Angela Rayner

Angela Rayner     ( politician)
Born	28 March 1980  Stockport,  United Kingdom
Children	3 sons
Spouse	•  Mark Rayner •  Sam Tarry
Party	Labour
British Labour Party politician who supported harsh lockdowns. Received "gifts" from TV mogul Waheed Alli.  Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom In office 5 July 2024 - 5 September 2025 Boss Keir Starmer Succeeded by David Lammy  Secretary of State for Housing,  Communities and Local Government In office 5 July 2024 - 5 September 2025  Deputy Leader of the Labour Party  In office 4 April 2020 - 5 September 2025 Boss Keir Starmer  Shadow Minister for the Cabinet Office  In office 9 May 2021 - 5 July 2024 Preceded by Rachel Reeves  Chair of the Labour Party In office 5 April 2020 - 8 May 2021 Preceded by Ian Lavery Succeeded by Anneliese Dodds  Shadow Secretary of State for Education  In office 1 July 2016 - 4 April 2020  Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities  In office 27 June 2016 - 4 April 2020  Member of Parliament for Ashton-under-Lyne In office 8 May 2015 - Present

Angela Rayner is a British Labour Party politician and a former trade union official who was elected as Member of Parliament (MP) for Ashton-under-Lyne at the 2015 General Election, increasing Labour's majority and share of the vote in the constituency.

On 4 April 2020, Angela Rayner was elected Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, and was appointed Chair of the Labour Party and Labour Party National Campaign Coordinator on 5 May 2020. After Labour's crushing defeat in the 2021 Hartlepool by-election, Keir Starmer relieved her of the two latter roles and appointed Angela Rayner Shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Shadow Minister for the Cabinet Office.

Following Labour's victory in the UK/General election/2024, Rayner was appointed Deputy Prime Minister and Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government by Starmer. She resigned from both roles in September 2025 after a report concluded she had broken the Ministerial Code by underpaying stamp duty on a property purchase.

Driven out of office

On 5 September 2025, Bella Caledonia published this article by Claire McNab entitled "Two Tribes of Hypocrisy":

The stench of hypocrisy reeks from all directions as Angela Rayner is driven from office. The UK gets a vacancy for the post of deputy prime minister, and the so-called “Labour Party” needs a new deputy leader.

The loss of a deputy prime minister to scandal is a huge political defeat for any government anywhere. In theory, recovery is far from impossible, but in practice, Starmer’s govt is so desperately unpopular that its pleas for a second chance will be ignored.

But the musical chairs interest me less than the cultural sewage spill.

The charge was led by the billionaire-owned Tory media. Their owners are part of a class which employs armies of lawyers and accountants to wriggle their way out of millions and even billions of tax. Yet they have devoted acres of front pages to yelling at a former impoverished teenage mum who faced complex decisions in caring for a disabled son. Rayner’s errors are utterly trivial compared to the squillons in tax havens which the press barons help to protect.

Similarly, the Conservative Party’s deep contempt for Rayner reeks of class hatred. The party of male big money openly despised the presence in politics of a woman raised in dysfunctional poverty who worked for years in low-paid jobs. They have sneered and jeered at her voice, her clothing and her life, while their online fans call her a “chav”. A party stuffed with multi-millionaires and landlords sneering at a woman who had absolutely none of their headstarts in life. Worse still, Rayner made a career as a carer, the most important job in any society: and for that, the Tories despise her. Their social hierarchy values spivs and speculators and other forms of parasite who make money out of money, and it sneers at the people who empty their granny’s bedpan.

The Labour side is little better. Rayner’s role in Starmer’s party and government was primarily as a working-class veneer on neoliberalism. Like former ship’s purser John Prescott’s place as Tony Blair’s sidekick, Rayner’s role was to reassure the party’s dwindling working-class membership that at least one person like them was at the top table. Meanwhile, government policy ignored the figurehead, and screwed the working class. Red Angela stayed on board when Starmer froze the grannies and starved the kids.

Tories mocked Rayner as the “token chav”, while the #Starmtroopers bypassed her and mused on her dismissal. In some ways, the Tory open contempt was more honest.

Rayner occupies a complex place straddling the boundaries of England’s vicious class system. Her working-class history and accent leaves her as “not one of us” for the toffs, but a decade of parliamentary salary and expenses has lifted her a long way beyond working-class incomes. For the last fourteen months, her combined parliamentary and ministerial salaries totalled £161,409 per year, or about £8,111 a month after tax and national insurance. That’s good money, about five times the median take-home pay in her constituency.

Such a big change of financial status propels a person to new environments. In addition, Rayner’s receipt of hefty compensation for her child pushed her into a world of trust and trustees, of legal instruments and unfamiliar concepts. Working-class people don’t have family solicitors and family trusts, so Rayner didn’t have a social network to warn of the pitfalls and trip hazards of that world.

But these hazards are nothing new, and nor is the vicious hypocrisy of the Conservative Party and its media attack dogs. Even if Rayner herself didn’t recognise the vulnerabilities, the Labour Party should have systems in place to help its MPs and especially its leaders get expert ethical advice on personal finance.

Rayner fell foul of an obscure technicality. I’d never in a month of Sundays have guessed that a trust in a disabled child’s name could alter stamp duty rates on a parent’s home purchase, and I can believe that it was possible to act in good faith and not see any need to get that issue checked. Rayner’s story seems a little shifty, but even so it’s reasonable to feel a lot of sympathy for a working mother of a disabled child having to make a lot of snap decisions as she juggled huge work pressures and multiple locations. Among the Westminster opposition parties, only Lib Dem leader Ed Davey (himself a carer of a disabled child) showed any glimpse of understanding the tensions.

But whatever happened, Rayner didn’t get the right advice. We don’t know whether she intentionally cut corners, or ignored specific warnings to get thorough legal advice, and just failed to check her assumptions.

And in the end, it doesn’t really matter which explanation is the best fit. Rayner was the deputy prime minister, entrusted with making very big decisions. Her job was to ensure that issues were properly checked and questions properly asked, but that didn’t happen. This person was responsible for a government’s avoidance of potholes, but fell into one. Not a good look.

Even the most sympathetic telling of the story looks bad. This isn’t just a case of boys with ologies failing to assist a girl with NVQs. It’s a case of a cabinet which was looking the other way from ethics, which rotted with a freebie culture even when it was in opposition. Freebie clothes and holidays and concert and ballgame tickets were bad enough, but trivial compared to the truckloads of cash from donors fundamentally hostile to Labour values.

This isn’t a newbie government tripping over a small detail; it’s a rotten government trapped in its own ethical swamp, in a political landscape of ethical sewage lakes.

Election challenge

Aroma Hassan in the green jacket is WPGB's candidate who aims to unseat Angela Rayner

On 30 April 2024, the Workers Party of Britain announced the name of its candidate at the next election in the Ashton-under-Lyne constituency:

"Aroma Hassan in the green jacket is our candidate for Ashton. She is going to unseat Angela Rayner."

Parliamentary career

Angela Rayner delivered her maiden speech in the House of Commons on 3 June 2015.

Having previously been an Opposition Whip and Shadow Pensions Minister, Angela Rayner was promoted to Shadow Women and Equalities Minister on 27 June 2016. Then, when Jeremy Corbyn reshuffled his shadow cabinet following a string of resignations, she was appointed Shadow Education Secretary on 1 July 2016.

Rayner, as deputy prime minister, during a holiday to New York stayed in a flat provided by TV mogul Waheed Alli, and has separately received more than £20,000 from him.

Member democracy

On 17 July 2016, interviewed by Andrew Neil on BBC Sunday Politics, Angela Rayner was repeatedly asked whether she would vote for Jeremy Corbyn in the forthcoming Labour leadership contest. Rayner said she was against holding the contest but will listen to the membership and the democratic process and will continue to support Corbyn as the elected Leader of the Labour Party.

Angela Rayner tweeted:

"The reason I wouldn't answer who I'd vote 4 on today's #sundaypolitics is because my vote isn't the issue. To me it's about member democracy."

Education funding

As Shadow Education Secretary, she made a widely-praised closing speech in the House of Commons debate on uncapping University tuition fees on 19 July 2016. The following month, Angela Rayner announced a plan, including reversing several unpopular Conservative government decisions, that could win Labour the next General Election. Rayner said Labour will reinstate the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) and maintenance grants for students from poorer families. Both these allowances were scrapped by former Chancellor George Osborne, who described the maintenance grants system as a "basic unfairness in asking taxpayers to fund grants for people who are likely to earn a lot more than them." Osborne's move was criticised by major charities, as well as student and teaching unions. Rayner said that it was:

"Disgraceful that the Conservative government abolished student grants that levelled the playing field for young people from low and middle income backgrounds. Opportunity taken from them is a loss to us all, leaving Britain worse off."

On 7 March 2017, in an interview with John Humphrys on BBC Radio 4's Today Programme, Angela Rayner said she was disgusted by Theresa May's £3 billion cuts to the education budget. Paul Mason tweeted:

"The palpable discomfort & disdain in the BBC's voice when a working class woman gets to top tier politics, is why @AngelaRayner is trending."

COVID-19

Rayner supported harsh lockdown measures during Covid.

 

Events Participated in

Event	Start	End	Location(s)	Description
Keir Starmer/Premiership	5 July 2024
UK/Parliament/Voted YES to vaccine passports in 2021	4 December 2021	4 December 2021	British House of Commons	These members of the UK Parliament voted YES to the introduction of a "vaccine" passport in 2021

 

Related Document

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:No denial from Starmer that he has received ‘beergate’ fixed penalty	Article	1 July 2022	Editor	Labour leader fails to deny reports circulating in party that he has been fined by Durham Constabulary, while police force says only that it has not issued any ‘new statements’ on matter.

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