UK deputy prime minister Angela Rayner resigns
UK Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner has stepped down after admitting she failed to pay the correct amount of property tax.
Her resignation adds to the mounting challenges facing the country’s struggling center-left government, News.Az reports, citing CNN.
Her departure is another headache for the United Kingdom’s increasingly unpopular leader, Keir Starmer, and deprives his cabinet of one of its brightest political stars.
In a letter addressed to Starmer on Friday, Rayner said that she was stepping down as Britain’s deputy prime minister and housing minister, as well as the deputy leader of the Labour Party.
Despite securing a landslide election victory in July 2024, Labour is now facing a rising challenge from the upstart anti-immigration Reform UK party, which currently leads national opinion polls and is holding a national conference in Birmingham on Friday.
Rayner had been fighting for her political survival after it emerged that she had not paid enough property taxes on an apartment in Hove on England’s southern coast, which she bought earlier this year.
Rayner claimed her mistake was unwitting and based on poor legal advice. Yet opposition parties and right-wing British tabloids quickly labeled her a hypocrite, due to her history of mauling Conservative ministers in the previous government over similar “sleazy” incidents. Her actions soon snowballed into a national scandal.
Starmer initially stood up for his deputy, but his support grew more anemic day by day. Defending Rayner became ever more challenging, given that Britain is wracked by a housing crisis and that Labour is considering raising taxes, including on property. Critics said her position had become untenable.
In her letter on Friday, Rayner wrote that media scrutiny had meant that staying in her post was “unbearable,” writing: “While I rightly expect proper scrutiny on me and my life, my family did not choose to have their private lives interrogated and exposed so publicly.”
Rayner’s resignation has cost Labour one of its most talented politicians, whose forthright style, working-class roots and strong northern English accent helped bridge divisions within the parliamentary Labour party.
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