Should alcohol be banned from the Palace of Westminster?

The striking feature was not a puritan consensus but a professional one: Yes won, 91 votes to No's 67, while the losing side supplied much of the room's wit. In this platform chamber, the verdict was a clear rebuke to Parliament's club-like habits, without amounting to unanimity.

The winning case cast the Palace as a workplace that has retained the manners of an inherited gentlemen's club. The floor's strongest Yes argument called it “a hangover (pun intended)” from the days when the landed gentry treated the Houses of Parliament as “another Club”; another voter wanted the bars and subsidies removed, with alcohol confined to “specific events / designated occasions”. The same logic extended to subsidised meals, which one Yes voter also wanted done away with.

No argued less for unrestricted drinking than for a managed tradition. Its most practical voice asked, “Where exactly is the PM supposed to meet informally with MPs?”, while another insisted, “Adults drink. Adults drink with colleagues.” Other No voters proposed cutting the subsidy or making people pay a fair price rather than banning alcohol, defended the tradition, and even joked that sober MPs might do more damage.

That left the two sides talking past each other about what Parliament's social spaces are for. Yes treated daytime drinking as an unacceptable workplace norm — especially in an institution shadowed by bullying, harassment and sexual-misconduct scandals — while No treated informal access and procurement as part of political life; one Yes reply returned to the fact that “Both Houses have bars open while the work goes on.”

The vote was therefore less a referendum on drink than on whether Westminster is a workplace first or a club with a legislature attached. The chamber chose the former, and left the old compromise looking less like tradition than permission.