It took just nine minutes and eleven seconds for Angela Rayner to expose the Prime Minister and his cabinet, and revive her chances of taking his job. Her resignation speech this week threw up a hall of mirrors around the Government, with the distorted reflections showing the political and moral abyss in today’s Labour leadership.
The MP for Ashton-Under-Lyne spoke of service, her constituents, the responsibilities of high office, the error that she made and is accountable for (under-paying stamp duty), her belief in working for the “us”, not the “I”. She even said the s-word! You know, the one that causes a Blairite to burst into flames upon mention: socialist.
When major political parties are doing the right-wing shuffle – Labour occupying Tory ground, Conservatives in Reform-land, Reform in a spot left of the BNP called “DefinitelyNotTheBNPShire” – and hyper-individualism isn’t so much celebrated as violently claimed as a birthright, they are radical and yes, exposing words.
Rayner reminded us of what a genuine politician sounds like, speaking in plain language, her voice only cracking when paying tribute to the people of Grenfell. Of what progressive politics looks like, of what the point of Government is, of a Labour Government. Of what was lost, when she was.
“Elected office is not about us, but our chance to change the lives of others,” the ex-deputy prime minister and Housing Secretary said from the back benches of Parliament. Yes! I thought. It is! We’ve all forgotten the point of our MPs, it seems – of that place. This Government certainly has. Parliament isn’t for personal power, for friendly headlines in right-wing media, for the continued comfort of big business or the continuing enrichment of the one per cent. It’s to improve the lot of the people, to work for them.
The bit the Right Honourable Lady was too classy to say: forget this, and you end up where Labour is now. Absolutely bamboozled as they sink fast, hemorrhaging voters quicker than any accidental Enoch Powell style speech will deliver replacements, their electoral future is doomed. Certainly, if Labour’s devastating performance in the Welsh by-election is anything to go by.
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The result in Caerphilly – the seat lost for the first time ever, not to Reform UK but Plaid Cymru – was also surely a big flashing sign that there is hunger for a party of true, soulful social democracy. Yet even if accepted, the trouble is that when Rayner walked from the very top of Government, she took both Labour’s best chance of connecting with the working-class voters they need, and the very essence, the core of the party, too.
Just look at what – and who – rose from her ashes. Keir Starmer, faced with replacing her authenticity, class identity and left-wing politics, thought, “nah!”. Instead, it is elevating Blairites and right-leaning MPs, including Shabana Mahmood, Peter Kyle, Jonathan Reynolds, and Pat McFadden. Since then, as Rayner – the party’s heart and soul tucked in her back pocket – disappeared in the rearview mirror, it’s been a Reform UK-chasing orgy.
We’ve had the PM getting performatively cosy with the England flag, and McFadden, newly in charge of welfare, saying reforms to benefits “must happen” in what feels like both a threat and a promise. Meanwhile, our new Home Secretary has been threatening the right to protest, edging close to Reform UK on the right to remain and sharing distressing forced removals’ “content” worthy of a Maga influencer on X.
It’s a marked difference from what Rayner prioritised in Government: house building, the rights of renters and workers on the lowest wages. Driven as she always was by her own experiences – by the life that didn’t just inform her politics, but became the umbilical cord joining her and party together.
Powerfully, she remains a testament to what a Labour Government can do – far more so than the son of a welder – growing up and becoming a mum in the sort of grinding poverty tens of millions in our country live in today. Families who desperately want a better tomorrow, but in the meantime will settle for one in which every bill doesn’t drop through the letterbox like a guillotine falling.
Her empathy only exposes the lack of it elsewhere. In anonymous reports, we’re told that the private Starmer is humane, but the public version is bureaucratic and cold. And with a gun to their heads, many (including me) couldn’t tell you what he believes, what gets him out of bed in a morning, what makes him furious, who he is.
This vacuum where identity and intent should be begins with him, but doesn’t end there. It has a gravitational pull, as black holes do, sucking in any belief system and all personal convictions.
It’s a vacuum which demands obedience and compliance with the nothingness, and will destroy those around it. Just ask Liz Kendall, the former Work and Pensions Secretary, who was replaced when the Government’s original welfare reforms fell, even though she was their biggest cheerleader, not flinching in the face of how much poverty they would create.
Or the seven MPs who had the whip removed last year for voting to abolish the Conservative welfare policy, the two-child limit. Or the four MPs who lost it just before summer recess, for rebelling on Kendall’s bill, or the three more sanctioned.
Child poverty. Cuts to disability benefits. They are hardly grey areas of party principles or policy. These are the exact injustices right-wing parties have long unleashed on the most vulnerable, that Labour has always made it its business to fight, with everything it has.
And if Starmer won’t, I have the feeling that Rayner will. The working-class, no-bullshit public servant with a soul who wears her heart stapled to her chest. Sure, it can be messy and beat loud, but it bleeds red for real.
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