The Mount of Olives, where, according to the Bible, Jesus said to his disciples that “he who is without sin should cast the first stone”, is very far from London (also from Madrid or Lisbon, and much more still from Washington). From the English capital, about five thousand kilometers. Perhaps this distance means that the conservatives, in this case the British, have a clear conscience by throwing garbage at their rivals, when the filth reaches up to their eyebrows.
Fourteen Tory MPs – an average of one a year – have lost their seats due to the most diverse scandals since David Cameron won the 2010 election, from financial irregularities to bullying of subordinates, including tax evasion, sexual abuse and almost any thing imaginable. The last one, Mark Menzies, resigned last week after calling an aide at night to borrow money, claiming that “bad people” had him kidnapped in his house and were going to harm him. Not even in the movies.
To such a record we must add the scandals of ministers forced to leave the Cabinet, advisors, or the billionaire wife of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who declared herself not domiciled in the country for tax purposes to pay as little as possible. But this does not prevent the conservatives of this country, like those of others, from adopting a position of moral highness (as if they were climbing the Mount of Olives) and without scruple looking for the speck in another’s eye, ignoring the beam in the own.
His latest victim is the Labor deputy leader Angela Rayner, a trade unionist and working class, a single mother at 16 and a grandmother at 37, who left school to simultaneously care for her daughter and a bipolar mother, and despite everything This made its way into life and politics. Within Labor she is a kind of cult figure, who says things how she thinks them, praised for her authenticity (a rare quality in the profession), her intelligence and her ability to manoeuvre.
Her sin would have been to declare a subsidized apartment that she had bought at a discount price when she was single as her primary residence a decade and a half ago, and not that of her husband (from whom she later separated), which was a kilometer away. . She claims that she spent more time in the former, but her accusers – including neighbors who probably vote Tory – allege that she was almost always in the latter.
It seems like a minor technicality. But if Rayner lived in her husband’s house, she would have had to pay more taxes on the capital gain from the sale of hers, an operation in which she earned just under one hundred thousand euros. And if she had said that she resided where it was not true, it would be a breach of the electoral law. In the first instance, the Manchester police saw nothing shady in all of this, nor any signs of a crime. But it has resumed the investigation following the presentation of new allegations by the Conservative Party, which does not know what to do to avoid a debacle when elections are called.
Challenging voters to elect the least corrupt or law-breaking group of politicians does not seem at first glance to be the best possible strategy for the Tories, given their record in the matter, and that Rayner’s whistleblower is none other than Lord Ashcroft, a prominent conservative patron who boasts of having his millions in Belize, “the last tax haven,” as a testament to his insight. In the worst case scenario, the deputy leader of Labor would owe the Treasury less than two thousand euros. Prime Minister Sunak’s wife has saved millions by declaring herself a non-resident for tax purposes. Behind the attacks there seems to be a certain amount of classism and misogyny.
Rayner claims to have a report that would clear her of dust and chaff, but she has not shown it, and says she will resign if she is found guilty of a crime. Labor are no saints (almost no politician is), but on the Richter scale of sinners they are far below the Tories.
