In response to Andrew Tettenborn: Being an MP is a calling, not just a job, KilowattTyler wrote:
Mr Tettenborn clearly hasn’t understood the relationship between professionals and the general public in today’s society.
The general public exist to provide a source of interesting and congenial careers for the professional elite. This is increasingly the case in medicine, for example, where people who fall ill or have accidents outside office hours just have to put up with what they get. Why should someone who’s spent years at university have to deal with some ‘deplorable’ at 3 o’clock on a wet January morning? After all, the patient might have brought on the illness themselves by eating red meat and smoking!
Parliament is no different. All political issues are now decided by experts, which is why almost all politicians hold the same views. So there is no need to make an MP’s life difficult by ruling out convenient hours of work and stand-ins when lifestyle balancing requires it. Being a modern MP is not really any different to being a clerk in a tax office – you just need to know standard procedures and when to apply them. Anyone can do the rubber-stamping!
Mr Tettenborn appears to have the attitude that professional people should have a sense of duty, reflected in their willingness to work long and unsocial hours if necessary. This is just the macho long-hours culture that has kept women out of professional jobs, and is so outdated!
