Why we should sympathise with Angela Rayner but not Nicola Sturgeon over tax affairs
Angela Rayner made a mistake; Nicola Sturgeon acted deliberately to pay less tax
There’s a pub on the corner of Whitehall called the Red Lion with which many who tread parliamentary corridors become familiar. On my rare return visits to SW1, I stroll past it without nostalgia.
Just beyond, however, there is an unmarked door which always prompts a memory and sense of appreciation. I have no idea what lies behind it these days but recall it accommodating an office which provided tax advice to new MPs whose affairs needed to be put in order.
Up to that point in my life, I was never in receipt of a proper salary and my relationship with the Inland Revenue had been fairly erratic. The friendly individual behind the desk sorted me out without fuss and I have never troubled the taxman since. Pay your taxes is a very sound principle, particularly for anyone making rules for others to follow.
Rayner’s circumstances complex
It is also a principle which voters understand. By and large, they are uninterested in the personal affairs of their parliamentary representatives. If, however, they perceive an MP or MSP to be “at it” for monetary gain, they tend to take a dim view and the issue does not readily go away.
The same applies to expenses, a subject which does not require a master’s degree in high finance to understand. That explains why nobody has resigned at Holyrood over a half-billion-pound ferry scandal but Michael Matheson walked the plank for an £11,000 claim he was patently not entitled to. One is complicated; the other is straightforward.
Angela Rayner’s difficulties fell between these stools. Her circumstances are complex and unusual. It would take a heart as hard as Kemi Badenoch’s not to have some empathy for them – a disabled child, a complicated divorce, an honourable desire to make the best provision for her family.
It is hardly a state secret, however, that a pack of hounds has been waiting for Ms Rayner to slip up from the day she became Deputy Prime Minister. She could hardly have been unaware they were waiting for their “gotcha” moment or that her property arrangements were already a source of interest.
‘Acted with integrity’
Yesterday, they got her and that is a sad end, at least for now, to a career built against heavy odds. Though Sir Laurie Magnus, the government’s independent ethics adviser, said she “acted with integrity”, it also hard to avoid the conclusion that Ms Rayner was the author of her own avoidable destruction.
I don’t know if my man in the discreet Whitehall office still exists but if he does, I am sure he could have pointed her in the right direction for the best possible stamp duty advice, just to be sure. And if that service is no longer available to MPs and ministers, there is no shortage of highly qualified tax lawyers to run things past… just to be sure.
The sum involved, up to £40,000, is neither trivial nor life-changing. To many on the Tory benches, it will be pocket money compared to the proceeds of how they manage their own fiscal affairs. But they are not Deputy Prime Minister in a Labour government and another political difference lies in that crucial question of whether the alleged offence is comprehensible enough to incite popular offence. I don’t understand why Ms Rayner did not smell that danger and safeguard against it.
Keir Starmer rightly pointed to the important work she was doing on housing, employment rights and other issues which are the meat and drink of a Labour government’s agenda. She is also an authentic voice of hard, lived experience. Why put it all at risk by not asking the right lawyer at the right time?
‘Nicola Sturgeon Ltd’
Then we come to the brazen conduct of Nicola Sturgeon, high priestess of moral rectitude on the duty to pay one’s taxes. While Ms Rayner’s tax problems may have stemmed from lack of care, there is nothing inadvertent about the way Scotland’s queen of cant has ordered her affairs.
Previously, she expressed firm views about the use of legal devices to minimise tax. “For individuals and businesses,” Ms Sturgeon intoned, “tax contributions should be a matter not of what they can get away with but of respecting the spirit of the law and paying a fair contribution. That is my message to individuals.” Except, in due course, to herself.
By metamorphing into “Nicola Sturgeon Ltd” through which to channel literary earnings, she is doing precisely what she railed against in her political pomp – all to secure avoidance of the 45 per cent tax rate set by her very own government.
It’s pretty clear for anyone respects “the spirit of the law” that writing articles or books is a personal endeavour rather than a corporate one. I have never known a company to write a book or even a book review. Yet we find in her Register of Interests a string of payments, all to “Nicola Sturgeon Limited”.
Truly breathtaking
Corporation tax goes to the UK Treasury, so she also avoids paying the Scottish Government (and Scottish public services) the tax due on these earnings. Truly breathtaking – and she cares not a jot what anyone might think, without a backward glance to the poor of Govanhill.
Defending Ms Sturgeon’s behaviour, John Swinney, said brusquely: “People are entitled to use the tax opportunities and arrangements available to them”. Yet I feel sure Mr Swinney would have been nodding piously by her side when Ms Sturgeon was preaching the previous doctrine about “paying a fair contribution” rather than “what you can get away with”.
That was then, this is now and Mr Swinney has not survived so long by being consistent. At least Angela Rayner has the consolation of having been assured that she “acted with integrity”.
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