First of all, some poverty top trumps: I’m one of five kids. My mum was a cleaner and my dad was a labourer but only when he was well enough to labour. For much of my childhood, he wasn’t, so we had to subsist on state benefits, free school meals and clothes that arrived in bin bags from the local church. My childhood was scarred by poverty and petty crime. However, before you reach for the violin, it was a childhood leavened by love and laughter which I wouldn’t have swapped for the world. Not least because, all these years later, it’s given me a natural understanding of Angela Rayner and why working-class voters are the ones who really cannot abide her.
Since it emerged that Rayner avoided paying an estimated £40,000 in stamp duty (which she blames on mistaken legal advice) the middle-classes – which the majority of MPs and political commentators come from – have sought to defend her as a ‘working-class hero’.
The working classes will roll their eyes in weary resignation at the Rayner story
Paul Nowak, General Secretary of the TUC was on Sky News yesterday making lame excuses for her. Angela Rayner, he claimed, is under sustained pressure simply because she’s a working-class woman. No, she’s under pressure because, having presented herself as honest, authentic and uninterested in money, she seems to be just another Labour politician caught with her hand in the till.
The middle-classes see Rayner as ‘refreshingly honest’ whereas Angela’s ilk are not fooled for a moment. They’re more likely to see a chancer who brings to mind that dodgy family on the other side of the estate.
The Deputy PM certainly had it tough. Pregnant at 16 and a grandmother at 37 – just like at least three of my cousins. As Tom Jones – a father at 16 and a grandfather at 42, will tell you, ‘It’s not unusual.’
What is unusual and genuinely impressive is the way Angela Rayner rose through the ranks of the trade union movement to become Deputy Prime Minister. However, once a politician has secured such a senior role, their background is neither here nor there. What matters to the electorate is the politician’s intelligence, integrity and suitability for the job. Angela Rayner, in avoiding stamp duty, has displayed a disgraceful lack of any of these things.
Those of any nation, culture or demographic have an innate understanding of their own people. Angela Rayner’s ‘people’ understand her only too well and they can see right through her. They’ll remember John Prescott, another chippy, undeserving greed bucket. He too was appointed Deputy Prime Minister as a condescending sop to the working classes because of the apparent poverty of his background, despite the more apparent poverty of his intellect. Obviously they saw right through him as they do Mick Lynch, Eddie Dempsey and countless other trade union leaders. They don’t see renegade working-class heroes: they see people on the make who’ve become part of a system that enriches them at the expense of the people they grew up with.
The working classes will roll their eyes in weary resignation at the Rayner story. Tory sleaze scandals are usually about sex whereas Labour’s are always about money. We remember the Angela Rayners of our youth, bristling with envy, resentment and entitlement: ‘It’s not fair. You’ve got more than me. I want and I’m going to have.’
Which is why it’s so patronising to assume that working-class people are fine with that and would vote for her solely because she’s ‘one of their own’. With her large salary, three homes and now these tacky allegations of tax avoidance, Angela Rayner is no such thing.
Voters, working class or otherwise, do not care if the politicians they elect were brought up in a castle or a council flat. They just want to be represented in Parliament by intelligent, capable and principled people. Angela Rayner is no such thing.
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