Rayner Checked
We haven’t seen the last of Angela Rayner.
“If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.” Obi Wan Kenobi. Star Wars (Back when it was still good)
Last week. Angela Rayner reluctantly resigned from both her position as Deputy Prime Minister, and as Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, after evading her property taxes being caught, evading her property taxes.
Say what you like about Our Ange, but she is unquestionably an impressive figure. While most British people struggle to secure themselves and their family even one home, socialist stalwart Red Rayner has managed to acquire three.
So vast is was her property empire that at one point she seems to have become befuddled by her riches, claiming, for tax purposes at least, to have three ‘main residences’. A £650,000 house in Ashton Under Lyme, an £800,00 flat in Hove, plus of course, a free, (to her, not to you) government funded, grace and favour apartment in Admiralty Arch in central London. Which is, in itself, quite the achievement.
Since the only way that most people could conceivably qualify for a free state funded luxury home in the heart of London is by turning up on a dinghy at Dover, and pretending to be a 15 year old, Syrian homosexual.
And in fairness to Ange, she did recently do her very best to fulfil this exacting criteria. Bobbing about off the south coast on a lilo for hours, sustained only by an Elf Bar, and a single bottle of warm WKD.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer could have taken advantage of Rayner’s resignation and the enforced reshuffle it precipitated.
Turning this latest crisis into an opportunity to signal his car crash government was changing course, and turning its back on the idiocy, mismanagement, and disaster which has been the hallmark of its first year in office.
But of course not, Starmer, displaying all the political acumen of a loved up Matt Hancock, didn’t even seize the moment to dump the hapless Ed Miliband. Or even rebrand his nutso Net Zero Department in a way which more accurately reflects its pivotal role in reshaping modern Britain.
By perhaps renaming it the Department for National Suicide.
Starmer also moved Yvette Cooper sideways to become Foreign Secretary. Which might seem an odd choice at first. Since one of the main requirements of the job is to dazzle foreign dignitaries with your sparkling personality, all round likability, and general bon-homie. (Say what you like about Peter Mandleson, but he knows when to turn on the charm). Until you realise that as ever, Stamer is prioritising Britain’s relationship with the EU.
After all Cooper’s is one of the few faces in international politics which could give Ursula Von Der Leyen’s a run for its money, in a milk curdling contest.
Shabana Mahmood becomes Home Secretary. Rewarded for a job well done at the Justice Department, where she wasted no time identifying problems and rolling out effective solutions.
Such as addressing the serious issue of an inadequate number of white working class people being arrested for made up ‘hate crimes’. And by helping introduce a Two Tier justice, sentencing, and court system.
She even single handedly managed to reduce the pressure on our overcrowded, pressure cooker prison system. By cleverly releasing all the rapists, burglars, and drug dealers. A genius move which came with the added benefit of freeing up valuable space on D Wing for angry mums who dared lose their temper online, when confronted with yet another news story about murdered kids.
So with a record like that, I can’t wait to find out what Mahmood does with the small boats.
Next Sir Keir, never one to miss an opportunity to double down on stupid, made political mastermindless David Lammy the new Deputy Prime Minister. An appointment so bafflingly inappropriate that I half expected him to release Lucy Letby from jail, just so he could put her in charge of the NHS.
Some were surprised that Rachel Reeves remained in place at the (we’ve run out of) Treasury. But it’s clear that Starmer is simply biding his time. Fully aware he’ll need to offer her up as a sacrifice to the gilt markets when her next bonkers budget inevitably sends the economy into (yet another) catastrophic nose dive. Making an entire nation nostalgic for the financial probity and prudence of Liz Truss’s Mini Budget.
So that’s the reshuffle. But let’s get back to Rayner.
Big Ange put up a robust defence when the scandal first broke.
Her excuse seemed to be, ‘I followed all the rules when I broke all the rules’.
And predictably for a leading politician, she was quick to blame others for her wholly self inflicted predicament. Claiming she had been mislead by advisors about how much stamp duty was owed on her latest property.
Really Ange? Who did you go to for that tax advice? Jimmy Carr?
But let’s cut Ange some slack.
After all, how could a working class woman, a hard grifting grafting single mum, who has been forced to deal with sexism, classism, and gingerism all her life, and who had to single handedly, with the help of her husband, bring up a disabled child, be expected to know the ins and outs of Britain’s ever changing, unfathomably Byzantine, and venally pernicious, housing laws?
It’s not like she was the housing minister in charge of Britain’s ever changing, unfathomably Byzantine, and venally pernicious housing laws.
And let’s also be very careful not to criticise a vulnerable, marginalised, £160,000 a year, Deputy Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, from our position of privilege.
In the end Rayner’s fate was sealed after a careful and forensic investigation by Sir Laurie Magnus, the government’s ethics advisor.
Who judged, that by cheating on her taxes, and then pretending she hadn’t cheated on her taxes, Our Ange had somehow broken ‘the Ministerial Code’, and had to go.
Personally I don’t give two hoots about the Ministerial Code
It seems clear that this ‘code’ is just yet another way of taking the responsibility for decision making out of the hands of elected, accountable politicians, and making it the function of a faceless ‘process’ instead.
Absolving the Prime Minister of the day from making difficult choices, and so turning what should be ‘leadership,’ into little more than an algorithm. While at the same time effectively handing hostile civil servants the power to sack elected politicians.
In short it is technocratic, unaccountable, and undemocratic.
No wonder our political elites love it so much.
Just a couple of weeks ago Angela Rayner was being talked up as the inevitable, unstoppable successor to Keir Starmer.
But now she returns to the back benches. Lost to the wilderness. With no path back to high office.
Well maybe.
Let’s take another look at Sir Laurie’s ruling. Here is his judgely judgement on that legal advice which Ange never received.
This is hardly a damning appraisal. Magnus is clearly going out of his way to paint Our Ange’s tax dodging as more cock-up than conspiracy.
Sir Keir’s independent, and unimpeachably non partisan ethics advisor Sir Laurie goes on to say
Magnus could hardly have been more obliging. He seems less like a black capped hanging judge, grimly sending the condemned to the gallows, and more like a reluctant, limbo dancing copper, taking an obsequious knee to a BLM rioter.
It’s easy to imagine how, once the dust has settled, Rayner will seize on Magnus’ accommodating language to rewrite the narrative.
You can hear the spin already.
Ange will explain how she was simply the victim of a system where all the cards are stacked against ‘women from her background’.
And reframe her tax dodging as little more than ‘an honest mistake Guv’.
Cheered on by her backbench standard bearers, Our Ange will explain how she simply didn’t have the time or resources to spend hours pouring over a labyrinthian tax riddle like some highly paid posho Eton swot.
She was far too busy, standing up for British workers, bringing up a sick kid, flashing her growler on the House of Commons terrace, not building houses, sucking on a vape, and calling out Tories for the scum they are.
And she will be quick to remind us that even when she found herself unfairly marginalised by an unjust, sexist, patriarchal system, she continued to ‘act in good faith’ and clearly demonstrated her ‘integrity’ by falling on her sword.
Meanwhile Ange will take pains to distance herself from Starmer, and far from the cascade of calamity which is Labour’s front bench, work hard to cleanse the authentic Rayner brand of the stinking miasma of rot, corruption, failure, and decay, which hangs around this government like a grubby shroud.
And so, freed from the burden of office, Angela Rayner will regroup her forces, build a new power base, and potentially even take a tilt at the Labour crown.
How could that play out?
Well, I’ve had some thoughts.
What follows is not for the faint hearted.
Don’t think of it as a prediction. More a far fetched fantasy. A bit of fun maybe. Or if you prefer, an early Halloween horror story, to scare the children.
So strap yourself in, and here we go.
After the forthcoming and inevitable financial crash Starmer sacrifices Rachel Reeves, his tear soaked human(ish) shield, to appease the markets.
But it is not enough. Even more out of his depth, lost, and useless than usual. Starmer is left exposed and vulnerable.
At PMQs, a razor sharp Kemi Badenoch moves in for the kill. Administering the coup de grace with her trademark wit, elan, and charm.
Only joking. She’s useless.
Facing Badenoch over the Despatch Box must be like being beaten to death with a sock full of Angel Delight.
Which is why, in the week when Starmer is forced to go ‘cap in hand’ to the IMF, the Tories least effective leader since all the other ones, fails to grill Starmer on the economy, and instead asks the Prime Minister about prescription charges, a new royal yacht, and where he thinks all the bees have gone.
So it’s left to grumpy Labour backbenchers to dump Starmer (who is, let’s remind ourselves, hated in the country for being too authoritarian, two tier, and far left, but by Labour party backbenchers for being insufficiently authoritarian, two tier, and far left).
During a brief but vicious leadership contest, King Across The Water, Andy Burnham, attempts to prove his true Northern credentials by stripping off his box fresh Adidas shirt to reveal a still bloody, chest sized tattoo, of Noel and Liam.
But poor Andy B has miscalculated, The Labour Party faithful are unimpressed. They’re mainly weak wristed, middle class Blur fans after all. Burnham is swiftly dispatched, and Red Rayner is installed as party leader.
With Rayner in charge the party lurches even further from the centre, and finally becomes, in the delighted eyes of many, ‘Real Labour’. Rayner may even rebrand it as such.
Next Real Labour’s flame haired leader turbo charges the anti-human politics of grift, greed, envy, subsidy, blame, and innumeracy, which along with the pathological anti-Britishness, sectarianism, rampant Malthusiansim, and selective, spittle mouthed racism, powers the modern ‘progressive’ left.
A winter of discontent turns into a year of misery. There is rioting in the streets as energy prices soar, food prices spiral, and every spare bedroom in the land is sequestered by the state, and turned into a home for asylum seekers.
An early election becomes inevitable.
Farage and Jenrick (Kemi now consigned to the bin marked Hague/IDS) dance around each other like tipsy teachers at an end of term disco. But neither’s ego allows them to take the plunge and do any deal where he could possibly be seen as subordinate to the other. And so the right remains divided, and because of maths, electorally impotent.
The left on the other hand does coalesce. Or more accurately congeal.
Most voters who followed Corbyn to his, still unnamed, Nutso Party, return to the Real Labour fold. Jezza’s boss eyed project was never really the cult of personality that many claimed. Instead all Corbyn really offered intellectually challenged and chronically Marxist allotment botherers was a platform on which to virtue signal their ideological purity. A chance to spray their haughty righteousness around like a mangy fox marking a wheelie bin.
For much the same reasons many far left Greens return to the party, bringing with them their own cast of extreme Year Zero, Net Zero communist fuckwittery.
Meanwhile the public sector masses, lanyard wearing hordes, and Guardian reading busybodies who make up the bulk of our enlightened, entitled middle classes, are so repulsed by the idea that Farage’s grubby mob of white bread eating, flag shagging oiks might finally be handed the very thing they have been voicelessly voting for since 2010, that they rally to the Real Labour cause in a bid to form a ‘cordon sanitaire’ between government and the little people.
Meanwhile the PLP continues to indulge its passion for gerrymandering and vote manipulation. Showering voting rights onto client groups like eco confetti at a vegan wedding.
They’ve already handed the vote to people they themselves don’t even trust to use the internet-16 year olds. Next comes a government drive to make voting more ‘inclusive’ by promoting more postal votes, votes for foreign nationals, and even asylum seekers. (Seems preposterous, but if they could give Eddie Izzard two votes, one for his ‘boy’ side, and one for his ‘girl’ persona 🤮 they surely would).
And sure the economy is in dire straits, but not to worry, Real Labour has a plan for that too.
Red Ange promises she has a foolproof way of pulling our crumbling nation out of the sinking, stinking quagmire wrought by Labour’s brain dead tax and spend policies.
Even more tax and spend.
Somehow a still wildly unpopular Labour Party limps home as the largest party. It immediately does unsavoury backroom deals with the Lib Dems, the rump of the Greens, the new, Jew hating ‘independents’, and Jezza himself, to give themselves a working majority.
The Red Queen enters Downing Street.
Britain gives up the struggle, finally does a Stevie Smith, and sinks beneath the waves.
Anyway. As I said. A far fetched fantasy. A Halloween horror story. Ignore me. I’m just being silly. It could never really happen.
Probably.
***********
Thank you for reading Low Status Opinions.
As I said at the top of the email, a special welcome to all my new subscribers who have signed up since my 100th post. It’s great to have you here. And thanks for coming.
If you haven’t yet subscribed then maybe you’d like to. It’s free unless you don’t want it to be. And even the paid version works out at less than a £1 a week.
Of course there’s also my Buy Me A Coffee button here 👇 for those one off contributions. Many, many thanks to all of you who support my work in this way.
Quick housekeeping note. I’m about to hit a very busy patch in my professional/personal life so I might not be able to post here for a couple of weeks or so.
I’ll try to post on Notes, but I might not find the time for a full length article. Please bear with me. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.
And thanks again for coming.
All the best
LSO
Good summary of things. My prediction is civil unrest followed by a steep decline, leading to more unrest. All that contributing to a very serious hardening of attitudes as people learn Labour, Conservative, Reform etc. all ultimately dance to the same tune. More immigration, more climate initiatives, more taxes, more decline. None of them are in a position to respond to voter concerns. We see this in most Western countries now. Germany and France are no better. Canada is becoming a basket case. Ireland is dying.
I do think people are now beginning to realize this will not end well. No one is coming to our rescue, least of all political parties.
Great summary of the situation. The only area I might disagree is about the possible electoral situation - the rise of the "independents" (Islamist) group. There is already a small group of them and it seems likely they will grow, splitting from the Left and thus dooming Labour. In the process ridding us of such luminaries as Jess Phillips. What do you think?