Angela Rayner « Labour Uncut

Posts Tagged ‘Angela Rayner’

Pick someone outside the bubble for deputy leader

05/09/2025, 10:21:43 PM

Choosing Labour’s next deputy leader shouldn’t be a cabinet beauty contest, with token representation from the party’s Left. In fact, Labour’s next deputy leader should not be an MP at all.

Its time the rulebook was changed and figures from outside the Parliamentary Labour Party were able to stand for the deputy’s role.

Helpfully the annual conference in Liverpool is three weeks away, providing the perfect opportunity to do just that.

Labour’s General Secretary, Hollie Ridley, has rightly warned about navel-gazing, reminding the party that the contest to find the party’s 19^th deputy leader should be conducted ‘in a manner that befits the party of government.’

That’s code for keep it cheap and quick, but it’s also a chance to hold a meaningful election without disrupting ministerial business.

Indeed, the party’s internal workings are not keeping pace with the government’s own agenda.

One of Angela Rayner’s final acts in government was to publish the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill, which aims to ‘permanently change the balance of power’ between centre and provinces towards the latter, as she put it in her resignation letter.

Limiting the process to candidates outside the cabinet would amplify Labour as a party for the whole country and show it really is serious about devolution.

And it’s not like there’s a shortage of talented applicants out there.

A poll of party members by Survation/LabourList found that Greater Manchester Mayor, Andy Burnham, was comfortably ahead of any other party figure as a potential successor to Keir Starmer. (Ironically, Angela Rayner was second).

Another recent poll from YouGov saw party veteran David Blunkett come top in the public popularity stakes.

Would either Blunkett or Burnham – or other Labour Mayors like Claire Ward or Tracey Brabin – not be a suitable fit?

Or for that matter Eluned Morgan, the Welsh First Minister? Or Sir Steve Houghton, leader of Barnsley Council and one of the most respected figures in local government?

Rather than a troupe of busy cabinet ministers taking bites at each other, with every utterance translated into an attack on the government, undermining cabinet collective responsibility in the process, would it not be better to leave the stage clear for the party’s stars beyond the Westminster bubble to become deputy leader?

Posted in Uncut | No Comments »

Angela Rayner is not too big to fail

03/09/2025, 10:27:36 PM

It always seems trite to focus on ‘the optics’ of a political scandal rather than the substance of one, but the swirling row about Angela Rayner’s complex property affairs looks utterly disastrous, both for her and the government of which she is nominally the second-in-charge.

After a week of headlines about her purchase of an £800,000 flat in fashionable Hove – hundreds of miles from her east Manchester parliamentary seat – the Deputy Prime Minister has been forced to concede she had not paid the full amount of stamp duty owed.

Rayner’s much-publicised living arrangements, dividing her time between her central London grace-and-favour flat, her domestic home in Ashton-under-Lyne and her new flat, is given added complexity as she and her ex-husband share caring arrangements for their children, including a disabled son.

Wise, perhaps, for people without disabled children to withhold judgment about people who have – and it is perfectly feasible that Angela Rayner has followed the expert advice she received, which led her to underpay the correct amount of stamp duty, to the letter.

It seems plausible that the government’s standards adviser, Sir Laurie Magnus, might see it that way. But that must be a hope rather than an expectation. For now, Angela Rayner is in big trouble.

She is not just a mother trying to juggle her domestic responsibilities; she is the deputy prime minister in a Labour government. One that presides over a divided, moribund country having won as little as 34% of the popular vote in last year’s general election.

To state the obvious; two-thirds of voters did not back Labour, with the government bequeathed the worst in-tray since Clement Attlee inherited the smoking ruins of post-war Britain.

(more…)

Posted in Uncut | No Comments »

Labour leadership’s achievements overshadowed by its tin ear

28/09/2021, 10:46:10 PM

by Rob Marchant

Labour, despite what you might think after the last few days, is back on the road to recovery. The consolidation of the leadership’s upper hand over the rump Corbynites has been sure-footed. It has won key votes on an independent complaints process to finish the job on anti-Semitism, as well as rule changes to make it very hard for any repeat performance of the Corbyn years, where a tiny tail of hard-lefties flooded the party with entryists, in order to wag the Labour party dog. Yes, it didn’t manage to get to fully reverting leadership elections to the electoral college but that was, frankly, the icing on the cake.

There is, of course, a but.

Labour’s problem so far this week is that no-one has really noticed all that good stuff, because of its abysmal management of its media spotlight since Saturday, where a catalogue of unforced errors has left it reeling.

First came Angela Rayner’s “scum” diatribe against the Tories, in a fringe meeting on Saturday night. If our Deputy Leader genuinely thinks that kind of language will have helped woo floating voters, then we should be asking very serious questions about her judgement.

Then our normally-sensible leader, the lawyerly former barrister and DPP, managed to wobble and bluster like a rookie country lawyer when questioned by Andrew Marr on Sunday morning about whether it is ok to say, as Rosie Duffield MP did, that only women have a cervix.

(more…)

Posted in Uncut | 7 Comments »

The Uncuts: 2017 political awards (part I)

30/12/2017, 12:45:42 PM

Politician of the year – Jeremy Corbyn

2017 was the year when everyone lost. The Tories lost their majority, Labour lost the election, the SNP lost a third of their Westminster seats and the Lib Dems, well, 60% of Lib Dem general election candidates lost their deposit.

Yet despite this litany of defeat, one politician had a very good 2017: Jeremy Corbyn.

Labour might have fallen short in June, but it was nothing like the wipeout predicted by the polls, pundits (not least at Uncut) and Labour’s own candidates.

At the 2017 general election Jeremy Corbyn was able to tap into seams of Labour support among the young and non-voters that have been beyond the reach of the party for over a decade, if not longer.

Expectations, however, are a tricky taskmaster.

Having wildly exceeded the bar for success in 2017 – let’s not forget, even Len McCluskey was talking about 200 seats as a decent performance – the political world now expects much, much more of Labour’s leader.

Jeremy Corbyn has done his bit to help fuel these expectations, predicting he’d be prime minister by Christmas when at Glastonbury in June, and more recently, in his Grazia interview, forecasting that he’ll “probably” be prime minister next year.

When expectations rise like this, either there needs to be demonstrable progress – for example, establishing a commanding poll lead over the Tories – or the media narrative will turn to why Labour is under-performing.

The local elections in May, which are being fought in metropolitan areas, will likely give Labour a boost but at some point Labour is going to have to win big votes in the House of Commons and bring the government down.

If not, those expectations, which contributed so much to Jeremy Corbyn’s happy 2017, will be a lot less benign in 2018.

Early-bird shameless leadership bid – Emily Thornberry

Emily Thornberry wins for realising that the anti-Semitism currently infecting parts of the party membership was poisonous to opinion-formers, as well as many party members. Visiting Israel and the West Bank, she staked out her position as clearly differentiated from that of Corbyn himself, who refuses to visit Israel, despite numerous invitations.

Ah, if only it were the result of a deeply-held belief, rather than political expedience. We need only go back a few years to 2007 to find the now Shadow Foreign Secretary speaking at an anti-Israel rally with all the bigots of the BDS (Boycott Divestment Sanctions) crowd.

No, she’s polished up her act a great deal since those days; not to mention cultivating the party’s most important single backer, one Len McCluskey of Unite. A journey indeed from tweeting herself out of a job in 2014, by way of a patronising photo of a White Van Man’s house.

Question is, can she keep a lid on her flexible principles, and that contempt, if she ever makes it to leader?

Pragmatist of the year – Angela Rayner

Angela Rayner gets on with things: whether it is pregnancy at 16, taking on a shadow cabinet job when many were walking away from them, refusing to be pigeonholed as being of the left or the right.

(more…)

Posted in Uncut | 9 Comments »

The Tories are harking back to a mythical ‘golden age’ of grammar schools

26/07/2016, 04:12:25 PM

by Angela Rayner

Conservative Voice, a Tory activist group, has officially launched their campaign to lift the ban on opening new grammar schools, introduced by the then Prime Minister Tony Blair 18 years ago.

If prime minister Theresa May is serious about her recent rhetoric on the steps of Downing Street, when she said that her government would do everything it could to help “anyone, whatever your background, to go as far as your talents will take you”, then she will halt this divisive campaign in its tracks.

Some Tories argue for more grammar schools as engines of social mobility, which propel kids from working-class, low and middle income families up the social ladder. But the facts argue otherwise.

The independent Institute for Fiscal Studies has found that amongst those identified as high achievers at an early age, children who are eligible for free school meals or who live in poorer neighbourhoods are significantly less likely to attend a grammar school than their better off classmates.

There are 163 grammar schools left in the country. In 161 of them, fewer than 10% of pupils are eligible for free school meals.

According to research by the House of Commons library, around 2% of children at grammar schools are eligible for free school meals.

So they are not being drawn from the poorest backgrounds.

(more…)

Posted in Uncut | 17 Comments »