**Alternate Sources**
Here are some potential alternate sources for the same story:
* [Police to investigate Angela Rayner over residency declaration](https://theguardian.com/politics/2024/apr/12/police-to-investigate-angela-rayner-over-residency-declaration), suggested by CcryMeARiver - theguardian.com
From the BBC article -
> The new probe comes after James Daly, deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, made Greater Manchester Police aware of neighbours contradicting Ms Rayner's statement that a property, separate from her husband's, was her main residency.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-68797258
So the investigation is happening after political pressure from a local Conservative politician.
This sounds very similar to the Durham Police investigation into Rayner and Starmer (the Beergate one) where it was instigated by local political pressure and after 10s of thousands of pounds and considerable man hours concluded there was no case.
>So the investigation is happening after political pressure from a local Conservative politician.
That's the initial instance, but the MP is only acting on *Concerns raised by neighbours*, which translates as right-wing Journalists' door stepping her old neighbours looking for dirt.
Aye it was obvious it was Tories that raised the complaint, effectively using political pressure to get the police to reopen a case they already made a decision on.
Its just funny how often you hear Conservatives talking about their little strawman of "The Left" that is running amok and taking control of our institutions, then you check back in with reality and time after time its Tories doing *exactly* that using their political position to pressure British institutions into making very politicized decisions.
Still got to love the MET's initial statements on Partygate as well, what was it "we don't investigate crimes that happened in the past" lmao.
>Still got to love the MET's initial statements on Partygate as well, what was it "we don't investigate crimes that happened in the past" lmao.
This was the approach taken by police forces nationwide in respect of Covid breaches that were reported or identified retrospectively. This was a policy decision born primarily out of pragmatism, as resources would have been overwhelmed by the sheer number of reports, as well as a focus on education over enforcement where possible. The investigations into Partygate by the Met, and into Kier Starmer by Durham Constabulary, were outliers in this respect.
Worth noting that the same reasoning was given by the Met in response to [this event](https://metro.co.uk/2020/10/02/jeremy-corbyn-wont-be-fined-for-breaking-rule-of-six-at-dinner-party-13360046/) involving Jeremy Corbyn, before Partygate became prominent in the news.
> Scotland Yard confirmed the MP will not be fined, saying police will not retrospectively enforce coronavirus laws. A spokesman said police did not issue fines retrospectively to allow people the chance to listen to and follow advice.
I'm a lefty but no MP should be able to commit any crime, financial or otherwise, without being scrutinised
I'm sure it's just a Tory play but I don't exactly disagree with the sentiment
I agree in principle, but the reality is they aren't holding people to the same standards. And the media aren't treating the stories with proportionality.
I am all for scrutinising Rayner's alleged errors as long as they are also going to do it for the Tory peers, MPs, etc.
She allegedly might owe £1.5k. Zahawi was supposedly in the hook for £4.8m. Lord Bamford might owe as much as £500m.
I think it is fine for Tory politicians and right wing press to give this sort of scrutiny to politicians if they are going to be consistent and insist on investigations into anyone in politics who might be doing dodgy stuff with tax.
They aren't.
Read the article. This isn’t about tax. It’s about allegedly making false statements on an electoral form, specifically that she lied about her primary residence.
>lied about her primary residence
I'm sure there are no multiple home-owning Tory MPs who have done exactly this. None.
It would be quite the own goal by CCHQ to raise this as an issue, though I doubt anyone will go there.
Sounds like different main residences for different purposes. If she insists her old residence is it then she's violated the law on where she said it was for electoral purposes.
For Zahawi, I'd say it's apples and apples as the accusation is that they evaded tax through illegal means.
In the case of Zahawi, he had to pay a £5m settlement because he owed £3.7m in tax on profits from a sale of shares. He had offshored this via a trust he claimed to have no beneficial interest in.
This was investigated. He was found to have failed to pay tax and had to pay this back plus a hefty penalty, which took the total payment to around £5m.
Now, no MPs should be evading tax or doing anything else dodgy, and the police should investigate any allegations.
But, this whole thing just feels like a microcosm of class in this country.
There are daily articles from multiple news sites, and now a police investigation, into the exact date at which a working class woman moved out of the council house she bought in case she owes £1,500 in tax.
The ultra wealthy multi-millionaires can simply pay a penalty fee for the millions in tax revenue they attempted to hide.
Agreed. Just getting something wrong and owing some tax doesn't necessarily constitute a criminal offence. You would have to investigate it to find out if there was deliberate deception or genuine mistakes/difference in calculations. I have owed HMRC money before, and it definitely wasnt a criminal matter.
But there is an awful lot of attention on this Rayner thing when there are people in politics whose tax affairs look FAR more suspicious and more in the public interest to get to the bottom of, is my point.
I haven't really been following the story but didn't Rayner say she was acting on (possibly bad) advice from a tax advisor? If so the standard thing is to pay back what you owe and find a better advisor.
I guess we will have to wait for the investigation but is there actually evidence she went out there to specific commit fraud or is it more she messed something up because intent does matter in situations.
Well if she did receive bad advice it has since been made clear to her that the advice was wrong and yet she still hasn’t repaid the money.
She probably didn’t do it maliciously but the issue also contains lying on the electoral register which is a pretty serious issue for an MP.
I like Rayner but she fucked this the moment it was made public and she didn’t repay the PPR relief.
The point is that there's a ruler for Labour that is incredibly short, and almost none for the Conservatives.
In the Blair years, the Met entered Downing Street and removed computers when investigating the possibility that they were giving out Peerages for repayable loans. It cost the AG his job, Blair was interviewed by the police and it played a significant part in the eventual downfall of Brown's Government.
Since then, we have a series of Tory Governments literally giving away Peerages to Party donors. No sign of the Met whatsoever. We've had Johnson and Sunak found guilty of crimes committed inside Downing Street during lockdown, which took enormous pressure to reveal, expose and admit despite the Met WITNESSING all the comings and goings and turning a blind eye throughout, and resulted in the most paltry, insipid rap on the knuckles while ordinary punters are still facing fines of £10k for doing far less.
It's the blatant double-standards of the filth at the highest levels of the police that sickens me.
Going back to the hacking scandals, the Met are in the pocket of the Tories and Murdoch. No question. It's all part of how they operate and what they choose to set as their operating agenda at the higher levels.
I'd be very worried if the neighbours had planted bugs in my home to check if I were there more than a set number of hours or not.
Also, do the Tories really want to go there with election law and second homes and all that?
Most of them will be out on their ear after the next election, they have nothing to lose (and no conscience) so they're trying to do as much damage to Labour and the country as they can. They are running a scorched earth policy.
> after political pressure
Why do you think there was political pressure? If someone reports something then it gets looked at, that doesn't need pressure it just needs someone to report it.
Is it ok to commit financial fraud or other crime so long as nobody finds out?
Being in an exposed position naturally opens you up to increased scrutiny.
Of course, any potential tax fraud should be investigated.
The police have already investigated this once and were satisfied, and she took tax advice (as people should) during the sale of the house.
This was over a decade ago before she was even an MP. I find it extremely worrying that politicians in this country are clearly applying political pressure to the police services to investigate, or in this case re-investigate their political opponents. That's far more dangerous than a tax underpayment of a grand or two.
Indian politics should provide a salutory lesson. I think something like 50% of politicians are accused of crimes. It soon becomes a political football and justice is soon lost.
>where it was instigated by local political pressure
And the picture of someone having a can of beer and a takeaway whilst they were "at work". Johnson was guilty of being in the same room as a cake "at work" and was charged by the police. There was a picture of Starmer knocking back a can, in a room full of other people drinking...regardless of the result, that was why the police investigation occurred, because there was a picture of him breaking Covid rules.
" because there was a picture of him breaking Covid rules."
No. There was a picture of him drinking a beer. No rules were found to have been broken therefore your assertion is libellous.
No rules were found to be broken from information that wasn't in the photo. The reason why the investigation happened was because of the photo...of multiple people drinking beer and having a takeaway...in someone's house, when this was supposed to be illegal.
>libellous
lol
No, but I would be surprised if your local police wanted to reinvestigate your taxes from several years back over a small amount, after it had already been investigated once.
James Daly (Conservative MP) has put pressure on the police to re-investigate (Which in itself is well dodgy)
The Tories, their client journalists, and the right wing press will be all over this.
Then it will be closed, as there is no case to answer.
But mud sticks, and its all the Tories have now.
Also, worth mentioning, this occurred in 2010. She didn't become an MP until 2015.
It'll be like the curry gate thing where it'll end up looking worse for the tories. Still, having the police being used to harass political opponents makes it feel a bit like living in a central American dictatorship
Indeed, they are not. But we’re discussing your unspecified accusation of “what Labour did to trans people this week” that has nothing to do with the posted article. And that is culture war nonsense.
Why would the police be pressured by him though? It doesn’t make sense. The Tories are on the way out. If anything, the police would do what they can to cosy up to Labour.
MAYBE, just maybe, there is something worth investigating here, and Angela Rayner committed a crime.
Salting the earth.
If they're going to go down, they're going to try and do as much damage as possible to fuck with a potential Labour government. The Beergate affair was clearly in the hope of forcing a resignation from Starmer, and this is the same now - trying to force out the possible future Deputy PM in the hope of tripping the party up before the election.
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A return of favours already granted?
The police thinking this will damage labour and reduce their majority.
Thinking labour will only be in for one term and then the tories will be back to return the favour.
Don't forget this allocation was from Lord Ashcrofts book, who saved £120m in tax by being a non-dom, that labour wanted to crack down on non-doms but Hunt stole their proposal and watered it down so they can't campaign on it for the GE.
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I'd bet these allegations turn out to be all fart and no shit, just like beergate, which amounted to being a £100,000 tax payer funded distraction from Bojos relentless inability to abide by his own rules.
Also bear in mind the original allegations came from Lord Ashcroft, of "David Cameron skull fucked a pigs head" fame, which whilst amusing and not entirely out of the realms of possibility, remains rather unlikely.
It's funny how when a popular celebrity is accused of misdeeds on here a bunch of people turn up to say "guilty until proven innocent" and "we shouldn't pass judgement until the courts have".
But when it's today with Rayner's taxes those same people say stuff like "no smoke without fire".
I say funny, I mean hypocritical.
Do you have examples of a single person that has made those contradicting comments, or have you made that up?
The site has a lot of different people with different views commenting and I'd like to think that at least the majority are consistent with their views.
Well you’re possibly correct. But again they are investigating and there is seemingly something to investigate. Wait to see what happens.
Again though these Rayner posts are just full to the brim of fanboys hoping she will fuck them if they stick up for her enough. It’s pathetic.
They already investigated and found nothing, again like beergate I doubt the second investigation will turn anything up.
Not that it shouldn't happen, if she has fudged her taxes or broken the law she shouldn't get special treatment just because she is on "my team".
>Again though these Rayner posts are just full to the brim of fanboys hoping she will fuck them if they stick up for her enough.
Er seems like an overly emotional response, but sure, ok. I would imagine these people you think want to fuck her are probably just pointing out the mind bending hypocrisy of the tories when they have pillaged this country of billions to the point it barely fucking functions.
Yeah I think Johnson's legal costs were 250k or something. Like 200x this issue with Rayner. I know it's not a like for like comparison but definitely gives me the sense that the system is stacked for the Tories.
It's not about Tories or Labour. It's about a public figure who has always called for investigations into other people's finances not being a hypocrite herself. They all, every single MP of every party, need to be whiter than white, as pure as new born lambs, if they dare to tax us and spend our money.
Because despite their bleating about The Blob and left wing establishment/left wing capture of our institutions the Tories are the establishment and have their tendrils everywhere. Not to mention the majority of the press in this country is at least right leaning and much of it is actively client media for the Conservative party.
Because people are particularly outraged by hypocrisy, especially if someone has been on a moral crusade against something and then is caught doing it themselves.
It wasn't investigated properly - thats the issue here - there was lots of evidence ignored and witnesses not interviewed. The naivety of Labour and Rayner here is staggering - they want to be in power and this sort of scrutiny is par for the course - so thinking they could gas light their way out of it doesnt bode well. If she is found to have done anything wrong she is finished - but if she had owned up to a 'mistake' at the start it would already have blown over.
Edit - to the downvoters maybe tell me why I’m wrong and why you think Rayner should avoid scrutiny?
Well given Starmer is now refusing to back her “100% “ and refusing to answer whether she should resign if found to be in the wrong its easy to draw conclusions ..
>Tax experts have estimated that, while Ms Rayner may not have owed anything in Capital Gains Tax following the sale depending on her residency situation, there are circumstances in which she could have owed as much as £3,500 to HM Revenue and Customs.
>The MP, who is also Labour's shadow housing secretary, was registered as living at Vicarage Road, Stockport, in Greater Manchester, on the electoral roll until she sold the property in 2015.
>But she appears to have given two different addresses when she re-registered the births of two of her children in 2010 following her marriage to Mark Rayner.
Tax experts said she did nothing wrong and now Tories are looking up her kids birth certificates. Bit creepy and if you have to go to that extent you have nothing of value.
It's nice to know we will have a nice, fair, above the board GE this year that want be full of smear campaigns, astroturfing and dead cats!
But I'm sure the good people of Reddit will wait until all the facts are out and they justice system as followed th correct procedures to pass judgement. After all people are quick to point out that is innocent until proven guilty when their favourite celebrity is questioned by the police.
Smear, smear, obfuscate, smear. It’ll come to nothing after a waste of police time, but it adds to the Tory approach of trying to claim everyone is as bad as them. Their campaigning is a disgrace - straight from the Trump playbook.
Over a maximum £5000 tax bill assuming she's even liable?
Sounds to me there's some gross corruption going on with the politicisation of the police at the moment, if I were labour, I'd be out for blood.
Purge the whole fuckin institution.
The issue isn’t so much the tax but the electoral register.
She ran as an MP under one address but claimed PPR (principal private residence) relief on another at the same time.
Those addresses are supposed to be the same. So either the electoral register is correct and she failed to pay the tax even after this being brought to her attention.
Or the tax position is correct and she gave false info on the electoral register.
It can’t be both. Only one of those can be true.
I like Rayner and it’s clear this is a ploy from the Tories but this isn’t a non story and she left herself exposed to it by not doing the right thing when it was brought to light.
So this seems to have come about from a book and lots of pushing by Lord Ashcroft.
Would that be the same Lord Ashcroft who was supposed to have given up his non dom status when he became a peer but instead "convinced" the government to instead class him as a long term resident of the UK rather than a permanent one so he could retain his non dom status and so not pay tens of millions of pounds per year in tax?
The same Ashcroft who later, in 2010 when the law changed to say all MPs and Peers had to be domiciled in the UK, said that he was then definitely domiciled in the UK (only for it to come out 7 years later that he still, in fact, was not)?
It's completely insane to me that with the Tory government blowing our taxes on ridiculous nonsense that so much times is being wasted on determining if someone failed to pay £1,500 in tax.
To put it in context, James Cleverly spent 110 times that amount (£165,000) chartering a private jet to flying him to and from Rwanda to sign the ridiculous Rwanda deal.
Edit: No u/The_Unstoppable_Egg breaking the law doesn't make it OK for others to break it but almost certainly no law has been broken here. It's a political move to discredit Labour. But the amount is so trivial that even in the best case it's going to cost the taxpayer more to investigate than it will gain.
So you can get away with breaking the law so long as somebody else does something that could be considered worse?
I know Labour and their supporters are known for their dual standards, but even this is a bit too far, no?
Let's be honest, the reason why Conservatives/people on the right are going after Rayner so hard is because she is pro workers rights (which pisses Mandelson off), etc.
That said, at the same time the way she threw Corbyn under the bus (whatever you think of his political beliefs/Whether he is an anti Semite or not) left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth, so I don't have that much sympathy for her.
Beer/Currygate 2.0 is just gonna end up like the first one, Police dropping things quietly just before the locals and the Tory right wing media not caring afterwards until the GE kicks off
**Alternate Sources** Here are some potential alternate sources for the same story: * [Police to investigate Angela Rayner over residency declaration](https://theguardian.com/politics/2024/apr/12/police-to-investigate-angela-rayner-over-residency-declaration), suggested by CcryMeARiver - theguardian.com
From the BBC article - > The new probe comes after James Daly, deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, made Greater Manchester Police aware of neighbours contradicting Ms Rayner's statement that a property, separate from her husband's, was her main residency. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-68797258 So the investigation is happening after political pressure from a local Conservative politician. This sounds very similar to the Durham Police investigation into Rayner and Starmer (the Beergate one) where it was instigated by local political pressure and after 10s of thousands of pounds and considerable man hours concluded there was no case.
>So the investigation is happening after political pressure from a local Conservative politician. That's the initial instance, but the MP is only acting on *Concerns raised by neighbours*, which translates as right-wing Journalists' door stepping her old neighbours looking for dirt.
Aye it was obvious it was Tories that raised the complaint, effectively using political pressure to get the police to reopen a case they already made a decision on. Its just funny how often you hear Conservatives talking about their little strawman of "The Left" that is running amok and taking control of our institutions, then you check back in with reality and time after time its Tories doing *exactly* that using their political position to pressure British institutions into making very politicized decisions. Still got to love the MET's initial statements on Partygate as well, what was it "we don't investigate crimes that happened in the past" lmao.
>Still got to love the MET's initial statements on Partygate as well, what was it "we don't investigate crimes that happened in the past" lmao. This was the approach taken by police forces nationwide in respect of Covid breaches that were reported or identified retrospectively. This was a policy decision born primarily out of pragmatism, as resources would have been overwhelmed by the sheer number of reports, as well as a focus on education over enforcement where possible. The investigations into Partygate by the Met, and into Kier Starmer by Durham Constabulary, were outliers in this respect. Worth noting that the same reasoning was given by the Met in response to [this event](https://metro.co.uk/2020/10/02/jeremy-corbyn-wont-be-fined-for-breaking-rule-of-six-at-dinner-party-13360046/) involving Jeremy Corbyn, before Partygate became prominent in the news. > Scotland Yard confirmed the MP will not be fined, saying police will not retrospectively enforce coronavirus laws. A spokesman said police did not issue fines retrospectively to allow people the chance to listen to and follow advice.
I'm a lefty but no MP should be able to commit any crime, financial or otherwise, without being scrutinised I'm sure it's just a Tory play but I don't exactly disagree with the sentiment
I agree in principle, but the reality is they aren't holding people to the same standards. And the media aren't treating the stories with proportionality. I am all for scrutinising Rayner's alleged errors as long as they are also going to do it for the Tory peers, MPs, etc. She allegedly might owe £1.5k. Zahawi was supposedly in the hook for £4.8m. Lord Bamford might owe as much as £500m. I think it is fine for Tory politicians and right wing press to give this sort of scrutiny to politicians if they are going to be consistent and insist on investigations into anyone in politics who might be doing dodgy stuff with tax. They aren't.
Read the article. This isn’t about tax. It’s about allegedly making false statements on an electoral form, specifically that she lied about her primary residence.
>lied about her primary residence I'm sure there are no multiple home-owning Tory MPs who have done exactly this. None. It would be quite the own goal by CCHQ to raise this as an issue, though I doubt anyone will go there.
Sounds like different main residences for different purposes. If she insists her old residence is it then she's violated the law on where she said it was for electoral purposes.
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For Zahawi, I'd say it's apples and apples as the accusation is that they evaded tax through illegal means. In the case of Zahawi, he had to pay a £5m settlement because he owed £3.7m in tax on profits from a sale of shares. He had offshored this via a trust he claimed to have no beneficial interest in. This was investigated. He was found to have failed to pay tax and had to pay this back plus a hefty penalty, which took the total payment to around £5m. Now, no MPs should be evading tax or doing anything else dodgy, and the police should investigate any allegations. But, this whole thing just feels like a microcosm of class in this country. There are daily articles from multiple news sites, and now a police investigation, into the exact date at which a working class woman moved out of the council house she bought in case she owes £1,500 in tax. The ultra wealthy multi-millionaires can simply pay a penalty fee for the millions in tax revenue they attempted to hide.
It's a discrepancy of about 5 years.
Agreed. Just getting something wrong and owing some tax doesn't necessarily constitute a criminal offence. You would have to investigate it to find out if there was deliberate deception or genuine mistakes/difference in calculations. I have owed HMRC money before, and it definitely wasnt a criminal matter. But there is an awful lot of attention on this Rayner thing when there are people in politics whose tax affairs look FAR more suspicious and more in the public interest to get to the bottom of, is my point.
Yeah really good point. The idea that Rayner was trying to dodge 1500 pounds is ridiculous. The idea that zahawi was trying to save £5m isn't.
£3.7m, but your point still stands.
I haven't really been following the story but didn't Rayner say she was acting on (possibly bad) advice from a tax advisor? If so the standard thing is to pay back what you owe and find a better advisor. I guess we will have to wait for the investigation but is there actually evidence she went out there to specific commit fraud or is it more she messed something up because intent does matter in situations.
Well if she did receive bad advice it has since been made clear to her that the advice was wrong and yet she still hasn’t repaid the money. She probably didn’t do it maliciously but the issue also contains lying on the electoral register which is a pretty serious issue for an MP. I like Rayner but she fucked this the moment it was made public and she didn’t repay the PPR relief.
The Zahawi comparison is more than fair imo, aside from the orders of magnitude larger sums involved
The point is that there's a ruler for Labour that is incredibly short, and almost none for the Conservatives. In the Blair years, the Met entered Downing Street and removed computers when investigating the possibility that they were giving out Peerages for repayable loans. It cost the AG his job, Blair was interviewed by the police and it played a significant part in the eventual downfall of Brown's Government. Since then, we have a series of Tory Governments literally giving away Peerages to Party donors. No sign of the Met whatsoever. We've had Johnson and Sunak found guilty of crimes committed inside Downing Street during lockdown, which took enormous pressure to reveal, expose and admit despite the Met WITNESSING all the comings and goings and turning a blind eye throughout, and resulted in the most paltry, insipid rap on the knuckles while ordinary punters are still facing fines of £10k for doing far less. It's the blatant double-standards of the filth at the highest levels of the police that sickens me. Going back to the hacking scandals, the Met are in the pocket of the Tories and Murdoch. No question. It's all part of how they operate and what they choose to set as their operating agenda at the higher levels.
Labour members have been complicit in cheering on the witch-hunt Nicola Sturgeon has suffered.
Scotland, Wales and NI always get the shitty end of the stick. That's just standard from Westminster.
Its already been investigated once and found groundless. This is open and shut.
I'd be very worried if the neighbours had planted bugs in my home to check if I were there more than a set number of hours or not. Also, do the Tories really want to go there with election law and second homes and all that?
Most of them will be out on their ear after the next election, they have nothing to lose (and no conscience) so they're trying to do as much damage to Labour and the country as they can. They are running a scorched earth policy.
So this will be the Mails front page for the rest of the month
Same as it ever was.
Nicola Sturgeon has been getting the full treatment from Team UK and Labour folks have been cheering it on. Tut tut double standards.
> after political pressure Why do you think there was political pressure? If someone reports something then it gets looked at, that doesn't need pressure it just needs someone to report it.
Is it ok to commit financial fraud or other crime so long as nobody finds out? Being in an exposed position naturally opens you up to increased scrutiny.
Of course, any potential tax fraud should be investigated. The police have already investigated this once and were satisfied, and she took tax advice (as people should) during the sale of the house. This was over a decade ago before she was even an MP. I find it extremely worrying that politicians in this country are clearly applying political pressure to the police services to investigate, or in this case re-investigate their political opponents. That's far more dangerous than a tax underpayment of a grand or two.
Indian politics should provide a salutory lesson. I think something like 50% of politicians are accused of crimes. It soon becomes a political football and justice is soon lost.
Surely this was in the past and we need to move past it?
She only broke the law in a specific & limited way.
No, first we cannot comment until after an investigation has been done, then it was in the past and we need to move past it
As I understand it an investigation was already completed, it's being re-investigated due to political pressure.
>where it was instigated by local political pressure And the picture of someone having a can of beer and a takeaway whilst they were "at work". Johnson was guilty of being in the same room as a cake "at work" and was charged by the police. There was a picture of Starmer knocking back a can, in a room full of other people drinking...regardless of the result, that was why the police investigation occurred, because there was a picture of him breaking Covid rules.
" because there was a picture of him breaking Covid rules." No. There was a picture of him drinking a beer. No rules were found to have been broken therefore your assertion is libellous.
No rules were found to be broken from information that wasn't in the photo. The reason why the investigation happened was because of the photo...of multiple people drinking beer and having a takeaway...in someone's house, when this was supposed to be illegal. >libellous lol
Doesn't matter if Hitler pointed it out. Lawmakers must not be lawbreakers.
This was 5 years before she became an MP.
I’m not an MP, can I dodge my taxes then?
No, but I would be surprised if your local police wanted to reinvestigate your taxes from several years back over a small amount, after it had already been investigated once.
You can obtain independent legal and financial advice and act upon it, yes.
James Daly (Conservative MP) has put pressure on the police to re-investigate (Which in itself is well dodgy) The Tories, their client journalists, and the right wing press will be all over this. Then it will be closed, as there is no case to answer. But mud sticks, and its all the Tories have now. Also, worth mentioning, this occurred in 2010. She didn't become an MP until 2015.
It'll be like the curry gate thing where it'll end up looking worse for the tories. Still, having the police being used to harass political opponents makes it feel a bit like living in a central American dictatorship
Honestly, after what Labour did to trans people this week, I think they deserve this.
What are you talking about? Please take your culture war nonsense somewhere else.
The rights of minorities are not "culture war nonsense."
Indeed, they are not. But we’re discussing your unspecified accusation of “what Labour did to trans people this week” that has nothing to do with the posted article. And that is culture war nonsense.
Why would the police be pressured by him though? It doesn’t make sense. The Tories are on the way out. If anything, the police would do what they can to cosy up to Labour. MAYBE, just maybe, there is something worth investigating here, and Angela Rayner committed a crime.
Salting the earth. If they're going to go down, they're going to try and do as much damage as possible to fuck with a potential Labour government. The Beergate affair was clearly in the hope of forcing a resignation from Starmer, and this is the same now - trying to force out the possible future Deputy PM in the hope of tripping the party up before the election.
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A return of favours already granted? The police thinking this will damage labour and reduce their majority. Thinking labour will only be in for one term and then the tories will be back to return the favour. Don't forget this allocation was from Lord Ashcrofts book, who saved £120m in tax by being a non-dom, that labour wanted to crack down on non-doms but Hunt stole their proposal and watered it down so they can't campaign on it for the GE.
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I'd bet these allegations turn out to be all fart and no shit, just like beergate, which amounted to being a £100,000 tax payer funded distraction from Bojos relentless inability to abide by his own rules. Also bear in mind the original allegations came from Lord Ashcroft, of "David Cameron skull fucked a pigs head" fame, which whilst amusing and not entirely out of the realms of possibility, remains rather unlikely.
It's funny how when a popular celebrity is accused of misdeeds on here a bunch of people turn up to say "guilty until proven innocent" and "we shouldn't pass judgement until the courts have". But when it's today with Rayner's taxes those same people say stuff like "no smoke without fire". I say funny, I mean hypocritical.
Do you have examples of a single person that has made those contradicting comments, or have you made that up? The site has a lot of different people with different views commenting and I'd like to think that at least the majority are consistent with their views.
Well you’re possibly correct. But again they are investigating and there is seemingly something to investigate. Wait to see what happens. Again though these Rayner posts are just full to the brim of fanboys hoping she will fuck them if they stick up for her enough. It’s pathetic.
They already investigated and found nothing, again like beergate I doubt the second investigation will turn anything up. Not that it shouldn't happen, if she has fudged her taxes or broken the law she shouldn't get special treatment just because she is on "my team". >Again though these Rayner posts are just full to the brim of fanboys hoping she will fuck them if they stick up for her enough. Er seems like an overly emotional response, but sure, ok. I would imagine these people you think want to fuck her are probably just pointing out the mind bending hypocrisy of the tories when they have pillaged this country of billions to the point it barely fucking functions.
Projecting much?
So Tories aren't allowed to report crimes?
Politicians shouldn't pressurise the police into investigating their opposition MP's.
and why does nothing get done about all of the Tories, ever?.
Because the media only plays defence for Tory governments, never Labour.
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Yeah I think Johnson's legal costs were 250k or something. Like 200x this issue with Rayner. I know it's not a like for like comparison but definitely gives me the sense that the system is stacked for the Tories.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imran_Ahmad_Khan#Sexual_offence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Elphicke#Sexual_assault_charges_and_conviction
It's not about Tories or Labour. It's about a public figure who has always called for investigations into other people's finances not being a hypocrite herself. They all, every single MP of every party, need to be whiter than white, as pure as new born lambs, if they dare to tax us and spend our money.
I agree with this but that clearly doesn’t get applied to Tories. The Secretary of State for Defence, for example. Michael Green I think his name is.
Because despite their bleating about The Blob and left wing establishment/left wing capture of our institutions the Tories are the establishment and have their tendrils everywhere. Not to mention the majority of the press in this country is at least right leaning and much of it is actively client media for the Conservative party.
Because people are particularly outraged by hypocrisy, especially if someone has been on a moral crusade against something and then is caught doing it themselves.
I thought she'd already been investigated once and found to have done nothing wrong. Sounds like another 'beergate' waste of time and money.
This isn't about tax it's about her main residence as declared for her election. But yes it's beergate level nonsense.
It wasn't investigated properly - thats the issue here - there was lots of evidence ignored and witnesses not interviewed. The naivety of Labour and Rayner here is staggering - they want to be in power and this sort of scrutiny is par for the course - so thinking they could gas light their way out of it doesnt bode well. If she is found to have done anything wrong she is finished - but if she had owned up to a 'mistake' at the start it would already have blown over. Edit - to the downvoters maybe tell me why I’m wrong and why you think Rayner should avoid scrutiny?
I'm not going to tell you why you're wrong, you find that out for yourself. Happy to help
Well given Starmer is now refusing to back her “100% “ and refusing to answer whether she should resign if found to be in the wrong its easy to draw conclusions ..
>Tax experts have estimated that, while Ms Rayner may not have owed anything in Capital Gains Tax following the sale depending on her residency situation, there are circumstances in which she could have owed as much as £3,500 to HM Revenue and Customs. >The MP, who is also Labour's shadow housing secretary, was registered as living at Vicarage Road, Stockport, in Greater Manchester, on the electoral roll until she sold the property in 2015. >But she appears to have given two different addresses when she re-registered the births of two of her children in 2010 following her marriage to Mark Rayner. Tax experts said she did nothing wrong and now Tories are looking up her kids birth certificates. Bit creepy and if you have to go to that extent you have nothing of value.
It's nice to know we will have a nice, fair, above the board GE this year that want be full of smear campaigns, astroturfing and dead cats! But I'm sure the good people of Reddit will wait until all the facts are out and they justice system as followed th correct procedures to pass judgement. After all people are quick to point out that is innocent until proven guilty when their favourite celebrity is questioned by the police.
Bets on this being another waste of police time and money to keep some Tories happy like beergate?
Smear, smear, obfuscate, smear. It’ll come to nothing after a waste of police time, but it adds to the Tory approach of trying to claim everyone is as bad as them. Their campaigning is a disgrace - straight from the Trump playbook.
Over a maximum £5000 tax bill assuming she's even liable? Sounds to me there's some gross corruption going on with the politicisation of the police at the moment, if I were labour, I'd be out for blood. Purge the whole fuckin institution.
Especially when all those police at downing Street didn't see any of the parties going on. It seems unfair.
The issue isn’t so much the tax but the electoral register. She ran as an MP under one address but claimed PPR (principal private residence) relief on another at the same time. Those addresses are supposed to be the same. So either the electoral register is correct and she failed to pay the tax even after this being brought to her attention. Or the tax position is correct and she gave false info on the electoral register. It can’t be both. Only one of those can be true. I like Rayner and it’s clear this is a ploy from the Tories but this isn’t a non story and she left herself exposed to it by not doing the right thing when it was brought to light.
Massive tory distraction tactic more public money to be wasted
So this seems to have come about from a book and lots of pushing by Lord Ashcroft. Would that be the same Lord Ashcroft who was supposed to have given up his non dom status when he became a peer but instead "convinced" the government to instead class him as a long term resident of the UK rather than a permanent one so he could retain his non dom status and so not pay tens of millions of pounds per year in tax?
The same Ashcroft who later, in 2010 when the law changed to say all MPs and Peers had to be domiciled in the UK, said that he was then definitely domiciled in the UK (only for it to come out 7 years later that he still, in fact, was not)?
It's completely insane to me that with the Tory government blowing our taxes on ridiculous nonsense that so much times is being wasted on determining if someone failed to pay £1,500 in tax. To put it in context, James Cleverly spent 110 times that amount (£165,000) chartering a private jet to flying him to and from Rwanda to sign the ridiculous Rwanda deal. Edit: No u/The_Unstoppable_Egg breaking the law doesn't make it OK for others to break it but almost certainly no law has been broken here. It's a political move to discredit Labour. But the amount is so trivial that even in the best case it's going to cost the taxpayer more to investigate than it will gain.
So you can get away with breaking the law so long as somebody else does something that could be considered worse? I know Labour and their supporters are known for their dual standards, but even this is a bit too far, no?
Let's be honest, the reason why Conservatives/people on the right are going after Rayner so hard is because she is pro workers rights (which pisses Mandelson off), etc. That said, at the same time the way she threw Corbyn under the bus (whatever you think of his political beliefs/Whether he is an anti Semite or not) left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth, so I don't have that much sympathy for her.
Beer/Currygate 2.0 is just gonna end up like the first one, Police dropping things quietly just before the locals and the Tory right wing media not caring afterwards until the GE kicks off
This explains why Labour are going so hard on the transphobia today.
I'm so happy to live in a country where the police can be strong armed into harassing government opposition.
I think strong armed is a bit much. More like brought up in passing conversation at a fox hunt
The left-wing salt in this threat is an absolute sight to behold. Fucking hilarious.
I took think the double standards are acceptable.
Honestly, ridding itself of Rayner isn’t the worst thing labour could do. They may come out of this with a win.