Explaining Rayner Danger

Angela Rayner's in the news. The Telegraph has been in receipt of documents showing that she argued for tax rises in cabinet meetings. These involved hideously Bolshevist measures like upping the back surcharge by five per cent and removing tax relief on dividends. Soon it will be a 100% wealth tax and the nationalisation of the country's cutlery drawers. For the Tory press, this demonstrates how beneath Labour's fiscal responsibility lurks a menace red in tooth and claw, desperate for the opportunity to push class warfare politics.

It's complete rubbish, of course. The threat the Deputy Prime Minister poses British capitalism is daily demonstrated by her going along with everything this government has done since assuming office. All the leak says is that, shock horror, there are different views in cabinet and that occasionally policies pushed by one minister or one faction are sent over to the Treasury for analysis. But because this is politics, everything has significance and is read as such, regardless of intention. Which has allowed for a bit of Kremlinology to work out what's going on.

Could it be that Rayner is positioning herself ahead of a leadership election before Labour goes to the country again? Where the beleaguered membership and affiliated unions are concerned, it's a reminder that someone at the top has an understanding of what Labourism is about. A diet of disability cuts and attacks on the elderly - u-turn notwithstanding - is a performance unlikely to make for happy campers, let alone electoral success. It keeps the soft left reassured and when Keir Starmer gets the heave ho, we can see who's politically best placed to take over. The leak therefore came from her team.

Or did it? We know who has a history of briefing against leading members of the government (a coincidence, I'm sure, that it's nearly always women on the receiving end), and that would be Morgan McSweeney and friends. This fits with a pattern of behaviour aimed at Rayner specifically. To their mind, Labour spending money and taxing the rich is very unpopular, and leaking Rayner's proposals would damage her in the eyes of the public and dent her chances among the PLP. This makes the party safe for Wes Streeting or some other horror to assume the leadership. It's the same kind of genius we saw on show when Labour's 2017 manifesto was leaked by a right winger, and helped ensure its offerings dominated election coverage for a few days - much to the party's benefit.

Regardless of why it was leaked, for the Telegraph it feeds into a Rayner danger obsession they share with the Conservative Party. Her politics are simultaneously chameleonic and Milquetoast, and carry a light stain of Blue Labour drivel. But as far as the right are concerned, Rayner is indelibly part of the trade union movement. Unlike Streeting and Bridget Phillipson, who are also from working class backgrounds, she made it into politics through the unions - Unison specifically. She reminds the establishment that Labour is fundamentally unreliable because Labourism draws its strength from the labour movement, and mobilises, still, the support of workers. This, despite the gyrations by many a Labour politician to play this down or efface it. For the hyper-class conscious leader writers of the bourgeois press, this is always a worry for as long as Labourism retains this base. It is chimerical, and even though Labour's history has been one of stabilising British capitalism, there are interludes where it appears poised to turn on its master - Bevanism, Bennism, Militant, and more recently Corbynism all threatened this country's class settlement, and were occasions for genuine panic in establishment circles. Rayner is attacked not only because of what she is, but because she - despite her own politics - represents to them the threat of what could be.

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