Having followed the most vicious media campaign against a politician in my lifetime, more than ever I want Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner to survive in her job. I love her success story, a working class woman who managed to escape poverty and reach high office in government. If it turns out she fucked up by underpaying Stamp Duty – and I am quite sure there was no question of tax avoidance or evasion – then I would hope she would continue in a job she is doing very well. My gut feeling is that she won’t survive, quite possibly not as long as this afternoon, because the media establishment, including, no especially, the BBC have a scent for blood. But it’s not just the bloodlust among the media elite, it is their sheer hypocrisy.
The attacks on Rayner are undoubtedly class-based, certainly where the media is concerned. Sure, Rayner’s error involves a fair wedge of cash but I don’t recall the same levels of opprobrium when the Tories were at it. When Boris Johnson pissed away thousands of pounds of taxpayer’s money on expensive wallpaper, the gutter media must have thought that was okay. And Johnson himself wasn’t too bothered when his minister Owen Paterson started working for Randox for a mere £8,333 a month for a monthly commitment of 16 hours as a consultant and then started lobbying other ministers for them to be awarded a contract worth £133 million for Covid testing kits. No. Loveable Boris tried to change the rules instead. There’s much more.
The MP for the 19th century Jacob Rees-Mogg moved all his investments to Ireland in order to avoid tax. Jeremy Hunt ‘forgot’ he owned seven buy to let flats. Iain Duncan Smith – all three of him – forgot a company who paid him £25,000, as you do. Theresa Villiers forgot she owned £70k of shares in Shell and Nadhim Zahawi ‘forgot’ to pay £4.9 million in taxes while also charging the taxpayer for keeping his horses warm in the winter. Well, let’s be honest: who hasn’t claimed expenses from work in order to keep one’s horses warm? But did the gutter media give a toss? Of course not. They are part of the same elite establishment who think it’s perfect okay to lie and mislead as long as you are a Tory.
It’s true that MPs are held to different standards to the rest of us. If this is the worst mistake Rayner has ever made, then she is a better person than most of the lowlife scumbags who are trying to wreck her life. Someone once said to me, jokingly I suspect, that I should run for parliament. I laughed out loud because I do not have enough closets to keep all my admittedly small skeletons. I would not get as far as a selection meeting in the Labour Party. To be fair, it’s not just the skeletons that would be an object: I am wholly unsuitable for political office on the grounds of ability more than anything. I just wanted to make the point, though.
Rayner’s story is far more complicated than the gutter media would have you believe but facts don’t matter to them. As I said, the idea of working class people being successful – and this is the most working class government in history, from the prime minister downwards – is an anathema to the ruling elite. They are only happy when one of their own, someone like David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, is in charge. Leave it to the chaps. The myth of meritocracy is shown up yet again for what it is.
When and if Rayner is sacked, or forced to resign, the establishment attacks on the people’s party will not stop. Rather, it will encourage them. They will see it as if they got rid of one, who’s next?
If you buy, or subscribe to, any of the gutter press – and when I refer to the gutter press, I mean the entire press, including the now hard left Guardian * which is coming at Labour from a different angle – you are only encouraging them. You are directly subsidising the hatred and encouraging a group of people whose influence is vastly greater than the tiny and falling newspaper circulations they have these days. More than that, the red tops hate you.
Hate is winning in Britain. When and if Angela Rayner leaves her job, it will be trebles all round for the establishment media and their filthy rich proprietors. I rather like it when working class people succeed in life, escaping poverty and enjoying a better standard of living and, yes, that includes socialists and social democrats. I’ve never had money, but I have worked hard to give my children the chance to escape the working class grind and make names for themselves. If you hate Rayner for doing well for herself, you must by extension hate it if your own children succeed. You see, this is what the media actually means. Know your place, do as you’re told, if you are a socialist, you should be poor. Well, fuck that.
* And we DO subscribe to the Guardian. I’ll explain why another day.
