The New Statesman

I'm Anusha Kellyan and you're listening to the politics show from The New

Statesman and I'm here again with my colleague Will Dun for our weekly roundup.

Hello.

Hello.

So our first category this week is workplace woes of the week.

Will, what have you got? Well, Hannah Spencer,

who already had a great job as a plumber and qualified, I believe, during the race for

Gaunton and Denton, qualified as a plasterer, but then following that by-election, got a new job

as a Green Party MP has taken exception to some of the working practices of her fellow members of Parliament, whom she has accused of day drinking.

She said that in Westminster, you can smell the alcohol when people are in between votes.

She added, there have been cases of questionable and dangerous behaviour and potentially some MPs taking part in what she called an unprofessional culture of drinking. So this is not the first time that an MP has raised the issue of drinking in Parliament.

Sarah Wollaston, the Conservative MP and I believe GP.

Yes, I remember her.

In 2011, she said that it was a real problem that some MPs were having a bottle of wine or two

and then going into vote on matters of national importance.

But the history of drinking in Parliament goes back a really long way.

There are quite a lot of bars on the parliamentary estate.

The Chancellor is famously the only person who can have a drink in the House of Commons,

which goes back to the time when budget speeches apparently it's related to the amount of time they used to take.

So when Gladstone gave his budget speech in 1853, lasted for four and three-quarter hours.

And he propped himself up with a glass of sherry and beaten egg,

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