We need to discuss Angela Rayner. It’s not my favourite subject, by a long way, but it needs to be done. Because Angela Rayner stole 1500 quid from me. Ok, from ‘us’. She avoided capital gains tax in precisely that amount when selling a ‘home’ which may or may not have been her first or only home and if not, she’s robbing the poor, working people of this faahn coontreh (her words) of money needed for hospitals, schools, care for the elderly and a new tyre on an ambulance.

Normally, if anyone ‘avoided’ payments to HMRC by almost-legal, slightly-dodgy little ploys, I’d be burning with admiration. But Ms Rayner is the deputy leader of the Labour Party. Furthermore, she’s always banging on about everyone else’s dodgy dealings and financial benefitting and sleaze and how that will all end when Labour are in government. And therefore must hold herself to higher standards. Otherwise you become that political pariah: a fucking hypocrite.

The whole issue began because of a book by (Lord) Michael Ashcroft, the former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party and one of its biggest donors. Even though (for tax purposes) he doesn’t live here. He likes it in Belize. Better climate. Financial climate, that is. So he is, in fact, most ideally placed to point out instances of tax avoidance as he is an absolute master of the art.

Yet on the radio the other day (the real radio, not a ‘podcast’) they were trying to say that Ange is unpopular because she’s a woman and northern to boot. And many would like to boot her. And as someone married to a northern woman, who still cannot say ‘bath’ or ‘glasses’ with a suitably long ‘a’, despite the beatings, I think it is terrible to accuse everyone who hates Angela Rayner of mysoginistic northernism. It is limiting. When there are so many other reasons to hate her. And although I don’t think I was precisely who Neil Young had in mind when he wrote ‘Southern Man’, that’s what I am. Why must these people take a specific example of a rather obnoxious person and try to use it as just an example of a more generalised problem of mysoginy or Nothernphobia? Although you are well within your rights to hate anyone who pulls the stock phrase ‘nothing to see here’ because they can’t manage ‘FUCK OFF!’

What needs to happen is that we need ‘transparency’ and ‘openness’ and all those other nauseating things which Labour insist upon, and we need to examine Angela Rayner’s house sale from a properly informed perspective. I’m already examining it from the perspective of a highly cultured, politically engaged wide-boy. And I don’t like it one bit.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx