Angela Rayner, it’s reported, has bought a ‘third home’. The three-bedroom seaside flat on the south coast that she has just acquired for a sum slightly more than £700,000 adds, the Mail on Sunday reports excitedly, to her ‘burgeoning property empire’. Pre-burgeoning, be it noted, her property empire consisted of a single house in her constituency of Ashton-under-Lyne. The Candy Brothers, even post-burgeoning, she is not. Papers get to call it a ‘third home’ because she has the use of a ministerial apartment – ‘grace and favour’, obviously, to make it sound extra posh – in Westminster, but she’s not exactly going to be flipping the place in Admiralty House for a profit when she leaves office.
This is one of those stories that seems to want to be a scandal, but stubbornly refuses quite to fit in. It comes, it’s said, ‘at a time’ when the department she heads has passed legislation ‘designed to deter wealthy people buying up second properties’ – making it possible for council tax on second homes to be as much as double the usual rate. But sheepishly also noted is that the legislation was inherited from the Tory government that came before; that it was, in fact, the brainchild of my now colleague Michael Gove.
‘The Candy brothers, even post-burgeoning, she is not.’
And it’s not clear how this would be a bad thing even had the council tax wheeze (a luminously wise and far-sighted idea, I’d like to be the first to put on record) been her own inspiration anyway. Had she passed legislation making it cheaper to buy second homes and then filled her boots, we might have furrowed our brows a bit. But when someone does something in what they consider the public interest that tends to disadvantage them personally, we usually hold this to be rather a noble thing. Same with the people (farmers, or Cornwall, for example) who selflessly voted for Brexit on principle heedless of the suffering it would inflict on them personally.
Can she be accused of hypocrisy? Inasmuch as socialists tend not to be hugely in favour of burgeoning property empires, and she tends to identify with the non-burgeoning-property-empire-owning working class, some of the tankies on her own side might grumble. But Labour has always contained an aspirational strand. Just look at, or through, Sir Keir Starmer’s fancy spectacles. She hasn’t, as far as I can see, ever said that second home ownership should be illegal, or that the owners of three-bedroom flats in seaside towns are parasites strangling the life out of the nation.
There’s some huffing and puffing about exactly where she pays her council tax (on entering government, she said her constituency home was her main address, which let her claim back the council tax on her Westminster flat, and she has declined to say if that’s still the case), but what on earth this question has to do with the new place in Brighton – which plainly isn’t going to be her main residence – is neither here nor there.
What does she want a second (or if you insist, third) home for? As the sort of shrewd investment that will rise in value while reaping her a steady rental income? Or as a bolthole to escape to for long weekends in search of la vie simple to recharge her batteries from time to time? We do not know, and it’s her business, but we’re told it’s a holiday house. Lots of people have them, or would like to have them.
It’s perfectly possible for a sane person to take the view that second home ownership should be made much more expensive to discourage rent-seeking, generational inequality, pressure on housing supply, the pricing of yokels out of picturesque holiday spots and so forth. It is a view taken while in government, as noted, by the editor of this very magazine, and he’s not exactly a Maoist revolutionary.
But it’s also possible to combine that with the view that it is still something to aspire to for those who can afford it, and that people should be free to spend their money on holiday flats if they want to. Was it not Lord Mandelson who said that Labour had no problem with people getting filthy rich, as long as they pay their taxes? Here is that creed, in modest form, being put into action by one of his successors.
Who knows? Perhaps she has bought this new flat precisely because of the new changes in the law. Perhaps she sees a whacking council tax bill as a way of giving something back to the honest working people of Brighton and Hove; with a side helping of the pleasing recognition that being able to afford it means she has arrived. The more something costs, the more of a status symbol it is. Like Stella Artois: reassuringly expensive.
So what are Miss Rayner’s determined haters to do? The obvious and gracious thing, I think, at least for those haters on the right, would be warmly and without reservation to welcome her participation in capitalism, bourgeois aspiration and the property-owning democracy. More joy in heaven, and all that. Plus, it would probably really annoy her.
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