Angela Rayner and the terminal hypocrisy of Labour

So Angela Rayner has finally resigned as UK housing secretary and deputy prime minister, after admitting she underpaid stamp duty on an £800,000 seaside pad in Hove, East Sussex.

As the Telegraph revealed last week, Rayner avoided paying the full amount of stamp duty normally applied on a second home, by claiming that her new flat was in fact her primary residence. This was despite the fact that she spends most of her time in Ashton-under-Lyne, Greater Manchester, living at her family house. She recently sold her stake in this house to a trust she set up for her disabled son. It was this move – made, she says, in the interests of her child – that reportedly saved her as much as £40,000 in stamp duty when purchasing the Hove apartment.

As political scandals go, this was hardly up there with a minister whispering state secrets into an escort’s ear, as John Profumo did some six decades ago. Or even one of the countless, skin-crawling sexcapades involving Tory ministers in the John Major era. Set beside these shockers, Rayner’s nifty tax arrangements seem rather low-rent.

Yet it’s difficult to have much sympathy for Rayner. For over a decade, the Labour Party and Rayner in particular have moralised and wrung their hands over the tax affairs of others. They have repeatedly gone after their political rivals, accusing them of tax avoidance. And now they have all too predictably been hoist with their own petard.

Indeed, Rayner appointed herself Labour’s Tax-Finder General. ‘Tax avoidance costs lives’, she tweeted in 2013. Four years later, she was praising then Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn for raising the ‘tax-dodging issue’ in parliament, claiming that ‘the public are furious with those who get away with tax avoidance while they pay!’.

She pursued her Tory opponents over their tax affairs with particular zeal. In 2023, she demanded the sacking of then Conservative Party chairman Nadhim Zahawi over a penalty he had to pay to HMRC as part of a settlement over a tax bill. The previous year, she went after then prime minister Rishi Sunak’s wife, Akshata Murty, over her ‘non-dom’ tax status, calling it ‘tax dodging’.

This went well beyond tax, too. Allegations of bullying civil servants, bending Covid rules, not wearing a seat belt. Tory ministers in the last government would face cries of outrage and calls for their resignation over the most minor of infractions. And Rayner was often there leading the charge.

Labour bigwigs have spent so long portraying themselves as morally superior that they have come to believe their own hype. They really do seem to think they are, as a group, almost beyond reproach. That they are the good guys, the virtuous ones. What they lack in any substantial political vision for Britain, they make up for in skyscraping self-righteousness. Which blinds them to their own hypocrisy.

That’s partially why so many ministers, including Starmer himself, seemed to think it was okay to accept tens of thousands of pounds in free gifts from donors and backers. And it’s why Angela ‘tax avoidance kills’ Rayner thought it was okay to save £40,000 on the purchase of a posh flat on the south coast.

Scandals like this might not matter so much if Labour had anything else going for it. But with no principles or politics to speak of, empty moralising has filled the gap. Without that, it really has nothing.

Flat-gate has also exposed the chronically rule-bound prime minister’s lack of leadership, given his refusal to make a decision on Rayner’s future one way or the other. Instead, he responded, yet again, to a political crisis like a robot awaiting instructions – in this case, from Sir Laurie Magnus, the PM’s independent adviser on ministers’ interests, who was tasked with investigating Rayner. (Magnus’s ruling, that Rayner broke the ministerial code, is what precipitated her resignation.)

Whatever else you might say about Angela Rayner, she was easily the more normal, relatable figure at the top of Labour. Without her, the government looks not only hypocritical, but also even more stiff and out-of-touch than before. Just when you thought the government couldn’t get any weaker, it does.

Tim Black is associate editor of spiked.