It was the Commons at its best: the whole House, united in agreement on one key matter. MP after MP took a stand against the critics to support a colleague. All of them wanted to praise Angela Rayner’s dancing while on holiday. They were back in the Commons after recess for Housing, Communities and Local Government questions, and despite the cross-party unity on the Secretary of State’s boogieing, the session was pretty spicy.
For one thing, Kemi Badenoch was on the opposite benches, and used the session as a second leadership launch. She deployed her characteristic charming turn of phrase when asking Rayner questions, including telling the minister that she clearly hadn’t read a review they were talking about. That exchange ran thus:
Badenoch: Can the right honourable lady give me her assessment of the Khan review into social cohesion?
Rayner: Well, the Khan review into social cohesion is one part and element of what we need to do to get back to addressing the issues of community cohesion as opposed to the divisiveness in the way in which the previous government looked at community cohesion. What I’d like to see instead of the language and tone that we’ve seen from the right honourable members and others on her benches is actually about the tone that the right honourable member previously took around how we can bring communities together, how we can work together to ensure that people can respect people’s differences and celebrate what makes us British and that’s that we all have different places.
Badenoch: The right honourable lady has obviously not read the Khan review, because if she had, that’s not the answer she would have given. Anyway.
She then went on to explain that the review talked about the incident in Batley where a teacher was forced to go into hiding, and asked Rayner ‘what her plans are to make sure that incidents like do not happen again?’
Rayner replied that she had read the review, and suggested Badenoch hadn’t noticed she had ‘because the minister was busy launching her leadership campaign earlier today’. She added that the previous government had tended towards ‘stoking division’, and she hoped that if Badenoch won the leadership contest, she would work with Labour on this issue.
Community cohesion is one of the most fraught parts of Rayner’s portfolio, and other questions underlined that, including ones from Labour backbencher Afzal Khan and Reform’s Lee Anderson on the definition of Islamophobia. There are serious concerns within Labour that the government’s consultation on this will be even more difficult given the recent riots. Rayner used both the terms ‘Islamophobia’ and ‘anti-Muslim hatred’ interchangeably, though they are not the same and much of the concern around the definition is if ‘Islamophobia’ ends up being a de facto blasphemy law.
Anyway, she has plenty of other fraught problems to be dealing with in the meantime, including her huge house-building plans, which came under attack from a number of Tories, including the peripatetic Richard Holden, formerly a North East MP and now Member for Basildon and Billericay, on why the government was reducing its targets for house building in areas like London. Badenoch popped up again on this in topical questions, asking a very smart question about why those targets had been scaled back:
I’m very grateful for the letter the right honourable lady sent me on Saturday. I enjoyed reading it, especially where she attempts to explain why she’s reduced Sadiq Khan’s London targets and even more where she highlights that he’s consistently under-delivered. My question is – if other local leaders miss their housing targets, will she reduce their targets too?
Rayner’s rejoinder was that the previous government had ‘missed their targets every single year’ and that Labour’s ‘methodology is about realistic expectations that people can meet’. She added: ‘We will not shy away from the decisions that need to be made to make sure we build the homes that we need’. Luckily for Rayner, her backbench colleagues were in a supportive mood today, but many of them are anxious about those targets too. It’s not going to be a ravingly enjoyable few months for her.
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