• Imperfect

On one level, perhaps not that much. If every person who’d done something they shouldn’t were to be fired then unemployment levels would be close to a hundred per cent. There’d certainly be very few people in politics, in the City or in holy orders. The world is an imperfect place and we make imperfect decisions. The way in which we’re punished is also imperfect.

Did she try to conceal what she’s done? It does look a bit like it. The story first emerged several weeks ago so she’s had time to check to see if the facts support an outright denial. It now appears they don’t. Stamp Duty regulations seem fairly simple from what I’ve been told but were perhaps complicated by the trust fund she set up for her disabled son, about which there seems no debate.

However, if she gave the right information to a competent advisor who had seen the trust document (as they must have done if the opinion were to have been relevant), it seems odd that they could have given her advice they did.

People will doubtless ask if she can disclose this. This might be next level of the dispute: “you must” followed by “no, that’s confidential.”

We’ve all been given bad advice and often acted on it. Several of the victims of the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) scandal fell into the traps set by their local councils as a result of being told the wrong thing by supposed experts. Many of the victims of the Post Office scandal would say the same thing about the information they got from PO HQ.

All those involved had to live with the results of that. The penalties here included fines, criminal charges or the threat of them, bankruptcy, relationship failure, mental-health problems and suicide. Few would argue that these were proportionate to the crimes (that in any case hadn’t been committed).

• Proportionate

This leads into a rabbit hole of how far punishment should be, or can ever be, proportionate to the crime.

In judicial cases, a judge will generally be able to exercise considerable latitude in the sentencing. They are skilled and experienced professionals who specialise in little else. Even then, colossal errors are made which can take years to fix, if they ever are.

Judgements which are delivered as a result of non-judicial processes (as with the CIL charges) or in cases where a fair trial is impossible because of the pre-determination and policies of the prosecuting body (as with the Postmasters) tend to be far more random. The CIL charges levied by some councils were not imposed by a court, nor paid any mind to wealth, circumstance or extenuation. You did (or didn’t) supply this bit of paper by the correct date so here’s a bill £235,000 (not a random example). That’s that. It’s the law. Our hands are tied.

(As we explain here, in fact councils are free to follow the excellent example that West Berkshire Council set in 2023-24 by reversing its previous policy and showing that discretion of interpretation was possible within the law. This sorry and widespread matter also proves that HMRC is easier to deal with than planning authorities who’ve decided to weaponise CIL against their residents.)

For all the nightmares that it’s inflicted, however, the CIL scandal hasn’t in general resulted in a loss of reputation (though Maria Dobson in Kintbury, whose case details were nailed to her gate and discussed with her neighbours by a West Berkshire Council enforcement officer several years ago, might disagree). The PO victims, however, in every case lost not only money and in some cases liberty but also their good character. The first of these can be refunded (though in many cases still hasn’t). The last two can’t be so we have to be very sure that banging up and shaming is the correct response.

The bigger we are, the harder we fall. Public figures believe themselves to have a dignity and status which makes their reputation particularly vital. For all of us, however, it is amongst the most precious things we possess. A politician might find that disgrace ended their political career but as Jeffrey Archer, Jonathan Aitken and Boris Johnson, to name but three, discovered, it does little to decrease the earnings from book tours, newspaper columns and the after-dinner speaking circuit.

For a Postmaster, however, disgrace is total. To stay in their community and be vilified or move away and run the risk of exposure are equally horrible. That’s why several killed themselves. We are what we can remember, which is why dementia is so awful. To perhaps an even greater extent, we are what people see us to be.

• Foolish

Perhaps Angela Rayner, to return to her, was guilty of nothing more than stupidity. There must, somewhere in the HQ of any political party, be a document that explains that when the press or the opposition get their teeth into you, sooner or later the truth, or perhaps a distorted version of it, will emerge. By denying what is wholly or partly correct, you’re compounding the problem and losing control of the narrative. These people won’t go away and, unless something like a nuclear war comes to your rescue, they won’t let go.

If any of her denials came after her realisation that she’d screwed up, then she’s guilty of foolishness: not an ideal quality for someone in her position.

Worse still, she’s in charge of housing. The thing that was a problem here was a house (OK, a flat). Do you see where this is going? Surely you’ve got to be squeaky clean if you’re supervising legislation on the subject and not following the rules yourself: or, as Boris memorably claimed, didn’t really understand what they were (none of us did). Someone in her position should have got the best possible advice; perhaps from two different sources to check they agreed. It seems that she was guilty of believing what she wanted to be true: a very normal human failing.

This poses another question: should official punishment for a crime be commensurate with the amount of influence one has over the laws that you’ve broken? By that logic, every MP, civil servant, lawyer, policeman and judge should be judged more harshly for breaking them, irrespective of what they knew of the particular act or case. That’s probably meted out to you if you end up inside: but how about before that?

Should a Transport Minister get double points for a motoring offence? Should traffic wardens have to pay three times the usual fine for parking tickets? Should the custodial sentencing tariff for judges be four times higher than for the rest of us?

• Minority

There are other aspects to Angela Rayner’s predicament. She’s female, self-made, working-class, northern, left-wing, red-headed and didn’t go to university, any one of which puts her in a minority in the Commons. None of these are reasonable causes for wishing someone ill: but humans don’t act reasonably. Are we dealing with a bit of class-based misogyny here: the idea that somehow Anglea Rayner “won’t do”?

Perhaps her so-called or erstwhile friends are the worst offenders. As Morrisey observed, “We hate it when our friends become successful/And if they’re northern, that makes it even worse.”

Above all, she’s a senior government minister and so people are waiting for her to trip up. “Resign!” is the cry from her enemies. “She retains my full confidence” are the responses from her friends: or – which probably better describes Starmer – from someone who has no particular liking for her but recognises that she represents a swathe of his party that seems otherwise to have been cut adrift.

So the political carnival continues, operating according to its own internal rules of acceptable conduct but setting the rules by which we must all abide.

• Update 5 September: clearly this coverage was the last straw for her as she’s just resigned…

• Off the books

If your council is responsible for education, then the thing that might well hold it below the waterline is the cost of Special Educational Needs (SEN) provision. The elaborate government sleight of hand which has hitherto kept these off council books is set to end next year. The result could be a £5bn liability which most authorities, including us here in West Berkshire, will be unable to meet. A raft of Section 114 notices (declarations of insolvency) will follow on an unprecedented scale.

There seem only three outcomes. The first is that the government takes on the costs of the responsibility that its legislation created and, in all probability, raises taxes to meet the needs. The second is that it reduces the threshold, meaning that fewer children who’ve previously qualified will be able to. The third is that matters continue as they are and many local councils go bust.

Take you pick. None are very appealing.

The same might also be said about social care, the NHS, pensions, defence spending, foreign aid…the list could go on and on. We have over the last fifty years created expectations of being able to provide things that we can no longer afford to. We’re still by many measures about the sixth richest country in the world. Despite this, we appear to have no money to pay for any of things that were long regarded as axiomatic, despite the fact that many of us have already paid from them through taxes and NI throughout our working lives in expectation of receiving them.

So, where’s all the money gone? Ask me another…

• On the books

The UK government has, not for the first time, suggested that ID cards are the solution to several of our problems, on this occasion that of illegal migration. The idea appears to be that this will make it far harder for the arrivals to be integrated into even the black economy, still less the official one, and so discourage them from making the journey. Another darker possibility is that people will still come and will be even more exploited as a result. The cabinet, however, seems convinced, the i Paper quoting one insider as saying that “there are no remaining sceptics” about the idea.

When visitng my parents in France years ago I was sometimes stopped by the Police and asked to show my ID card. They were on each occasion amazed when I said we didn’t have them in the UK. Macron thinks the same and the same paper refers to his repeated warnings that the lack of ID cards here “acts as a major incentive to migrants.”

There’s also a quaint idea amongst many here that such things are, like the metric system, driving on the left and having a written constitution, fine for most other countries but that the UK is “different”: the idea is “un-British” and “it wouldn’t work.” There’s also the much more tangible fear that such a large IT infrastructure project is, on past form, impossible for the UK government to provide so that it’s remotely on schedule, remotely on budget and remotely functional.

ID cards proved quite easy to bring in during WW2. They were abolished in the early 1950s, however. Re-introducing them in these very different and more suspicious times will be a far harder ask and will doubtless trigger all the objections mentioned above, Many of these will come from the very parties which are most vociferous about stopping the boats; the very thing that ID cards will be trying to fix. the civil-liberties price is, they might argue, too high a one to pay.

In 1952 Churchill said that abolishing them would “set the people free.” Almost exactly that phrase was used to great effect in 2016, despite the fact that it wasn’t clear then, and isn’t clear now, exactly what we were trying to get free of.

However, perhaps the main point is that the idea has been floated. Starmer has shown that He Is Serious about tackling the problem. All kinds of reasons can later be found for why the ID idea won’t after all work.

• And finally…

• It’s impossible to pretend that the idea of a world ruled by Vlad, Xi and Kim isn’t very alarming, the more so as all of them were recently overheard having a conversation at their recent gun-fest about people being able to live to 150. Perhaps the problem is purely subjective and comes from an atavistic fear of not recognising from where these people are coming. At least Trump, Starmer and Macron speak languages I can understand and, as regards the rest of Western Europe, whose alphabets I can recognise even if I have no idea what they’re talking about.

Is the real bias in the world perhaps not derived not from political or economic differences but from whether you write from the right or the left, if you use pictograms or letters and which way round you write your Rs?

• There are many problems with the way taxation works in the UK. Three of the more intractable and unpopular are Council Tax, Stamp Duty and Business Rates, each of which are (in the second case, as Angela Rayner would doubtless agree) well overdue for reform. Taxes are designed for a number of reasons: to raise money, to nudge behaviour and to satisfy particular social or political objectives. The last two of these may pass away but, if the first continues to be profitable, it will survive.

At present, the government’s need for cash is so acute that it would be unwise to expect any substantive reforms of a system which the government so often criticised when in opposition. Several options exist. Private Eye 1657 points out on p14 that some measures that have already been offered as possibilities, such as removing the CGT exemption for main residences, could raise what Rachel Reeves needs to plug our alleged £40bn black hole: at a political cost, of course. However, if you already have an outdated anachronistic system, there’s perhaps little to be lost from making it even worse.

• In sporting terms, August is my favourite month. The football season has started and the cricket season is still going on: particularly the Hundred, which I love equally in both the men’s and women’s versions. Cricket attention now shifts to the women’s World Cup in India and Sri Lanka which starts at the end of this month.

After deriving so much pleasure from this sport, I was delighted to learn on the BBC website that “the winners of the Women’s World Cup will take home more prize money than Australia received for winning the previous men’s version following a huge boost to the prize fund.” This is due to its increasing popularity. It’s been a long time coming: and it’s happened quite quickly, mainly over the last fifteen years.

• Words and music have the power to move me. Visual art, on the other hand, generally leaves me completely cold. Regardless of one’s views, the hoard of looted Nazi art transcends any considerations of the merits of the creation. Examples of these –few of which are as engaging or fictional as those in Graham Greene’s delightful Travels with my Aunt – are constantly being uncovered. The most recent case was exposed when a long-lost painting by Giuseppe Ghislandi was discovered on a estate agent’s website in Argentina. It seems that the numerous consequences of WW2 will never end…

Across the area