John Cryer MP’s lacklustre Parliamentary record UPDATED

I have periodically joked that, so rarely is John Cryer seen or heard locally, he must love his sleep.

Now the website They Work For You provides some hard data to chew upon, and largely confirms my suspicions: Mr. Cryer’s Parliamentary record is indeed lacklustre.

The bare bones are as follows. Mr. Cryer, it turns out:

‘Has spoken in 15 debates in the last year — well below average amongst MPs.

Has received answers to 4 written questions in the last year — below average amongst MPs.

Replied with 2 or 3 weeks to a low number of messages sent via WriteToThem.com during 2014, according to his constituents.

Has voted in 65.40 % of votes in this Parliament with this affiliation — below average amongst MPs’.

(see http://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/10143/john_cryer/leyton_and_wanstead; emphasis added)

Mr. Cryer’s friends will no doubt plead that sleep has nothing to do with it, and if Mr. Cryer has performed indifferently in Parliament, we must remember that his role in the Corbynista struggle for the soul of the Labour Party has been little short of heroic.

Yet for those of us outside the political bubble, this matters not a jot. We pay Mr. Cryer to represent us, and moreover provide him with an office and five staff costing £170,00 per year so that he can do so.

One wonders what the young Turks of Momentum will make of all this? In a sense, it is a litmus test. They claim to espouse a new, open, and democratic politics. But will Mr. Cryer’s value to them in internal party squabbles – the cachet of his trade union affiliation, his contacts book, and so on – persuade them to overlook his less than impressive record in terms of the ordinary voter?

I know where my money is.

UPDATE

I have been advised that my use of the phrase ‘young Turks’ is potentially ageist, and, as ‘Disgusted of Leyton’ points out, ‘most of L&W’s Turks are [anyway] hardly young but are of mature years’ (‘L&W’ being Leyton and Wanstead Labour Party).

I stand corrected.