HOW I wish we could all celebrate the inspiring tale of a working-class woman who was born into poverty on a council estate and became a single mother at 16, yet managed, by the age of 44, to become Britain’s deputy Prime Minister.
Never mind the snobbery over her accent and choice of clothes, the hurdles Angela Rayner must have had to clamber over to beat more moneyed and educated rivals to the top of the Labour Party must have been immense.
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But, sorry, her background should not be used to try to neutralise the increasingly sulphuric pong surrounding her property affairs.
I don’t care whether you are a patrician Tory putting your duck house on expenses, or a Labour woman-of-the-people flipping your properties to avoid the stamp duty hike — which has just been imposed on other buyers by your own government — it is not going to endear you to the voters if you start exploiting tax rules.
Few would begrudge successful people wanting to enjoy their new-found wealth by investing in a second home by the seaside, if they were not simultaneously leading a government department that is trying to blame second home-owners for the housing crisis and just about every other social ill.
But in the past week, Rayner’s purchase of an £800,000 flat in Hove has gone far beyond a story of hypocrisy. It is now one of tax avoidance, too.
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Last October Rayner sat on the green benches in the Commons nodding along as Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced that she was raising the stamp duty surcharge on second homes and investment properties from three per cent to five per cent, making life even more difficult for many small-time buy-to-let investors who are just trying to build themselves a modest nest egg for their retirement.
Was that the moment when Rayner herself devised a little scheme to avoid the surcharge altogether?
It has subsequently emerged that shortly before Rayner purchased her Hove flat in May she removed her name from the deeds of her constituency home in Ashton-under-Lyne, Greater Manchester, which she owns with the husband she is now divorcing.
That allowed her to reduce the stamp duty bill on her Hove flat from £70,000 to £30,000 — the same amount a buyer would have to pay if they were purchasing the property as a main home.
Yet Rayner still appears to consider the Greater Manchester property as her main home when it suits her.
That is where she is registered to pay council tax and where she also has a postal vote, according to the electoral roll.
Treating the house as her main home has allowed her to avoid council tax on her grace-and-favour apartment in Admiralty House, Central London.
There also seems to be a bit of clever tax-planning going on with regard to the Manchester home, which appears to have been placed in a trust — possibly for the benefit of the couple’s three children.
The firm who valued the property for the trust came up with a figure of £650,000, which just happens to be the maximum value for a property you can gift to family members without it becoming liable for inheritance tax.
To complicate matters, it transpires that Rayner has also put herself on the electoral roll in Sussex.
Presumably, Rayner isn’t planning to exercise both votes — doing so in a general election is a criminal offence, punishable by up to two years in jail.
Had a Conservative MP been caught out doing the same Rayner would have been the first to erupt into anger.
But it indicates a somewhat flexible attitude towards where she lives — if not a clever ruse to leave her options open if she decides to abandon her Greater Manchester constituency for a safer seat in Brighton at the next election (something she denies).
It is reminiscent of the practice of “flipping,” whereby MPs were caught out during the 2009 expenses scandal for having changed the designation of their main home in order to maximise their claims.
The response from Rayner’s team, too, reminds me of the excuses that MPs used to trot out when caught.
The Deputy Prime Minister, an official statement from her office stated, “paid the relevant duty owing on the purchase of the Hove property in line with relevant requirements and entirely properly.”
True, she has done nothing illegal, but then neither had most MPs caught out in the expenses scandal (although some went to jail). What she did do, however, was to rearrange her affairs in order to engage in legal tax avoidance at a time the Chancellor was walloping many ordinary people with tax rises.
Treat with contempt
Had a Conservative MP been caught out doing the same Rayner would have been the first to erupt into anger.
This is the very same Rayner, you may remember, who in 2021 was forced to apologise for saying of Tory ministers “we cannot get any worse than a bunch of scum, homophobic, racist, misogynistic, absolute vile, nasty Etonian piece of scum”.
Her speech, at the Labour party conference, also chucked in the charge that the Conservative government resembled a “banana republic”.
As Rayner herself once said, ‘the public are furious with those who get away with tax avoidance while they pay.’
Sorry, Angela, but it is you who is now resembling something out of a banana republic.
Your sense of entitlement — that it is one set of rules for you and another set for everyone else — is that of a leader who treats their people with contempt.
As Rayner herself once said, “the public are furious with those who get away with tax avoidance while they pay.”
Quite. That is why the fuss over Rayner’s properties is not going to go away any time soon.
The Deputy Prime Minister still likes to make political capital out of her working-class background, but she herself has become the self-serving capitalist she feigns to detest.
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