Even a former Tory MP has called the party’s witch-hunt over the Labour deputy leader ‘a grotesque spectacle of hypocrisy’
It’s now more than two months since the Tories set their attack dogs on Angela Rayner over the historic sale of her council house.
Yet, despite their media stooges still gnashing their teeth and a dozen Mancunian coppers diverted from investigating burglaries, the question about whether Labour’s deputy leader did or didn’t underpay, by a couple of grand, a capital gains tax bill in 2015 just hasn’t landed with the public.
Which is no wonder when we’ve spent years watching Tories dish out billions in dodgy contracts to their donors, stash fortunes in offshore trusts, have their wives avoid tens of millions in taxes through non-dom status or, bringing it bang up-to-date, demand in a 3am phone call to an elderly woman, £6,500 to pay off “bad people”.
Even former Tory MPs like Nick Boles call the Rayner witch-hunt “a grotesque spectacle of hypocrisy”, and Matthew Parris dubs it “outrageous: brutal, snobbish and out of proportion”.
Yet still they persist in trying to make capital out of dubious criminality claims Rayner denies, with that wet dishcloth in human form, Oliver Dowden, demanding at Wednesday’s PMQs that the “Right Honourable Landlady” should resign.
As Rayner is a northern, working-class woman who, despite leaving school with no qualifications, made it to the top of politics, this is only to be expected. When Tory backs are against the wall their brains instinctively tell them to punch down.
They learn at public school or in the City that when you need to fight your way out of a corner, you take the bullying route by hitting hard at the less powerful and wealthy. Let’s call it humiliating the plebs.
We are seeing it in multi-millionaire Rishi Sunak’s vicious attack on “sicknote Britain”, unleashed to shore up his collapsing Middle England vote.
Proposing to take an axe to Personal Independence Payments will plunge many thousands of the most vulnerable people into panic, depression and in some cases suicide. But oh, how their core support will love it. It’s the same with Sunak’s obsession with deporting a handful of asylum seekers to Rwanda, which even many in his own party view as a costly farce, and a token gesture to voters attracted to far-right groups who want to bar all asylum seekers.
Instead of addressing the outrageous backlog of criminal cases in our crumbling legal system, Sunak has managed to magic up 25 courtrooms, 150 judges and 5,000 sitting days to deport some of the most tortured people in the world to a brutal dictatorship.
Months ago, five UK Supreme Court judges unanimously ruled Rwanda to be an unsafe destination due to the risk that asylum seekers may be sent on to other countries to face persecution.
Sunak knows this scam will not halt the tide of asylum seekers landing but so long as his planes are in the air before the next election he can claim to have “stopped the boats”.
Once again, now the Tories are cornered, their only plan is to scapegoat the marginalised and the voiceless. It’s in their DNA. At the last election they promised to level up but all they’ve done is punch down.
You have a chance to punch back with your vote in Thursday’s elections. Make sure you land it.
