Rayner rebuked for calling senior Tories ‘scum’
ANGELA RAYNER, Labour’s deputy leader, was rebuked by Sir Keir Starmer yesterday after she described senior Tories as “scum”.
She made the controversial remarks during a fringe event at around 9.15pm on Saturday, the opening day of the party’s five-day conference in Brighton.
“We cannot get any worse than a bunch of scum, homophobic, racist, misogynistic, absolute pile … of banana republic … Etonian … piece of scum,” she told activists, according to the Daily Mirror. Sir Keir sought to distance himself from her intervention, which
appeared to refer to Boris Johnson and his Conservative Government.
The Labour leader said he and his deputy “take different approaches”, telling the BBC: “That’s not the language that I would use.”
He said he would speak to her about the episode, but insisted it was a matter for her whether she apologised.
The row erupted ahead of Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, setting out the party’s tax plans today, with proposals to overhaul the business rates system and review a thousand current tax reliefs. Allies of Sir Keir warned that Ms Rayner’s remarks risked overshadowing such policy interventions.
Senior Conservatives weighed in to
condemn the remarks, branding them “appalling”, as they demanded the deputy Labour leader show contrition for her language. Some members of the shadow cabinet were also forthright in suggesting she should apologise.
The deputy Labour leader stood firm, however, and said the remarks expressed her “anger and frustration”.
She said she would apologise only if Mr Johnson said sorry for past comments that she described as homophobic, racist and misogynistic.
Oliver Dowden, the Conservative chairman, said: “We need to make politics better, not drag it into the gutter.”
LABOUR will today pledge to create a minister for rural affairs in every government department, as the party makes a pitch for Conservative voters in the countryside. Sir Keir Starmer is concerned his party has lost support in the Red Wall and Scotland, and will need to win back constituencies in the south of England not held by Labour since the 2001 election if it is to win a majority at Westminster.
The party believes it can win back
‘We won in rural communities in 1997 and 2001, and we held a lot of them in 2005 and 2010’
areas in the countryside by nominating a minister in every department to oversee the impact of the Government’s work in rural communities.
The rural minister in the Department for Transport would be responsible for rural bus services, for example, while a health minister would intervene to prevent the decline of GPS in the countryside.
The change would apply to all government departments except for the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and the Department for
International Trade. Luke Pollard, the shadow environment secretary, said the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has become increasingly “peripheral” in government under the leadership of George Eustice.
He said Defra has been sidelined when the Government is negotiating post-brexit trade deals, leading to an influx of cheap products from abroad that undercut British farmers, while transport times to local hospitals in the countryside are double that of cities.
“I think there has always been this assumption in those communities that the Conservatives are the party of rural communities and they are the parties of farming,” Mr Pollard said.
“That is largely an impression built up by good Tory spin doctors … We won in rural communities in 1997 and 2001, and we held a lot of them in 2005 and 2010.”
Labour’s pitch for the countryside comes after a collapse in support in some of its traditional heartlands – Scotland and the North East and North West.