Counting the hours
25th January 2005
Blue Monday
The most miserable Monday of the year found me in a cheerful frame of mind. I hummed tunelessly as I drove into Westminster through the snow. I like the cold. For once I had not overspent my Christmas budget. Best of all, I had managed, despite one or two lapses, to keep my New Year resolution to take a brisk walk every day. But, smugness always comes before a fall. No sooner had I got through Parliament’s interminable security checks than my mood began to change. By 10.45pm, the end of an absurdly long Westminster day, miserable was quite an accurate description of my mood.
Time to decide
The cause of my decline was Wednesday’s vote on the sitting hours of the Commons. You may remember that, a few years ago, the then Leader of the House, Robin Cook, piloted through a series of reforms. These changed the hours on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays from a 2.30pm start and a 10.30pm finish, to a slightly more modern 11.30am start and a 7.30pm finish. Personally, I would prefer to work from 9.00am to 6.00pm, but this is Westminster. MPs are happy to change everyone else’s lives but curiously reluctant to do anything about their own. The Cook Reforms got through with a majority of just seven. But they were only valid for one session of Parliament. With an election imminent the time has come to try to incorporate them permanently into the Standing Orders of the House of Commons.
Turning the clock back
That is the problem. This means a debate and a vote which gives the vocal minority of MPs who want to turn the clock back, and return to the old hours, a chance to do just that. Most of the women and the younger male MPs are appalled by the idea. But, as it became very clear on miserable Monday, the minority was extremely well organized. With the help of some of the whips, they had arranged to give quite a few of the pro-reform group the week off. Very crafty. With an election imminent most MPs are constituency, rather than Commons, focused. Time in their patch seems far more important than the re-arrangement of time at Westminster. So, on miserable Monday, the pro-reform group found its support draining away in an opposition-organized 'stay-at-home'.
Ticking away
The opposition, in this case, was not organized along the usual lines. The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats are just as divided on this issue as Labour. As it is a free vote we will all be sharing lobbies with some unusual allies on Wednesday. However, this is no bad thing. The Westminster tribes benefit from the occasional alliance across their normally inviolable boundaries. I do not know what is going to happen on Wednesday. But I do know that reaction is alive and well in the Commons and that is enough to make any Monday blue.
Driven to drink
It is enough to drive one to drink. Unless, like me, you are so allergic to the stuff, that it is simply not an option.
But, most of us do use drink to relax at the end of a stressful day – or week. Some of us use it to excess. That is why concerns about the new opening hours are so understandable. They are, however, also misplaced.
The new hours are an attempt to minimise the stoking up that is a prelude to so many closing times. They are also an attempt to minimise the nuisance caused by one, single tipping out time. This drains police resources and is the cause of much disorderly behavior.
Along with the new licensing hours come new police powers to control drunk and disorderly behavior and new fixed penalties for contraventions of licensing conditions.
Local authorities are also given new rights to dispute and prevent license applications. Above all, some of the cost of controlling and cleaning up after drinkers is to be passed back to the brewers.
I welcome this. But, ultimately, the control of drinking lies with the individual not the state. It just has to provide a framework within which the individual should act responsibly. Sadly, we sometimes fail to do so.
Barbara Follett MP
