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Last Orders: A Green MP Asked About The Booze. Westminster Laughed In Her Face.

ended 28. May 2026

Stand up in your own workplace and ask why the senior team are drinking between big decisions, and you'd expect, at the very least, a polite answer. Hannah Spencer tried it in hers. They laughed at her.

The Green MP used Prime Minister's Questions on 20 May 2026 to ask Keir Starmer a simple question: should MPs really be drinking on the job, and should taxpayers still be subsidising the pints they sink between votes? Her own constituents in England and Denton, she pointed out, pay full price at the bar. Westminster doesn't. 

It wasn't a new line for her. Back on 26 April, she'd told PoliticsJOE that Parliament's drinking culture was out of step with the rest of working Britain, and, more pointedly, that it was feeding the intimidating, sometimes aggressive behaviour women in particular have been describing for years.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/apr/27/green-mp-hannah-spencer-attacks-parliament-drinking-culture 

https://hyphenonline.com/2026/05/06/drinking-parliament-culture-hannah-spencer-green-nigel-farage-alcohol/ 

The response, both times, told its own story. Nigel Farage and a string of backbenchers wrote her off as a puritan trying to spoil tradition. On the green benches, she was jeered, talked over and openly laughed at. Honestly, you couldn't have asked for a better illustration of her point if you'd scripted it. And while Westminster was busy braying, YouGov was quietly finding that most of the public agreed with her. 

https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/hannah-spencer-drinking-parliament-pmqs-video-b2980730.html 

https://www.facebook.com/MirrorPolitics/posts/green-mp-hannah-spencer-has-challenged-keir-starmer-over-whether-mps-should-enjo/1295279989456858/ 

Picture the same scene in your own office. An employee stands up in an all-hands and asks, calmly, whether it's a good idea that the leadership team are drinking between big calls. Half the room snorts. A senior manager shouts her down. Two more pile in with a joke at her expense. By the end of the day, half your HR team is drafting a grievance, and the other half is on the phone to ACAS. That's the standard we hold normal workplaces to, and it's the standard PMQs is failing live on television every Wednesday at noon, beamed into classrooms, citizenship lessons and family living rooms while children are eating their lunch.

And the awkward bit, for anyone in HR or running a small business, is that Westminster's bar isn't actually that unusual. Plenty of UK workplaces still run on cheap or free alcohol as a soft perk, Friday socials, client lunches, networking nights, the office fridge that magically refills, and the Christmas do that nobody quite remembers. Spencer's underlying point, stripped of the political theatre, is one every founder, agency owner, and people lead has quietly wondered about: would we really accept our decision-makers being a bit tipsy between high-stakes calls if we wrote it down on paper?

If the public has genuinely moved on from “a pint with lunch is fine”, and the polling suggests they have, the corporate booze trolley is living on borrowed time. The first complaint, the first accident, the first harassment claim, the first tribunal, that's when the lack of an alcohol policy stops being a quirk and starts being a problem with your name on it.

What do you think about this?

  • Should drinking during the working day be banned in every workplace, or has the boozy British lunch been unfairly demonised by a generation that simply doesn't drink the way their parents did?
  • If MPs, surgeons, pilots, to name a few, shouldn't drink on the job, why is it still normal for sales teams, agencies and small businesses to do exactly that, and where's the honest line between "team culture" and "impaired judgement"?
  • Subsidised drinks at work: smart staff benefit, hidden employer liability, or PR disaster waiting to happen?
  • Are after-work drinks really "optional" if visibility, networking and promotion all happen at the pub, and is a sober workplace more inclusive, or just more boring?
  • If your colleagues get discounted pints as a perk, should non-drinkers, parents, recovering alcoholics and observant Muslims be entitled to an equivalent benefit of equal value, and have you actually costed what that would look like?
  • PMQs is shown in schools as civic education. If an employee was jeered, mocked and shouted down for raising an alcohol concern at work, HR would call it bullying. So, hand on heart, is this really the standard of professional behaviour we want our children to grow up watching and copying?

5 responses from the Newspage community

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Kate UnderwoodVerified
Founder & Chief People Strategist at Kate Underwood HR and Training
There's something deeply British about jeering at the woman who pointed out the emperor has had a few. Hannah Spencer asked whether MPs should drink between votes, and Westminster answered by behaving exactly like the workplace nobody wants to work in.
For small business owners, the lesson isn't really about Parliament. It's that "we've always done it this way" is the most expensive sentence in HR. The free bar, the fridge that magically refills, the networking night that's somehow compulsory, they all feel like generosity until someone gets hurt, makes a claim, or can't keep up and quietly leaves.
And spare a thought for the people the booze culture quietly excludes: the parents, the non-drinkers, the recovering, the observant. If your best perk only works for the people who drink, it isn't a perk, it's a filter.
Put it in writing before someone else puts it in a grievance. Culture you can't defend on paper isn't culture, it's a liability with a hangover.
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Nouran MoustafaVerified
Practice Principal & IFA at Roxton Wealth
The issue is not whether adults can have a drink. The issue is whether people should be drinking during the working day while making serious decisions that affect other people’s lives, money, safety or future.

In most workplaces, this would not even be a debate. If a senior team were drinking between major decisions and an employee raised a concern, mocking them would be treated as poor leadership, not “tradition”.

The honest line is simple: if the decision matters, judgement matters. Alcohol and professional responsibility do not sit comfortably together during working hours.

Subsidised drinks may sound like a harmless perk, but in the wrong environment they can become a reputational, conduct and liability risk.

Parliament should be setting the standard, not hiding behind outdated workplace culture. If we would not accept this behaviour from a normal leadership team, we should not excuse it because it happens in Westminster.
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Sarah GatfordVerified
The Positivity Pathfinder - Head of Interactions at Sarah Gatford Ltd
Spencer wasn't actually attacking pints. She was naming a culture where status protects behaviour, and the response proved her point.
We know that psychological safety is what lets teams flag risk, challenge decisions, and raise concerns before they become tribunals. Jeering someone for asking a reasonable question is the precise opposite. It teaches everyone watching, including the schoolchildren this gets beamed to, that speaking up costs you.
The alcohol question is almost secondary. The deeper one is, what does it say about a workplace, any workplace, when the response to a careful query is mockery rather than curiosity?
The better question would be not "is she a puritan?" but "what's she noticed that we've stopped seeing?"
That's the muscle most workplaces, Westminster included, could do with strengthening.
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Samuel Mather-HolgateVerified
Managing Director & IFA at Mather and Murray Financial
The response to Hannah Spencer's question was contemputous, and significantly uncomfortable to watch by anyone with a level of decency. What is a very legitimate question; when you are voting on the future direction of the country, in ways the effect millions of people, sometimes the poorest in society, should you be of sound mind and good judgement. I know, that I would like my MP to represent me whilst coherant, but there have been numerous stories about fights, sexual harassment and drugs in the Commons. No other industry would accept the level of poor behaviour from their staff, yet the public are. No one is calling for the ban on bars in the Commons, or even their subsidised sessions; but surely restrictions on being able to be intoxicated but influential by voting should be a minimum standard.
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Colette MasonVerified
AI Ethics Consultant at Clever Clogs AI
Wales is legislating against politicians who deliberately lie, and Westminster can't even handle being asked about the cheap pints habit. The Senedd's bill, now past first reading, would make it a criminal offence for candidates to make false or misleading statements during elections. It's imperfect, and it won't be ready until 2030 at the earliest. But it exists because only 9% of UK voters trust politicians to tell the truth.

Meanwhile, Hannah Spencer asked a calm, factual question at PMQs about subsidised alcohol and voting under the influence, and some of the chamber jeered her like ne'er-do-wells from Hogarth's Gin Lane. But YouGov has found 76% of the public agree with her call for greater integrity. With the cost of living still biting, voters are running their own cost-benefit analysis on their representatives, and conduct like this is failing it.