Green MP Hannah Spencer has said Parliament’s drinking culture makes her feel ‘really uneasy’. Her comments, in an interview with PoliticsJOE, have landed her in hot water with MPs who have a soft spot for at work tipples, many of whom think she is naive to the traditional drinking culture of Westminster. But Spencer is far from the first parliamentarian – particularly on the left – to have taken a dim view of British attitudes towards alcohol.
Across the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Temperance movement – which sought to prohibit the consumption of alcohol – plagued parliamentary agendas. Prime Minister David Lloyd George, a teetotaller and staunch supporter of the temperance movement, even went as far as equating alcohol to the same level of threat as our enemies in World War I, saying ‘we are fighting Germans, Austrians and drink, and as far as I can see the greatest of these deadly foes is drink’.
‘Perhaps Hannah Spencer’s decision to take a pop at her fellow MPs’ drinking is an attempt to pick up a longstanding intellectual tradition of many great Left parliamentarians that came before her.’
Drink is certainly something of an obsession for our MPs. Since Hansard records began, whiskey has been mentioned 559 times, wine 9,623 times, and gin 2,058 times – with a recent mention forming a central part of an enjoyable back and forth between Emily Thornberry and Chris Elmore about how much Foreign Office officials drink wearing linen when on foreign trips.
The Temperance movement is often thought of as an American phenomenon, particularly in relation to the prohibition era. It certainly did begin in North America, in the mid 18th century, led by Native American activists like Peter Chartier, Chief of the Pekowi Shawnee, and Little Turtle, Chief of the Miami People nation, but it slowly spread across the Atlantic, with the growing influence of Presbyterian Church of Ireland minister John Edgar prompting individual Temperance societies to spring up across Ireland, Scotland, and England. In fairness, this was mainly focussed on the elimination of spirits rather than wine and beer.
As the movement continued to grow in Britain, its influence wasn’t confined to local trade halls and churches. Labour Party founder and Leader, Keir Hardie, took the temperance pledge at only seventeen years of age, driven by his stepfather becoming abusive when drunk. It was arguably the first real political cause he championed. The issue of temperance consumed the early dynamics of the Labour Party, embodied in the formation of a Trade Union & Labour Official Temperance Fellowship in 1905, with most of the 29 Labour MPs elected in the 1906 General Election joining up.
Ben Tillett, leader of the 1889 London dock strike and a founding member of the party, even wrote a 1908 pamphlet questioning whether the whole party had been a failure or not, because of the obsession its parliamentarians had with morality and drink. Tillett himself was a Christian Socialist, and had actually joined the Temperance Society in the late 1870s – but began to drink not long after that. He apparently drank himself to oblivion at the 1900 Labour Party Conference (haven’t we all?) and then embarked on a tour of Australia where he started an affair with Australian actress Eva Newton that lasted twenty years. Perhaps he was not best placed to provide society with moral guidance.
The influence of temperance societies in the UK died out not long after prohibition failed in the US, but their legacy still exists in horrible concepts like ‘Dry January’, and organisations like the Alliance House Foundation – a group originally founded as the United Temperance Alliance with the aim to spread the principles of total abstinence and ‘to promote the scientific study of the properties of alcohol and the effect of its use upon the human system, the social and moral consequences and the distribution of information on the subject’. Right. Thankfully, they seem pretty much defunct.
Perhaps Hannah Spencer’s decision to take a pop at her fellow MPs’ drinking is an attempt to pick up a longstanding intellectual tradition of many great Left parliamentarians that came before her. But perhaps not. When the Temperance movement’s influence was at its peak within the Labour Party, many of its critics said the claim that drink was the greatest sin of our society was a distraction from the real ills plaguing Britain, of mass unemployment and poverty. Spencer’s comments risk doing the same.
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