The British public is being gaslit about Angela Rayner

She’s not a saint, but she is nowhere near as bad as the right-wing press would have us believe.

I once met a posh lawyer who was so well-paid that by the time she was in her late twenties she had achieved the dream of buying a townhouse on the street where her parents lived. Next to Kensington Gardens. Her parents didn’t even need to chip in. She told me a story about a phone call with a young client who needed to make a decision about a spare £12bn in her name. The client barely listened to the lawyer because she was being distracted by her kitten. The client was right to be nonchalant on a phone call that cost her three figures though. They had a brilliant, diligent, top-of-her-Oxbridge-class lawyer looking after her, an army of them, no doubt.

I remembered the last time I gave legal-related advice to someone over the phone. I had just graduated with a law degree, but with no intentions of becoming a lawyer, and was working for non-profit legal advice centres while applying for jobs in parliament. I was manning a debt-advice line in a local charity, armed with the best intentions and the least experience. The people calling could not afford a lawyer, nor did they have a network of people who knew how “these things work”, so had to resort to a Russell Group law graduate with a 2:1. I could hear the fear in their voices as they described the debt collectors banging on their door like a 911 caller hiding in their closet during a burglary.

The PR companies hired by families like the one that the lucky 21-year-old was born into do a stellar job convincing us that progressive tax policy, which could prompt ladies like her to throw a fit and move to Geneva, is a matter of life and death for all of us – because rich people already pay tax!

That must be news to many rich people jumping on the opportunity to call Angela Rayner a hypocrite over her tax oversight. The Telegraph, the unofficial government opposition, which only a week ago was giving advice on how to avoid paying stamp duty twice, is no doubt celebrating a hit job well done.

The most important point the paper wants to drive home is that unless you support two-tier ethics, Angela Rayner not realising she needed to pay extra stamp duty on the property she placed in a trust for the long-term care of her disabled son is morally and politically equivalent to the story of Nadhim Zahawi having to pay back £5m of tax in January 2023. (He, by the way, stayed on as Tory chair for more than a week and was only sacked after an independent probe.)

Rishi Sunak’s wife avoided paying millions in tax as a non-dom while her husband was the actual chancellor. David Cameron had shares in his late father’s offshore fund. Jacob Rees-Mogg, that most esteemed of patriotic GB News presenters, co-founded Somerset Capital Management, which had links to offshore funds in the Cayman Islands.

Though these examples are not illegal, the Telegraph is right. If a poor person regularly cleans a banker’s flat and takes cash-in-hand, she could be considered tax evading if it isn’t declared. If that banker owns their assets through offshore trusts, they are being smart. We detest the breakdown of our society, as exposed by the countless videos of race-war slop on X, so we must start being strict with petty crimes again and get out of the way of the benevolent wealthy desperate to invest in our infrastructure if only we’d let them keep a smidge more of their galloping asset value.

Therapy-speak is anathema for the right-wing publications I am taking aim at here, but there is one word I won’t let them retire: gaslighting. When our media wants us to believe we are holding everyone to equal standards by hunting Angela Rayner out of power, it is gaslighting us. It is conflating “legal” with “moral” to describe tax optimisation, and trying to pretend that £40,000 you didn’t think you needed to pay is the same as millions of pounds you know you ought to pay but don’t want to, so hire someone with eggshell-coloured business cards to make it disappear.

The right-wing press seems genuinely baffled at the left’s willingness to defend Rayner when she has done something objectively wrong (and we agree it is right that she apologised, right that she will rectify). The same communication problem between left and right emerges in the discussion about raising taxes on the rich vs cutting benefits for the poor. Can’t you see, the right will say, all these grifters on TikTok hacking the system to milk the taxpayer of benefits they don’t deserve?

We do; we condemn fraud too, or as I like to call it, “benefit optimisation”. But you know what we condemn even more? Unearned wealth legislating to protect more unearned wealth. For every “auntie driving a motability BMW” and “Abdul in a five-star hotel”, there is a Hugo showering a Hattie with Dom Pérignon off the coast of the Adriatic Sea.

Are the editors and influencers trying to convince us they hold all politicians to the same standards delusional or just morally bankrupt? We have seen enough careers of brilliant female politicians given the CIA treatment, but times have changed. An orange celebrity has been re-elected into the White House, and Nigel Farage is being touted as the next prime minister. Forgive me, but I don’t care what the ethics investigation says. I stand by Rayner and any woman who has to pay full price for what most men get handed down for free.