I heard her interview regarding her tax issues. She hasn’t got a portfolio of properties and she doesn’t funnel assets into a company based in the Cayman Islands. She doesn’t run a funds management company on the side or have multiple enigmatic board roles or take lucrative consulting jobs overseas. It sounds like a messy divorce-related arrangement and the complexity of it has landed her where she is now.
She should have been vigilant over the tax status of the legal arrangement she entered into. She can’t claim that she was bewildered by the process or claim that the legal advice was followed without her realising that she was taking full responsibility for the decisions made. Lots of people have complex family arrangements – the Deputy PM is and should be held to a very high standard in terms of their own tax affairs.
So she was right to resign.
This is not, however, in the same league as the kind of activities mentioned above that Conservative Ministers have been doing for years and years. The venom directed to her sounds like the celebratory crowing of people that believe Angela Rayner had no business being a senior politician in the first place due to her background.
This is why I hope she will return to high office in the future.
100% right.
Such a pity she isn’t male and didn’t go to Eton. We need more of those guys.
Hear hear.
She has the forthrightness and authenticity of John Prescott who ended up as a national treasure. I actually feel sorry for her and agree totally with the OP. Hopefully she will be back once the dust has settled.
Here’s hoping she ‘does a Prescott’ and kicks a Farage in the ball. She’d be carried shoulder high through the streets of the land.
Just the one or is it like the person who has a spare in the Albert Hall?
Emulating his hero.
He has testicular cancer in his 20s. I started writing ‘in the balls’, then remembered and corrected myself.
I feel hugely pissed off that Raynor through either ignorance or arrogance has further damaged the already badly wounded Labour Party. Meanwhile Farage is making hay off the back of it. How on earth has this Govt made such a mess of a golden opportunity to take this country forward after such a disastrous 14 years of the Tories.
That question is easy. They had no vision and no overriding idea beyond “we’re not as crap as the Tories”. This was clear throughout the general election. From the start they’ve been blundering about making unforced errors. In fact the one person who seemed on top of her brief was Angela Rayner, getting the workers rights bill through, reforming planning and calling in projects stuck in Tory nimbyism and giving them a shove. There may be other good ministers but Labour’s comms are so hopeless we don’t know about them. As a Lib Dem I didn’t expect them to me much cop but they are worse than my lower expectations. I wrote to my MP a year ago and asked him to pass on the message that if they don’t sort out the plan and get delivery going we would be looking at Prime Minister Badenoch, Jenrick or worse, Farage. I received a typed message filled with generic guff about “there is a plan and it’s working”. What a waste.
So far as I can tell, the major push on planning came from Reeves and the Treasury. In any event I have no doubt that LiB Dem councils and possibly Lib Dem councils turn on full Nimby mode when the time comes. Sadly, for all the relaxation of planning constraints the likelihood is that we still won’t see much progress given the dearh of planning officers, the even more acute shortage of builders and civil engineers, and the huge delays to connecting projects to the National Grid.
Don’t forget LGR (local government reorganisation) which is already seeing small local authorisaties stalling on their mandated housing targets because they hope it will become someone else’s problem.
Lib Dem councils generally object to building when there isn’t a complementary investment in local services – schools, doctors, roads etc. which is where much of the local objection comes from.
The point about planning officers is spot on though – Tory cuts to local government have left councils incapable of doing much other than the basics and planners leave to work for supermarkets etc to help them run rings around their ex-employers.
Regarding your first assertion, @Twang, it’s not true of South Glos I’m afraid. Any generality, if it even exists, does not extend to here.
Completely agree about the second paragraph – the Tories gutted local council funding to the extent that planning departments have been on their financial knees for over a decade now. The public gets what the public deserves when they vote for cynical, entitled, parasitical bastards.
Whether or not Rayner deserves another crack at high office should also presumably depend on whether she is an effective minister. I think the jury is still out on that one.
Shitheads of all sorts have been gunning for her ever since the GE, from Mail/Telegraph etc (a low bar) downwards. Check out the bitches (and I use the word advisedly) commenting on her clothes because she apparently doesn’t dress like a proper female politician (eg Nadine Dorries). The high spot has been Nadim Zadawi, of all people, calling on her to resign. The hypocrisy is staggering – or maybe not.
So they’ve got their scalp, and I hope she’s rehabilitated soon.
I’ve just heard a Tory, on the radio, describe her £40,000 tax mishap as “a huge sum”. Zahawi managed to overlook a cool £5 million.
Funnily enough, the baffling popularity of Nadine Dorries in some circles demonstrated that many Tories were perfectly able to support women MPs from working class backgrounds.
Contempt for working class white women isn’t limited to Tories. The now ex Labour leader of Peterborough has resigned after it was revealed he had described the victims of the Rotherham grooming gang as “poor white trash”.
Up to a point, but not to the extent that she got the seat in The House of Lords, to which she felt so very Entitled.
I like Angela Rayner. Apart from her much publicised back story she’s a good communicator, knows what she thinks and isn’t afraid to say it which sets her apart from most of the PLP. I agree with the OP and posts passim that the RWP have been gunning for her – unsurprisingly since her role in the previous government was to be the attack dog, calling for resignations and calling them scum. Even if you agree with her, and I usually did, you can see why those of a Tory persuasion can’t stand her. Being female and with a Northern accent, in their eyes, makes her an even easier target. So we can’t blame the RWP for going after her. That’s the game.
The fact that Tory scumbags have committed worse crimes is irrelevant. Whataboutery is no defence. The reason she resigned was because the ethics review found that despite being advised to get more expert advice, she chose not to. In that she was negligent and had to go. There is a view that she’s a risk taker and thought WTF. There are those who think she’s crooked. I disagree, but I think she was over confident and probably thought it’d be fine. A moment’s thought should have told her that journalists would crawl all over her flat purchase looking for problems after the efforts they went to (unsuccessfully) find problems with her house purchase a few years ago. She should have gone belt and braces and asked some expert property tax expert to crawl all over it with a ” find dirt here” brief. But she didn’t.
All that said, I think she’s too good to stay down for long. I think she’ll be back. Next leader, anyone?
Or maybe she should have just paid the Stamp Duty she owed. Then there wouldn’t have been ‘problems’ with her flat purchase.
This story has put me in mind of one my oldest and most avowedly Socialist friends, who for the last twenty years at the end of each of our dinners out has quietly scooped up the meal receipt for his “expenses”.,
I think some are in danger of underestimating the level of public anger over Rayner’s actions. It’s not just the continuation of what seems to be an endless procession of government sleaze, it’s the blatant and rank hypocrisy of what she’s done. You half expect this stuff off the Tories, but what’s the point in left wing heroes who don’t pay their taxes.
Even the tax correspondent of the Daily Telegraph has admitted that he had no inkling of the tax wrinkle that caught her out. I’m not sure if she deliberately dodged tax or – like most of us I suspect – had no idea she was dodging tax. Her big mistake, perhaps, was trying to deflect blame onto her solicitors, who say they don’t offer tax advice. Maybe not, but presumably ‘you need to get tax advice’ would have been useful tax advice? Maybe they did and she ignored it, I don’t know.
Anybody who employs an accountant is, of course, paying someone to help them dodge tax.
I’m afraid that these are weak excuses.
Angela Rayner is the Secretary of State for Housing. She’s also sophisticated enough to be sticking properties in trusts. We can therefore assume that she’s familiar with the basic obligation to pay stamp duty.
The notion that she would need to be reminded of her tax obligations by a high street conveyancer doesn’t remotely stand up. Indeed, anyone who has had recent dealings with a conveyancer would probably be able to confirm that you’re fortunate if they do the job they’re supposed to do, never mind sorting your tax affairs while they’re at it. Frankly, referring to them as her “lawyers” was a stretch and Rayner’s attempt to throw them under the bus is risible.
The comment about accountants is also incorrect. I pay an accountant several hundred pounds a year purely to ensure that my self assessment is correct. They’re under no instructions to minimise my tax, just to ensure that I’m paying what I owe. That’s partly because I believe paying tax to be a civic duty and partly because I could be struck off if I got it sufficiently wrong. I know a ton of other people who engage accountants for more or less the same reasons.
Angela Rayner hasn’t been “caught out” by a “tax wrinkle”. She’s undertaken a fairly complex set of property transactions, apparently not bothered to take any real advice on the tax implications and ended up mysteriously better off to the tune of an amount in excess of the national average annual wage.
We shouldn’t be normalising this stuff by pretending it to be more commonplace than it is. I literally cannot imagine a scenario in which I’d conclude that I didn’t have to pay stamp duty on a property purchase without having someone with the requisite expertise confirm as much for me unequivocally and in writing. It’s really not the sort of thing you have a guess at, and that surely goes double when you’re a high profile politician with strong views on taxation.
Quick correction: more accurate to say that Rayner underpaid stamp duty, rather than failed to pay. The principle remains the same, however.
A fair cop: you’re paying an accountant to stop you paying more tax than you need to would have been a better way of putting it. I also believe that paying tax is a civic duty; as well as the law, of course.
If I’m not viewing the matter with perfect clarity it’s because, whether it’s her fault or not, I’m enraged that a worthwhile member of the government has been forced to resign by the hypocritical screeching of current and former members of His Majesty’s Opposition and of His Majesty’s press. (The fact that she went gunning for Zahawi when in opposition gave them an open goal of course. ) As politicians’ crimes go I feel it’s relatively minor and might have been fixable by issuing an apology and paying the shortfall. The fact that the shortfall is more than the average wage is neither here nor there when it comes to property dealings. When we sold our house in Brisbane the wife and I were, for about 48 hours, dollar millionaires, which probably made us richer than just about everybody else in our suburb until more than half of it went to the bank.
I think the fairest way to put it would be you pay an accountant to ensure you’re paying the correct amount of tax.
I get the frustration and that all the wrong people dislike Angela Rayner. But we have to move off this thing of going easy on our own side in politics, because it’s a slippery slope to the practice of “politics as team sports” that we see elsewhere. Besides which, it’s not only the opposition and the tabloids that are angry about this, and rightly so.
In purely fiscal terms it probably is at the lower end of the corruption we’ve seen, but it has to be seen in the proper context, taking into account Rayner’s role, previous public statements on tax avoidance and personal politics. Plus the fact that the entire country is being told to brace for imminent tax rises. How do you ask people to do their bit and then not do your own? As I said above, it’s the hypocrisy that’s intolerable.
I massively disagree that the size of the shortfall is neither here nor there. £40k is a lot of money to most people in this country. If Rayner’s defenders plan to argue that it’s some sort of pittance that should be overlooked then I would expect that to go down like a political lead balloon.
Fortunately it’s not my job to sell it to the country, and I wouldn’t expect anybody whose job it might be to try. But I’m obviously swimming against the tide here, so I’ll shut up and go to bed.
I can understand her thinking the house in trust is her son’s and that the flat in Brighton is the only property belonging to her, hence the lower stamp duty. However, the trust bought her out of the family home to the tune of £160,000. How does the trust manage to do that? It looks, on the face of it, as though she took money off her disabled son. I suspect the trust is quite complex and knowledgeable lawyers involved.
I do hope she hasn’t been caught out by the co-operative parenting, in which she is with her son one week and her ex the other. If that means the house in trust counts as her primary home and her flat her second, attracting more stamp duty, that seems most unfortunate.
Nevertheless, she should most definitely have had a belt and braces approach to tax advice.
This suggests that the Telegraph’s tax expert is not actually an expert. Or at least doesn’t grasp some of the basic principles of how trusts work
https://davidallengreen.com/2025/09/on-angela-rayner-and-tax-law/
Marvellous. Answers some of my questions, confirming that confusion in this area of tax is unsurprising.
Didn’t stop the overwhelming cheer (about four times louder) at Fromage’s shindig in… erm… Birmingham not being for her fall, or the Prime Minister’s problems off the back of it, but for the declaration that they were after Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of ‘London’ last time I looked.
I’m scratching my head wondering why these people should be so anti him.
Any ideas?
#964B00
“What did Horace say, Winnie?”
But hey, here’s a doozy, someone called Aseem Malhotra (dodger, blah, blah, looks a complete prick) has pitched up at… wooaaaaahhhhh… losing the will to live… in Birmingham to say yadda yadda…. blah blah.
Erm, OK, yes… they hold ALL the cards. Triffic.
It’s probably best to just listen to Kinks’ b-sides 24/7… so, see yer soon!
Still, at least the Royal Family all have cancer… one for the anti-monarchists!!!
Anyone??
Nah, me neither.
Although I would say gloating about anyone having cancer, regardless of their status, is really beyond any notion of mere self-indulgent, eccentric/execrable ‘bantz’.
I was wondering if there was a parody going on – a reference to another post or an alternate plane of humour that passed me by.
On reflection I think it was just a nasty thing to write down.
And he didn’t even mention what’s happening in Gaza. Silence is complicity. He has blood on his hands.
Isn’t it a reference to the doctor (??) that spoke at the reform conference that stated the royal family all got cancer because of the Covid vaccine ?
Yes, quite simple, just look up his name. The whole event is like a circus, but then it’s being orchestrated by a snake oil salesman.
The anti vax doctor was quite hideous. Talking about cancer, this sort of unfounded conspiracy theory as fact, straight out of the MAGA playbook and designed to feed off ignorance and mob mentality is itself a cancer in our body politic
Finished the conference with a rousing version of God Save the Queen.
Really.
They forgot she’s dead?
They do dwell on the past, though it’s often an imaginary one and I’m pretty certain the late Queen existed. Also, I’m not too sure they’re very comfortable with Charles, who is far too keen on multiculturalism for their comfort.
I wish that this poison would stop oozing into the discourse here. Yes, I know that we are dealing with unpleasant people who believe strange stuff in uncertain times. Yes, we are ‘keeping up’, no, we aren’t intrinsically bad people because we are younger than Paul McCartney. Anyway I’m off; I can get poisoned anywhere these days.
Just accept it as trolling, ignore it and move along. Your day will be better.
The thing is, if he decided to start a thread about Kinks b-sides, I’d be all over it.
Hopefully all those condemning Rayner will take note of the non-working class self-made woman Nigel Farage’s admission of misleading the public over his apparent house purchase in Clacton. Last year he clearly said he had ‘exchanged contracts’ on a house in his constituency (where he would no doubt spend much of his time, ministering conscientiously to the locals’ needs). Turns out it was his partner who 100% bought it and Nige, under pressure, now admits he just “spends some time there’. It is also totally coincidental that with this arrangement, he is neatly evading increased stamp duty.
Looking at this from outside of the UK, it amazes me that the other parties just don’t seem to have the ability to show Farage for what he is – a grifter.
Whilst this Clacton property has been reported, it’s buried deep in the general UK news and not the front page attack that was the case with Angela Raynor.
Time and time again, Farage has been shown to doing the things he is trying to make political capital out of (this, the fact he is paid by GB news via a company to avoid tax,etc etc). It’s time he was shown for what he really is.
Isn’t it like Trump, people know what he’s like but they don’t care? Labour party has (or should have) different standards
@chrisf – absolutely right. It seems Rayner was fair game for certain outlets and people for depressingly obvious reasons. But Farage is a serious man on a serious mission and in his view, his personal affairs are clearly off limits to the media and any other busybodies.
As reported in the Graun today:
“He told Sky News: “I should have said ‘we’.” Pushed again that he doesn’t actually own a house in Clacton, Farage added: “I should, I should have said ‘we’. All right? My partner bought it, so what?”
He continued: “All right. I shouldn’t have said ‘we’. I should have said ‘we’. It’s her money. It’s her asset. I own none of it. But I just happen to spend some time there.”
Farage added: “You know what? It’s a really funny thing in life. But sometimes we all say things that we perhaps shouldn’t quite have said.”
“But I just happen to spend some time there.”
Will that be all the times he’s held surgeries for his constituents or just when he visits for a photo opportunity?
Does she claim single occupancy council tax discount? I think we should be told.
Nicola Sturgeon has also set up a private company to reduce the amount of tax she pays on her non-MSP earnings, such as her book. As Alex Massie amusingly points out in The Times, she has condemned such rascals in the past. It shows the same level of consistency as the great patriot’s plan to move to exile in the Sassenach Babylon that is London.
Still, a woman from a working class background with a regional accent – different rules apply.
(If you can read it
https://www.thetimes.com/article/c938753f-36eb-43d2-b02b-e973ff229630)
I can’t read it unfortunately.
I will preface this by saying that I think Nigel Farage has the potential to end up being literally one of the worst things that has ever happened to this country. I would dramatically prefer to have Angela Rayner as Prime Minister over him.
Nonetheless, because facts matter… what’s described above, on the facts available at present, clearly isn’t “evading” increased stamp duty, much as I wish it was.
And it’s not a mystery why Rayner’s house purchase is being reported on, while Farage’s is not. Rayner underpaid taxes and came pretty close to tax evasion, whereas Farage – again, on the available facts at present – is nowhere close. What he is very clearly guilty of is lying about the extent of his personal connection to the Clacton area, but “MP tells lie” isn’t much of a headline, particularly when it’s him.
Rayner’s tax affairs aren’t headline news because she’s a woman or working class. They’re headline news because she was the Deputy Prime Minister in a government that takes a fairly dim view on second homes and she’s been caught underpaying stamp duty on what is, like it or not, her second home. In doing so, she’s breached the ministerial code, and – accidentally or not – exhibited a fairly notable degree of hypocrisy. There is no world in which that’s not a massive news story, no matter who the individual is.
If (say) the Guardian can catch Farage failing to pay his taxes then I hope they shout it from the bloody rooftops. In fact, I’d say the same of literally any sitting MP – they should all pay their taxes and we should be angry if and when they don’t. And the press should report on it.
I also agree with dai above – god help us all if Farage is the benchmark in our politics 🤮
I hadn’t realised one could accidentally be hypocritical.
Hey, every day’s a school day 🤷♂️
Does today’s Labour Party really “take a dim view” of second home ownership? Not so sure about that.
Accusations of hypocrisy on Rayner’s part don’t really hold much water if said dim view isn’t taken.
She was extremely careless in not making absolutely sure her house-buying transactions were completely legal.
As deputy PM she should have realised that carelessness has it’s costs.
It is interesting comparing the Rayner and Farage cases. Both intended to minimise their stamp duty liability. Both believed they were doing so legally. One failed to take the right advice but, when challenged, referred herself to the ethics committee and then acted in accordance with the findings. One took much better advice and so has complied with the legal requirements but has certainly been inconsistent with his positioning of who owns the house.
I think Rayner had to resign but I also think she has behaved reasonably well (she could have referred herself to the ethics committee sooner). I think Farage thinks ethics committees are not for him. Which seems to me to be part of his bewildering charm.
This isn’t true, is it. Hunt didn’t “underpay” stamp duty at all – he structured a transaction to minimise tax exposure and then paid the amount due.
I don’t like tax avoidance and I certainly think less of politicians who practice it to this extent, but the presentation in the graphic, as if Hunt and Rayner have done the same thing, is blatantly misleading.
The bit about failing to declare is accurate, but the whole thing ignores the fact that Jeremy Hunt was part of what is widely regarded to be one of the most sleazy and unprincipled governments in living memory, against whom Rayner’s Labour Party had positioned themselves as a more legitimate alternative. If this is really the benchmark we’re being asked to measure against then the current government is in enormous trouble.
I find it more than frustrating that Labour, not to mention parties other than the Tories, don’t keep on hammering Farage over Brexit. Poll after poll shows significant buyers remorse with a significant majority saying that they would vote remain now if given the opportunity. Of course, others can be blamed for Brexit and the subsequent shitshow (Johnson, Cummings etc) but Farage’s fingerprints are all over it.