Gwyneth Dunwoody: MPs need to stay up late to do their job

As I sat in my office at 11 o'clock yesterday morning, trawling through the piles of letters from my constituents, I started to wonder what exactly Robin Cook, the Leader of the House of Commons, thinks the average MP does during the day. Listening to his speech on Tuesday night, when he championed the case for earlier sittings for the House, he seemed to be under the impression that we do nothing before 2.30 in the afternoon. Does he think we sit around idly, waiting for the day's business to begin?

I'm afraid Robin Cook's "modernisation" programme for parliament has been sold with a simple sleight of hand; it looks good, it sounds good, but it's only when you get it home that you realise there's a big hole in the bottom.

My constituents in Crewe and Nantwich (and I'm sure this is true of the wider British public too) don't give a damn what hours we work in the House of Commons. In fact, they are usually happy to ask the impossible of you. They want you to devote yourself to dealing with local constituency affairs and at the same time devote yourself to affairs of national importance. They ask for a lot, and rightly so. Many people have written to me over the years saying they're not going to vote for me, but never on the grounds that I've been up at 2.30am listening to a debate in the chamber. What they really care about is what we do, not when we do it. It doesn't matter to them whether our working practices are "quaint", it's the result that matters.

Pulling debating times forward is no guarantee of quality. I've heard some terrible speeches at 3.30 in the afternoon and I've heard speeches at 4 in the morning which anyone in the world would have recognised as brilliantly thought-out and delivered.

Neither do I have much time for the view that we work in such a "masculine" environment that women are "put off" coming into politics. My colleague Glenda Jackson, MP for Hampstead and Highgate, has stated that "as a woman, that is the antithesis of work". I'm sick and tired of strong women pretending that they can't cope with a "masculine" working environment. If they can't deal with it they should go back home and do some knitting. I've got no problem dealing with men and neither should they. Gender shouldn't come into it. There are plenty of men who can't cope with the pressures of this job either, but they would never get away with complaining in the same way that some women do.

As for discouraging women from going into politics, I challenge reformers to find a single Labour seat where they can show that this has been the case and a potential woman candidate has pulled out. MPs are a self-selecting group of volunteers, and irrespective of gender have chosen this life and the responsibilities the job entails. The job demands a lot and they have to be prepared to give a lot.

And then there's the view that we should be more "media-friendly" and manipulate our working hours to fit in with newspaper deadlines and programme broadcast times. I get on well with both the press and broadcasters, but I find it ludicrous that we should be bending over backwards to make their life easier. We are here to frame laws and scrutinise legislation; legislation that affects the media as much as anyone else, and they should recognise the importance of that.

As MPs we have to remember what we are here to do. We are here to represent our constituents and enact laws. That's why these plans are so wrongly conceived. By fiddling around with timetables the Government is eroding the real powers of parliamentarians. They are scaling down our ability to scrutinise and debate legislation properly. We deal with immensely complex issues that demand to be taken seriously and looked at in real detail.

Does this level of scrutiny matter? Of course it does. Even if you thought a piece of legislation deserved to go through unimpeded or you trusted the government of the day, just remember that governments change; that's the nature of democracies. You might not be so sanguine about what a future government can push through the Commons. If we forget about properly scrutinising the legislative process we will inevitably produce bad laws.

A number of radical changes were made in the last Parliament, which all had the direct effect of limiting our power. In my view, the only reform that the Commons needs is a return of these powers. Backbench MPs used to have the right to initiate not just Private Member's Bills, but motions to debate political subjects and to get a vote on them. On Friday we could debate important subjects and get a vote of the House. If 300 or 400 Members managed to stay in the chamber on Fridays, as they often did, they could register their opinion on abortion, reform of the laws on homosexuality, and other contentious issues important to their constituents. It was guaranteed that the government of the day would take that seriously. They might not like it, and indeed would go around exercising considerable pressure on the MPs who had registered their votes and views, but they certainly took note of them. Now that opportunity is gone.

If reinstating these powers were the objective of these new reforms, I would be championing them louder than anyone else. Forget all this nonsense about late-night sittings and masculine working environments, there's nothing "quaint" about defending the ability to do your job.

The writer is the Labour MP for Crewe and Nantwich