Angela Rayner is electoral gold – for the Tories
Margaret Thatcher’s decision, long ago, to allow tenants to buy their council houses at a discount was not without its problems. Since, on Treasury insistence, the money from the sales was not redeployed to assist with a new generation of cheap housing, the net effect, except for the direct beneficiaries, was to make the property ladder a steeper climb.
But the council house sales policy was, politically, a work of genius. It broke open Labour’s monopoly on housing for the working classes, liberating roughly two million households. By opposing the policy, Labour put itself in the impossible position of trying to block the aspirations of ordinary people. This hamstrung the party until the era of Tony Blair, who slipped elegantly out of it.
A related problem was hypocrisy. Human nature being what it is, there were some council-house tenants who, though opposing the Right to Buy in principle, were not averse to collecting the personal benefits it offered. Labour’s present deputy leader, Angela Rayner, is too young to have been part of the original controversy, but she did buy – and sell at a profit – her council house. The question does now arise whether she has been frank about what happened.
Michael Ashcroft’s new biography of Ms Rayner, Red Queen?, asks why it was that Ms Rayner, while registered on the electoral roll as living in Vicarage Road in Stockport, seems to have been living with her eventual husband and two children in Lowndes Lane, Stockport. She had bought the house from the council at a 25 per cent discount.
It also notes that she sold Vicarage Road in 2015 for £127,500, making a profit in the region of £48,500. If Vicarage Road was not, in fact, her principal residence at that time, she could have been liable for Capital Gains Tax (CGT). Ms Rayner did not pay any CGT.
Lord Ashcroft’s book also points out that various conditions of residence attach to anyone using the Right to Buy – for example, the council’s right to claw back some of the profit if it is sold when the owner has resided there for fewer than five years. He questions whether Ms Rayner fulfilled these conditions.
We do not know the full facts, but I notice that Ms Rayner appears to be behaving as people do when they feel uncomfortable about something they have done or not done, which is to attack the questioner and not answer the questions.
When the Ashcroft accusations were first put to her, Labour responded on her behalf by attacking “Belize-based Tory billionaire Michael Ashcroft” and how the Tories had “shattered the dream of home ownership”. It said that “she and her husband maintained their existing residences before moving into their shared marital home” but did not say when. It did not answer the book’s other points.
In ensuing interviews, Ms Rayner has dug in, apparently on grounds of privacy, giving little further information.
My sense is that Ms Rayner is a latter-day victim of the curse which Right to Buy put upon Labour and will not easily escape it. The link between the words “Angela Rayner” and words like “Capital Gains Tax” are very embarrassing for a firebrand of the Left and potential electoral gold for the Conservatives. So if the Tories have any fight left in them at all, we shall be hearing more of this.
I watched with fascination the
clip of some pro-israel demonstrators arraigning a uniformed police officer (whom I shall call Officer 1) at a pro-gaza march.
They had told another officer (Officer 2) that they had seen marchers displaying swastikas on banners and that he (Officer 2) had said “that a swastika was not necessarily antisemitic or a disruption of public order”. They wanted to know from Officer 1 how this could be so. Officer 1 replied, “I haven’t said anything about it – that it is or it isn’t – everything needs to be taken in context, doesn’t it?”
This caused outrage. I felt sympathy for both sides. Having seen swastikas displayed on the march, the supporters were naturally incensed.
On the other hand, Officer 1 had not himself seen the swastikas and he was being asked to comment on the reported reaction of a colleague: he did not want to drop Officer 2 in it. So it was understandable that he took refuge in what the Public Order Act says and declined to get into the argument. He was certainly not saying that swastikas were OK by the police. Rather, he was sticking to training – don’t comment on something about which you have no independent knowledge; stick to the law. He remained calm and polite, though it would have been more impressive if he had not been holding a plastic coffee cup throughout.
To me at least, the clip was a reminder of something else: the dreadful effect that these weekly marches are having on public confidence and the peace of the streets of London. They give cover to extremists and the police let this happen. If these anti-semitic marchers were officially designated “far Right”, the police would move in with no hesitation about “context”.
The phrase “Global Majority” is
gaining ground – the Church of England being the latest to use it in official documents. It means all those in the world who are not white, allegedly 85 per cent.
It is a cant term. No racial group constitutes a global majority, and it is important for the peace of humanity that this be acknowledged.