Angela Rayner tax fail

[Iwishicouldflyhigh]

But it’s ok because she was just badly advised.
I’ll remember that excuse next time I fill in my tax return.

But still confused about one can have 2 main homes?

The problem here is that of course we have to highlight issues because had the issue not been highlighted it wouldnt have been identified so wouldn't have been corrected. Did you have the same attitude when Boris had his party during covid, said he had been advised it was okay and then had to apologise because it wasnt? Or are your observations on witch hunts different depending on which party you support?

If she was wrongly advised, then present the written advice for scrutiny by KS. There lays the truth. She has referred to taking advice from counsel, seemimgly indicating barrister involvement ie the solicitors instructed counsel for their expertise.

Whilst you may get conflicting legal advice it is her advisers duty to follow the letter of the law. It's unthinkable that this advice was not set out in writing.

She also said she sold her share of the house in Ashton to her son's Trust for £162500, representing her life savings. The flat in Hove was £800,000.

What a sorry and sad mess this is.

I'm assuming that you know as little about the specific adaptations as I do, so who knows what is being done in the Brighton flat? Not our business.

Even posters on this thread have shown how straightforward it is. I doubt they got it wrong.

Part of her tearful excuse today was that the home was adapted for her son’s needs. The Brighton flat surely isn’t?

She should honestly resign with some dignity.

The Labour Party already have enough problems with creditability - and tanking the economy overnight. They really don’t need the distraction of corrupt politicians as well to add to the disaster zone that is already unfolding.

Could there be two legal advisors - Shoosmith's to set up the trust and another to handle the Hove purchase?

Funny how she keeps getting bad advice - second time isn’t she has been badly advised about paying the right tax buying and selling houses. I’m a Labour supporter and I liked her but this looks shifty to me. It doesn’t matter if it’s legal, she was using it to avoid paying tax. She’s minister for housing and deputy PM ffs. She’s dragged the rest of the government into it as well. She should resign.

@Sevillian ? I think you have misunderstood my post.

I don’t believe for a second that she could have gone through the process of setting up a trust with lawyers, without them at least flagging that she would need to seek advice on the tax implications (even if they couldn’t advise on this themselves they would recommend she get specialist advice). She is housing minister. Anyone with half a brain and any scruples in that role would have checked this. It’s outrageous.

Not our business but his mother never needed to bring him and his needs into any of this.

And it’s pure BS that she was advised incorrectly!!! This is bread and butter of conveyancing. She absolutely knew what she was doing - and if she is so thick as to not understand something SO basic she really isn’t fit to be the deputy Prime Minister!! God forbid Starmer actually drops dead from stress, she would expected to run the entire country for heavens sake! She has to go!

I’m sure what you say about the complexity of the circumstances is true @PocketSand and I think Rayner deserves some grace/wiggle room for that. I don’t doubt it must be overwhelming at times, whoever you are/whatever your job is. And I think Rayner is definitely structurally disadvantaged by virtue of not being an entirely standard-issue wealthy guy with a simple, standard-issue wife and two kids. (Reminds me of David Laws actually - different issue, but he had to resign because he hadn’t wanted his elderly mother to know he was living with a man, and as a result ended up breaking the rules about parliamentary expenses.)

This is not her first housing misdemeanour, she wriggled out of the last one relatively unscathed, she’s a liar and massive hypocrite, rough as a bear’s arse and struggles to confirm what a woman is whilst bending to the knee of misogynistic men. And then there’s the free clothing. How many more have we yet to find about.

I could not care less about what happens to her.

@theresnolimits

Totally agree.

If her account is accurate, she sought tax advice and followed it, then when there was a question mark she sought a second tax opinion in case it came back with a worse outcome for her. It did and now she’s paying the tax.

I dont know enough tax law to know whether this is a genuine grey area or if the first advisor was negligent. But either way I don’t think she’s done much blameworthy tax wise. You can’t be faulted (imo) for using tax structures for the purpose for which they were designed, and you can’t be faulted for seeking professional advice and following it.

The blameworthy thing I think is spending years haranguing others for legal tax structuring and then using the same herself. That old irregular verb: I make prudent provision for my family in line with what I understand the law to be. You cheat the exchequer of money causing needless deaths.

But Angela Raynor has said that tax avoidance kills people.

And previously she called for Nadhim Zahawi to resign for tax avoidance.

She also criticised Jeremy Hunt for legally avoiding stamp duty.

Was she wrong to say those things? Presumably as she's a (caught out) tax avoider herself she should resign?

If Boris had followed legal advice, paid out for a second opinion when it was suggested the first may have been incorrect and then on discovering the initial advice was incorrect, made reparations and paid the correct amount of tax then I would be saying exactly the same thing.

If only the controversies that seemed to follow Boris around were as simple as a corrected tax mistake! But they weren't and many of them caused actual distress and harm to real people for which he never sincerely apologised (Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliff and Chris Pincher's victims being two that spring immediately to mind) or put our national security at risk by meeting privately with KGB officials and putting the likes of Lebedev in the Lords.

I am not necesarily a Labour supporter, for the most part I am a centrist who leans left on social matters, so I am not coming from a perspective of defending her just because she is Labour.

What I can't abide is a witch hunt of anyone - whether I agree with them politically or not

Eh?

You’re accepting her version as truthful re bad advice or ‘grey area’.

When in reality this is bread and butter stuff that any established firm will advise correctly on. It could be she lied then and now. That’s more likely than the advisors getting their daily practise wrong.

Even Kevin Maguire who defended labour to the last has said unless she provides actual documents of the legal advice she got /tax advise then she has to go.

People who are advised by professionals don't usually make huge mistakes like this

There is a video probably on here of her saying that any penny that doesn't go into the pot is robbing us all and is unacceptable.

It is Angela

Go

Yes, so something like "my family arrangements" would have done the job, and if others then chose to publicise these that would be an issue for them

Unfortunately nobody who's been quite so damning about others' similar grifts gets a free pass, and especially not when it isn't her first rodeo over property matters. I'd say why not just admit she's been caught out, but she's a politician so ...

Funny how her disabled child exempts her from guilt for avoiding tax, but woe betide anyone who struggled to put their SEN child through private school and couldn’t afford to pay the VAT… perhaps they should have been more creative with their tax affairs too? Oh, silly me, they middle class elites not a poor, tragic deputy prime minster buying a second home after putting their primary residence into a trust (a lovely way to avoid inheritance tax btw and probably Reeves’s property tax obligations too…)

It wouldn’t have done the job at all. That’s what Reeves said when she cried in parliament, all it did was feed the speculation. Rayner has never kept her disabled child a secret, she talked about him in her Rest is Politics interview. Davey talks about his, Cameron talked about his and allowed him to be photographed. Why is Rayner’s different?

The ones who rushed to the conclusion she.is a "wrong un" as you say, were ahead of the game!

Either she's dodgy or thick. Most other people can fill in or sign off a tax return without avoiding £40,000 and if they do get caught doing so, they have to bear the consequences. We all do. Scary as that is.