Two Tribes of Hypocrisy
The stench of hypocrisy reeks from all directions as Angela Rayner is driven from office. The UK gets a vacancy for the post of deputy prime minister, and the so-called “Labour Party” needs a new deputy leader.
The loss of a deputy prime minister to scandal is a huge political defeat for any government anywhere. In theory, recovery is far from impossible, but in practice, Starmer’s govt is so desperately unpopular that its pleas for a second chance will be ignored.
But the musical chairs interest me less than the cultural sewage spill.
The charge was led by the billionaire-owned Tory media. Their owners are part of a class which employs armies of lawyers and accountants to wriggle their way out of millions and even billions of tax. Yet they have devoted acres of front pages to yelling at a former impoverished teenage mum who faced complex decisions in caring for a disabled son. Rayner’s errors are utterly trivial compared to the squillons in tax havens which the press barons help to protect.
Similarly, the Conservative Party’s deep contempt for Rayner reeks of class hatred. The party of male big money openly despised the presence in politics of a woman raised in dysfunctional poverty who worked for years in low-paid jobs. They have sneered and jeered at her voice, her clothing and her life, while their online fans call her a “chav”. A party stuffed with multi-millionaires and landlords sneering at a woman who had absolutely none of their headstarts in life. Worse still, Rayner made a career as a carer, the most important job in any society: and for that, the Tories despise her. Their social hierarchy values spivs and speculators and other forms of parasite who make money out of money, and it sneers at the people who empty their granny’s bedpan.
The Labour side is little better. Rayner’s role in Starmer’s party and government was primarily as a working-class veneer on neoliberalism. Like former ship’s purser John Prescott’s place as Tony Blair’s sidekick, Rayner’s role was to reassure the party’s dwindling working-class membership that at least one person like them was at the top table. Meanwhile, government policy ignored the figurehead, and screwed the working class. Red Angela stayed on board when Starmer froze the grannies and starved the kids.
Tories mocked Rayner as the “token chav”, while the #Starmtroopers bypassed her and mused on her dismissal. In some ways, the Tory open contempt was more honest.
Rayner occupies a complex place straddling the boundaries of England’s vicious class system. Her working-class history and accent leaves her as “not one of us” for the toffs, but a decade of parliamentary salary and expenses has lifted her a long way beyond working-class incomes. For the last fourteen months, her combined parliamentary and ministerial salaries totalled £161,409 per year, or about £8,111 a month after tax and national insurance. That’s good money, about five times the median take-home pay in her constituency.
Such a big change of financial status propels a person to new environments. In addition, Rayner’s receipt of hefty compensation for her child pushed her into a world of trust and trustees, of legal instruments and unfamiliar concepts. Working-class people don’t have family solicitors and family trusts, so Rayner didn’t have a social network to warn of the pitfalls and trip hazards of that world.
But these hazards are nothing new, and nor is the vicious hypocrisy of the Conservative Party and its media attack dogs. Even if Rayner herself didn’t recognise the vulnerabilities, the Labour Party should have systems in place to help its MPs and especially its leaders get expert ethical advice on personal finance.
Rayner fell foul of an obscure technicality. I’d never in a month of Sundays have guessed that a trust in a disabled child’s name could alter stamp duty rates on a parent’s home purchase, and I can believe that it was possible to act in good faith and not see any need to get that issue checked. Rayner’s story seems a little shifty, but even so it’s reasonable to feel a lot of sympathy for a working mother of a disabled child having to make a lot of snap decisions as she juggled huge work pressures and multiple locations. Among the Westminster opposition parties, only LibDem leader Ed Davey (himself a carer of a disabled child) showed any glimpse of understanding the tensions.
But whatever happened, Rayner didn’t get the right advice. We don’t know whether she intentionally cut corners, or ignored specific warnings to get thorough legal advice, and just failed to check her assumptions.
And in the end, it doesn’t really matter which explanation is the best fit. Rayner was the deputy prime minister, entrusted with making very big decisions. Her job was to ensure that issues were properly checked and questions properly asked, but that didn’t happen. This person was responsible for a government’s avoidance of potholes, but fell into one. Not a good look.
Even the most sympathetic telling of the story looks bad. This isn’t just a case of boys with ologies failing to assist a girl with NVQs. It’s a case of a cabinet which was looking the other way from ethics, which rotted with a freebie culture even when it was in opposition. Freebie clothes and holidays and concert and ballgame tickets were bad enough, but trivial compared to the truckloads of cash from donors fundamentally hostile to Labour values.
This isn’t a newbie government tripping over a small detail; it’s a rotten government trapped in its own ethical swamp, in a political landscape of ethical sewage lakes.
Claire – I agree with the thrust of your argument about the hounding of a woman from a humble, difficult background who the rich and powerful consider has committed the cardinal sin of getting above her station (something Scottish voters will be familiar with).
The one fact you may have overlooked is that Raynor was Minister For Housing and the issue was with payment of Stamp Duty – her area of responsibility!
She will be able to come back from this setback and I would not be surprised if she is Labour Party leader (and PM) by time of next election.
John, I don’t think that is in any way part of the housing minister’s job to familiarise themselves with the finer details of stamp duty law. That would be a treasury role, unlikely to get ministerial attention.
Nor is the Department’s role to provide legal scrutiny of the minister’s transactions.
This was a failure by the minister to ensure that her private legal transaction was scrutinised by someone with specialist skills. The particular department which she headed adds to the embarrassment, but the dept was rightly uninvolved
Claire – I never meant to implicate the Department of Housing at all in this issue. I also never expected AR to personally know all legal issues around Stamp Duty. My point, not dissimilar to one you are making, is that as the minister with responsibility for Housing it should have been abundantly clear to AR that she should take all steps to ensure she was above criticism for with regard to her own personal housing dealings.
What I do not understand about these legal firms is how they get away with what they advise.
How can they twice inform someone that the lower rate applies (and by different firms) but with this get-out caveat. What exactly is the point of informing someone in writing that the lower rate applies, but then say but we are not experts? Why don’t they just do a proper, expert job, or say we cannot advise you properly as we are not expert enough in this case? Their actual advice was totally useless and totally wrong, but they take their no doubt considerable fees no problem.
She may have been Housing Minister but if two legal firms do not understand the details of this case, I don’t see how a person with a very broad housing brief would know the details of this complex case. It is not realistic – people take years and years to become experts in tax law.
She got it wrong, she had to go, but really, what a load of tosh.
Niemand – my reading and understanding of situations is she was advised to get more specialist advice in what appears a complicated tax issue. She chose not to which for someone who is the government minister responsible for this area was at best foolish.
My point was they said the property counted as being at the lower rate, twice, in writing, but then said, but we are not totally sure. If they had said we don’t know, please get more expert advice it would be different, but they did not do that. My question is what was the point of their advice that the property did count as being taxed at the lower rate? Why are they giving our legal advice that is wrong in the first place?
I don’t know whether you have had much dealings with law firms but I have had some and they are always like this – slippery snakes who never take proper responsibility for what they say, or even do, and always put it back to you when things go wrong, even though it is you paying them for a service.
Niemand – I am not trying to defend lawyers – I also have experience of using them and I ended up doing the work and advising them most of the time. Having said all that if you read Laurie Magnus report he clearly states that tow separate trust advisors recommended she seek specialist advice due to comple nature of her affairs. This Magnus states she failed to do and this was what ultimately did for her.
I think what they should have done was just recommend seeking specialist advice if they could not give it, end of. Anything else is useless and here we have a case that proves that. This is over and above what Rayner should have done which is clear and she conceeded that without caveat. It just struck a chord with me having dealt with two law firms recently over my Mum’s probate and I grew to hate their attitudes, but also their uselessness for which they charge a small fortune. I don’t know how they get away with it. I actually officially complained and their response was to totally stone wall and close ranks at which point you give up. They do everything they can to avoid taking any responsibility. Imagine how it must have felt for something really serious e.g. those caught up in the Post Office scandal?
I think the poshest political party in the UK may well be the Scottish Greens, if it is some kind of class war from half a century ago.
Margret Thatcher came from a working class background, if it is a compo for nit-wits.
Div ye, aye?
I have seen corruption in my working life. A big Armament company has covered up a corrupt individual for his Disability pension payment to “Protect the Company’s good name” because he was involved in the constructual dismissal of another employee. Management knew what was going on and did nothing because the manager was a Saudi National.
There’s many good points in here, and I find the one about the duty of care the Labour Party has for its MP in ministerial roles salient. Like the author I have a lot of sympathy for Angela Rayner’s position, I do firmly believe thst she’s been targeted deliberately by the Tory Press, but she has broken the rules.
On the negative side, the tone for the first two-thirds of the article is very much Dave Spart. Another editorial pass would’ve been useful.
What’s ‘Dave Spart’ Jacob?
He was (is?) the spoof leftie columnist in Private Eye, a caricature of a radical hard left agitator
Ah okay, thanks
You don’t read Private Eye?
At the risk of being of being a pedant, John Prescott was a Steward not a Purser. In the Merchant Navy there are Officers and Ratings with different and separate pay scales.
Hierarchy on a Cargo Ship used to be Pantry Boy, Assistant Steward, Second Steward Who is A Petty Officer, and Chief Steward or Purser who is an officer. John Prescott worked on passenger ships where there a multiplicity of roles.
in this otherwise very well written piece
Hypocrisy? She called for Nadhim Zahawi to be sacked in very similar circumstances when he said he’d not paid tax due to ‘bad advice.’ She refused to support the Birmingham bin strikers.
She called on the police to “shoot first, ask questions later” against a backdrop of police shootings of unarmed young black men. She sat and watched a genocide unfold for two years and said nothing. Only last week she was asked if what Israel is doing in Gaza constitutes genocide and replied “that’s not for me to determine.” Sorry, she’s an authoritarian, right-wing bully. No sympathy whatsoever. Glad she’s gone.
Yep.
Thank you Claire, a very fair summary of the rot that is British politics. And a very humane and realistic examination of Angela Rayner’s sad, human, but ultimately negligent misstep. In regard to Angela Rayner’s character and the claims of the class led assassination of her over the years, I have no knowledge, so I can’t judge the accuracy of your claims here, but I imagine they are not that far off reality, she has all the attributes for this privilege: she’s a woman, she has Lancashire working class upbringing and accent and she’s a “socialist”. .Bu it is worth considering the fundamental dichotomy or fallacy here, in that anyone overcoming their difficulties in their early life to reach high office or attainment, suggests something just a bit different about that person compared with so many of their peers they’ve left behind. Ambition? Competence? Greed? Even, perish the thought, hypocrisy? Just saying……
There was a PM of New Zealand called John Key also brought up in hardship – he made himself a multimillionaire being a whizz at humanity’s most useless job, a currency speculator. He was helicoptered in to be a leader of the right wing National Party, and became PM. I came to viscerally loathe him, a slick, insincere and dissembling hypocrite of a man corrupted by his own success, yet who was one of NZ’s most popular ever PMs – he wasn’t called “Teflon Man” for no reason. (He resigned suddenly and unexpectedly for “personal reasons” still as a popular and successful leader of his party. The persistent rumour is that he had an affair with a member of his staff. A rumour, purely, I hereby state.) So a poor upbringing is no guarantee of ultimate quality, sadly.
The title of your piece is the excellent “The Two Tribes of Hypocrisy” You’re right, hypocrisy is one of the most dangerous and murderous failures of humanity, and particularly in its leadership. The only worse failing perhaps is greed. The two allied together will be the ruination of us all.
This is what I have written eighteen months ago in an email to a local media outlet about hypocrisy in the Palace of Westminster. Mainly about Gaza, but the principle is the same:
Hypocrisy in the Palace of Westminster has a smell (as you aptly note, Claire, it has a stench), it’s the nauseating smell of hot blood, spilled guts, warm meat and human misery, it’s the smell of cordite and concrete dust catching the back of the throat and choking you, it’s the disabling smell of inescapable pain and despair – there’s a rank mephitis of hypocrisy in the House of Commons that most MPs have got so used to they no longer notice it, indeed the smell is on their breath and seeps out from their pores, but the humane visitor is immediately assailed and sickened by it. “If hypocrisy had weight, even now the Palace of Westminster would be slipping below the waters of the Thames and the White House similarly beneath the waters of the Potomac, never, thankfully, to be seen again”.
And today, here’s a report in the Guardian about Boris Johnson’s greedy and corrupt shenanigans after leaving office. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/sep/08/revealed-how-boris-johnson-traded-pm-contacts-for-global-business-deals Well, of course, as hypocrite and chancer in chief, what else would we expect. I imagine a leak in regard to Tony Blair, would show something very similar. And as for the other hundred of MPs? Who knows? But Angela Rayner’s downfall is just another “here we go again” – a constant running tap of serious missteps, personal and political, incompetence, dissembly and / or lying, unaccountability, and outright misbehaviour in successive administrations, against the background of a nation under stress, deteriorating private circumstance and public realm, and the Palace of Westminster itself in its crumbling magnificence a stark metaphor of wider decay in a once proud nation.
A functioning and truly democratic society depends perhaps more than any other single thing on trust – that we behave properly, we are humane and concerned, and we don’t dissemble, cheat or lie. It’s the cement that binds us together. That applies to us all, but as leaders of our society, our parliamentarians and representatives should be those that are leading that principle, not failing it. This failure of our politicians to behave in a trustworthy manner over many years, and this behaviour getting ever more common and egregious it seems, will ultimately undermine our really quite fragile democratic superstructure and cause its collapse into something more resembling an anarchic rubble.
Come on Scotland, time for a change, isn’t it?
Just to restate something I wrote in my last post, it’s articles like these – opinions expressed ably and humanely, that contain a thoughtful ethical balance to our mounting challenges – that bring me to Bella Caledonia from 12,000 miles away. And, of course, the comments of worthwhile others posting their thoughts in support or dissent – as for instance Bradley Brady’s contribution to “let’s be real” about Angela, including her attitude on Gaza. . Keep up the good work, and I will continue to contribute financially as I am able to.