If a deal is secured with the EU, the government is willing to force MPs to give up their December break to pass it
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The last time parliament sat in Westminster on Christmas Day, business began with the second reading of a bill about the holding of sheriffs’ courts in Wiltshire, before moving on to discussion of the forest laws in the Forest of Dean.
The circumstances, granted, were exceptional: the date was 1656 and Christmas observances had been outlawed by Oliver Cromwell’s Long Parliament. The Commons benches might have been suspiciously empty that 25 December, but those MPs who had turned up were eager to show that this was a day as mundane as any other.
