I feel sad about Angela Rayner

[Neededa]

OK, I am left leaning so maybe I am already biased, BUT, I do feel sad that a woman who overcame early issues, who was “proper” working class, who didn’t speak the kings English, but rather with a proper local dialect, and achieved a high office without a single spoon in her working class mouth, has gone.

i do understand that many people will agree with what has happened. I would have been fuming if the story played out the way it had as a different party, and I understand that Angela had to go, BUT as a woman who believes in holding up other women, particularly those who aren’t born to certain families, or have expectations placed on them from word go, I do feel a bit sad this morning.

There was a working class woman in the House of Commons. A working class woman was the deputy prime minister of this country. It is not even 100 years since working class women could vote. I feel sad.

I agree

yep

I do too.
Ive met her at various functions and she’s just normal and nice.
(I’m not political, just was with people who are).
I always feel empathetic towards heras she is so normal, yet so advanced in her career.
And I feel sad that all the things she’s overcome will be shadowed by this.
it is sad.

I agree.

I agree; unfortunately she needed to be Teflon and she should have realised this. She may have been naive - heard what she wanted to hear regarding the stamp duty and didn’t bother to seek professional tax advice. It’s a real shame.

Bloody hell, I went to the loo/toilet 😉 expecting to be destroyed by people when I came back here.
interesting other people agree.

Raises hand me too. I believe it was an honest mistake and TPTB and the media have been gunning for her from day one.

I’ve never voted labour in my life and I agree. Her explanation seemed reasonable. It’s not as if her political life is over though. She’s just been shuffled around until this dies down.

Yes and no.

I liked her when I heard her on Leading (Alistair Campbell / Rory Stewart), but I hate her politics and frankly I hate the way she wears her roots like a badge as if that makes her some kind of all knowing defender of the people.

Starmer and Rayner and Reeves (who lied on her CV big time - how is she even still in role?!) are absolutely screwing up this country.

let’s face it, she screwed up, twice, tried to game the system, then tried to blame a law firm. If she had been a Tory MP, regardless of her background, everyone would have been baying for blood from the word go.

So F her, and maybe she’ll stage a come back in the future but with a bit more humility

Agree, and there's a real level of hypocrisy over it after some of the very dodgy dealings of recent Conservative PMs and cabinet members, a lot of which was just brushed off and swept under the rug.

Me too.

She took legal advice, it was wrong, and now she’s being hung out to dry over it. Meanwhile, the tories fleeced us for years and got celebrated for it.

Completely agree. I liked her style, her insouciance and her wit (as well as her clever politics).

I’m really sad that a simple misunderstanding has brought a self-made woman down, with the right wing press gunning for her blood and ignoring the much more serious mendacious acts of the extensively-educated Farage and co.

I agree she has been very harshly treated. But as a very senior cabinet member she should have taken specialist advice to make sure what she was doing to address her complicated housing situation was squeaky clean.

Although I am not a fan of AR I too feel sorry for her. Had she come from a different background if she was from a well off, more privilege background she would have had accountants/legal advice etc etc all in place to have easy sorted out her affairs and probably have saved paying tax over and over again. She has by her own admission complex family arrangements and did not have the financial/legal support in place as a matter of course. She acted in good faith as has been acknowledged. I feel that it was her lack of awareness that caused her to make those mistakes which stems from her background. I genuinely feel sorry for her.

I agree but also feel annoyed at her for being so daft. These things always come out, we need to be better than everyone else - spotless - because we are women and working class and bear the weight of people thinking we're thick because we speak with 'common' accents and don't have Oxbridge degrees and I know that's unfair.

There's something in this about bearing the weight of representation of other (working class) women - having to be at least twice as good as others because of lack of representation... So the next time a bright opionated working class woman taps on that ceiling (some) people will think 'oh yeah, just like that other one who did dodgy tax deals'
It's depressing. I am in a space of thinking 'theres a good one!' and having that view knocked aside a little.

She's didn't take legal advice as far as I'm aware. Her lawyers even put out a statement saying they always advise people to see additional advice exactly.

We don't know what the legal advice actually was though, do we? It could well have been "your situation is complex and we recommend specialist tax advice as we are not qualified to advise on SDLT".

No - she didn’t. Even the law firm have come out saying she’s trying to land this at their door and they didn’t give her tax advice. She took legal advice (from one of Starmer’s contacts) once she realised she’d messed up

I agree with you

Live by the sword, die by the sword. Just imagine how vicious she would have been if it was anyone else who made this ‘mistake’.

The only part of this situation I could be sad about is that David Lammy now has her job.

Exactly - she's clearly got a lot on her plate in her personal life, but the point doesn't seem to have occurred to her "what if the second home SDLT applies to my more expensive property after all? How will I look? What would I say if a Tory did this?"

Sorry OP, I don’t feel sorry for her. She had access to the best advisors for these issues. Her finances were complicated and she had been recommended to get specialists to do some evaluations and she didn’t. That was her choice. In any top job you have to play by the rules, as she told the Tories when they were caught out. No different.

that said, I admire any women in politics and I feel sorry for her personal situation. But she had to go.

I do too!!

Me too.

I feel for her.
I think the press always had it in for a Northern loud girl.

She was given bad advice and paid the price.