassment, insults, shouting, swearing, theatening situations (or possibly situations that feel threatening, which aren’t exactly the same thing but never mind, I didn’t design the survey), and hungover or still-woozy colleagues. As one MP put it, “If I wouldn’t operate heavy machinery or drive a car, why should I legislate the laws of the land?”

Younger staff members–particularly women–feel pressured to drink so they’ll fit in.

Either pulling from some part of the report that I didn’t find or drawing on its extensive archive of bad ministerial behavior, the Guardian also mentions allegations of drink spiking and of one MP downing 200 units of alcohol per week. To pour that much down your throat, you’d need to drink ten pints per night. Or per day. Or in the name of moderation, you can divide them evenly between the two.

One MP talked about colleagues drinking so much they ended up in the hospital having their stomachs pumped, then returned to work the next day.

A newly elected Green MP said, “You can smell the alcohol when people are in between votes.”

 

Atmosphere

Going to a different source, a BBC journalist reporting on what the restaurants, cafes, and boozers are really like spoke to an anonymous someone on the catering staff, who said, “I’ve never seen anyone throw up. I’ve seen four or five pass out.” 

Irrelevantly (but interestingly),  the source said MPs are polite to the staff for the most part, but when they’re not their arrogance divides along party lines. A Conservative MP will say, “Do you know who I am?” A Labour MP will say, “Do you know how important I am?” 

Maybe you have to have lived in Britain for a while to get the  joke. 

So what are the pubs etc. like? If you want to know about the ambience, follow the link above. This blog is ambience-free. What’s worth repeating is that the Sports and Social club got such a reputation for drunken brawls and general mayhem that in 2018 it was put under new management and its name was changed to the Woolsack.** I’ll  go out on a limb and say it’s now suitably boring but I’d love to hear that I’m wrong. I don’t approve of the way they carrying on in Westminster, but I love disapproving.

When Parliament held late night sittings more often than it (apparently) does now, the Strangers bar was the place to find drunken MPs and party whips trying to keep them in line. (The article I’m working from says they were inebriated. If there’s a difference between that and drunk, other than that one crawled out of Latin and the other out of Old English, the mistake is mine and without the least hint of sarcasm I hereby apologize.) 

If an MP is still capable of walking, he or she can leave the Strangers and wobble down a corridor to find function rooms, where receptions and events are held most evenings and where–this will surprise you, I know–the booze flows freely. And is free.

 

So will anything change? 

I’m skeptical, although the younger generation is said to drink less. But a spokesperson for Parliament said, “Any changes . . . would ultimately be a matter for members to decide on.” The spokesperson also said everyone’s expected to drink responsibly and behave well, which of course they do. They’re also expected to vote with the country’s best interests at heart, not their own or those of the lobbyist who most recently poured them a drink. 

And this is, without a doubt, the best of all possible worlds.

Footnotes

*  Thirty-four candidates ran in Clacton, making the ballot the longest in British history. Printing it cost four times more than a normal ballot and left the council wrestling with the logistics of how to fold it into an envelope so it could be sent to postal voters. The major parties–Labour, Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, and Greens–didn’t bother to run candidates. Neither did Restore UK.

** The bar is named after a real woolsack in the House of Lords. I’ll quote Parliament’s website to explain that: “The Woolsack is where the Lord Speaker in the House of Lords sits and resembles*** a large square cushion covered in red cloth. In 1938 it was re-stuffed with a blend of wool from Britain and the other wool producing nations of the Commonwealth. The woolsack is thought to have been introduced in the 14th century to reflect the economic importance of the wool trade in England.” And here we are, seven centuries later, with someone called the Lord Speaker still sitting on a sack of wool. 

*** In case it’s not clear, it’s the woolsack that resembles a large square cushion, not the speakers. Although I can’t swear that none of them have. 

33 thoughts on “Alcohol and British parliamentary tradition”

  2. Hi Ellen,

    This piece of yours did me chuckle, which was rather nice, given that most items I read lately are filled with the negative. Not that MP’s getting sloshed is positive of course. Great stuff.

    Thanks ST

    BTW. Were the two errors in written english deliberate, to test readers.

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    • Were they deliberate? Truth is, I don’t remember anymore. I do sometimes push the language into small spaces it doesn’t want to go into and I may have done that this time. I also fuck up from time to time–miss a typo, change a sentence and forget to clear away the debris left from the earlier version, that sort of thing. If I have a moment when sanity and energy coincide (not guaranteed), I’ll take a look and change anything that wasn’t deliberate. In the meantime, let’s pretend they were a deliberate choice, although if they were it wasn’t to test the readers, it would’ve been for some other, now obscure, reason.

      In the meantime, glad I could offer you a laugh. We all need that.

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  6. British Parliamentary tradition? More like British tradition. I live in Portugal which is one of the most popular European vacation countries. Why do so many Europeans love Portugal? Great food, historical sites, agreeable weather, and for the British: cheap booze! There are touristic groups in Britain that arrange vacations specifically to hit the bars! Drinking alcohol is a British tradition at any occasion except for church services! (except for a few people carrying hidden flasks.)

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    • I haven’t seen any studies comparing British alcohol consumption to other nations’, and Hawley’s Small and Unscientific Study is suspect because I don’t drink anymore, so I haven’t done extensive research. With that out of the way, my hunch is that you’re right: people here do seem to drink a lot–at least the ones who do drink–and some of them go at it with a dedication that worries me.

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      • I learned a lot about this subject after dating a Brit for more than a year. We met working on a cruise ship. Piraeus Greece was one of our ports and she recommended we get up early and have breakfast at a British themed restaurant located near the dock. She ordered for both of us; big breakfast with beans, bacon, sausage, eggs, toast, and British apple cider which contains alcohol! I was stuffed and tipsy after eating breakfast! I will add that the Brits on board also loved smoking. We had a duty free port in Israel and she would buy cartons of cigs and then send them back to her dad to avoid the British taxes! Sin taxes do not work! P.S. the Russian crew members were the heaviest drinkers!

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        • Smoking strikes me as pretty minimal these days. With no evidence whatsoever, I’ll attribute that to a combination of high taxes, high public health campaigns, and the most horrifyingly ugly packaging you can imagine.

          After a full English breakfast, I’m surprised there was any room for alcohol. I’m not a delicate eater, but it’d take me a full day to work my way through one. If, that is, I could convince myself that baked beans and grilled tomatoes are edible. I can manage the veggie sausage substitutes although I can’t say I’d go out of my way to find them. That leave, basically, eggs and toast, although cooked mushrooms are nice enough. Translation? The full English is wasted on me.

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          • I needed a nap after that breakfast and it was the last one I ever had! I still drink British cider though but the kind that does not have alcohol! It is delicious and I am about to have some with lunch! P.S. We did break up a few months later. I met my Portuguese wife while working on another ship in Tahiti. The Portuguese breakfasts are much simpler, and the food more nutritious in general.

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            • I’ll admit complete ignorance about Portuguese breakfasts. I do miss American breakfasts, though. I make a damn good batch of pancakes, but I don’t have a knack for home fries/American fries. Probably because I look at the amount of oil involved, think, That can’t be right, and– Yeah. They look so much healthier when you don’t see what goes into them.

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  9. Hi Ellen, another smile success. Thanks!
    My impression is that the full English* is becoming a holiday treat for most people, a combination of healthier choices and time pressure making it a bit of an aberration for most. All our friends start their holidays in the UK having the full works and no lunch, gradually reducing the breakfast as the days go by.
    On the issue of Parliamentary drinking, I’m told by those who claim to know that the full English is the perfect antidote to a hangover but I don’t drink enough to comment. Presumably, though, the caterers in Westminster must offer it if the members are drinking on the scale you describe? It makes me wonder why the turnover in MPs isn’t much greater since we’re constantly advised to adopt healthy lifestyles and give up alcohol for our liver’s sake. Do you suppose that politics attracts the outliers on the curve, so that the physical ability to drink with impunity somehow correlates with the urge to have a say in government?
    Jeannie
    *In the interests of inclusivity, please note that “The full Welsh”, including laver bread is offered in the Principality, as is a Scottish version north of the border. No idea if there’s a Cornish variant…

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    • Good question on the variants and the definitive answer on the full Cornish is that I have no idea although I should. Some variants include black pudding in case anyone doesn’t think there’s enough food on the plate. Maybe the plan at Parliament is that if you eat all that you’ll be too incapacitated to drink.

      You understand, of course, that having researched the post I’m making this bit up completely.

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  10. Ages ago, when The Greens were still green, a newly elected member of parliament said publicly that the gathering would stink of booze every damn morning (I think it was J.Fischer, but may be wrong). For heavy cases you have the Fahrbereitschaft, the chauffeur driven motor pool.
    I personally believe that the headhoncho should be a reliable two bottle person, at least if need be.
    I think for apparatchiks alcohol related liver disease is a recognised operational illness, like black lung for miners. Many mayors develop an alcohol problem while in office, especially when they hold the office several times : The burgomaster is expected to drink at any social gathering / occasion, one can not always replace the vino with water etc. The Western culture is in a certain way built on alcohol – and I am very thankful for the Romans to have brought wine and cherries here.
    I think I’ll have a glass of Veuve Clicquot later – “over priced fizz” – pah !

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