The latest news that has the right-wing commentariat crowing with glee is the revelation that Angela Rayner, the Housing Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister, has bought a house. Or a flat, to be precise. And this is both newsworthy and scandalous, apparently, because Rayner already owns a property elsewhere.
One newspaper columnist at least tried to provide some evidence, comically claiming that Rayner is a hypocrite for buying a seaside home while tightening regulations for private landlords, as if there is any link whatsoever between the two. Others have smugly pointed out that some local councils are hiking council tax on second homes, which they are – under powers given to them by the Conservatives, not Labour. And there, it seems, the evidence for such supposedly shameless hypocrisy ends.
So what is this confected outrage really about? It is nothing but snobbery – not for the first time when it comes to stories about Rayner. The coverage of this most working-class of politicians, who grew up on a Stockport council estate, left school at 16 and became a teenage mother, consistently reeks of class prejudice. A second home, would you believe it?! Her, buying a second home! Has she forgotten where she comes from?
square YASMIN ALIBHAI-BROWN Something about Angela Rayner turns men into jumpy teenage boys
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Champagne! What an outrage. The suggestion, it seems, is that anyone who believes in more equality should forego any of life’s pleasures and subsist merely on gruel and ale, in solidarity with those less well off.
Rayner riles Britain’s snobs because she refuses to abide by the confines of long-standing class hierarchies. She has torn down boundaries, smashed through glass ceilings, and refuses to accept that a Stockport lass who has done well for herself has any less right to be quaffing champagne while listening to Puccini or splashing out on a nice holiday flat for herself than anybody else. Good for her.
Former chancellor Jeremy Hunt, for example, reportedly owns seven buy-to-let properties in the same Southampton development, as well as a plush pad in Pimlico, a family home in Surrey and a property in Italy. The same rent-a-gob commentators now criticising Rayner had nothing to say about that. Hunt wasn’t accused of hypocrisy every time he talked about the housing crisis, despite presumably profiting handsomely from it.
There is a valid question over whether a Parliament in which more than one in eight MPs are also landlords can truly be objective when it comes fixing the broken housing market. But that is nothing to do with Rayner – there is no suggestion that she has bought the £700,000 Hove flat as a business venture rather than simply a seaside bolthole.
And even if she had, she would merely be joining 83 of her parliamentary colleagues in receiving rental income. That, not Rayner’s housing choices, is the real issue. But that doesn’t fit the lazy, classist narrative of a hypocritical champagne socialist living the high life and so now we must endure more mockery of one of Britain’s most successful working-class politicians. It being silly season doesn’t make that any less predictable, or any less depressing.
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