Police to take no further action over Angela Rayner allegations – UK politics live | Politics

Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader, has welcomed the conclusion of the Greater Manchester police investigation into allegations against her. (See 4.01pm.) She said the Tory complaint about her was political motivated and that the public were fed up of such “desperate tactics”.

I welcome the conclusion of the police investigation, and confirmation that no further action will be taken.

We have seen the Conservative party use this playbook before – reporting political opponents to the police during election campaigns to distract from their dire record. The public have had enough of these desperate tactics from a Tory government with nothing else to say after 14 years of failure.

I am grateful to all those who have stood by and supported me and my family. My focus now is squarely on securing the change Britain needs, with the election of a Labour government.

Severin Carrell

Scottish National party sources have denied claims their candidate in Lothian East, Iain Whyte, resigned last week partly because he was annoyed it had failed to give him the money he was promised when he first stood in the seat. (See 1.10pm.)

Whyte quit the campaign suddenly the day after Rishi Sunak announced a snap election, forcing the SNP to quickly appoint Lyn Jardine, the party’s group leader on East Lothian council, as his replacement.

SNP sources said that Whyte, who had previously worked in the parliamentary office for the then SNP minister Paul Wheelhouse, has health issues which he hoped to overcome in time for a general election later this year.

Other sources in the constituency report Whyte also stood down because he felt the resources and money he believed were needed to compete effectively against Douglas Alexander and Scottish Labour had not been provided. The SNP has significant financial problems.

Whyte was nominated by Nicola Sturgeon and believed Lothian East was a priority seat for the SNP, partly because it has been represented by Kenny MacAskill, the former Scottish justice secretary who defected to Alex Salmond’s breakaway nationalist party Alba in 2021.

SNP sources said this claim was “factually incorrect”, and said spending and resources had never come up in the local branch. His decision to stand down was a purely personal one.

Lothian East, long known as East Lothian until the latest Boundary Commission review, has become a Scottish political weathervane.

It has changed hands between Labour and the SNP three times since the 2014 independence referendum. The SNP regained it in 2019 with a 3,886-vote majority. Alexander, a former international development secretary and transport secretary, is widely expected to win it back for Labour.

Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, has given sit-down interviews to various broadcasters which have just been released. Most of the questions focused on what she meant when she said earlier that Labour’s plans would not require any tax rises additional to the ones already announced by the party. (See 2.18pm.)

Andy Bell from 5 News asked about fuel duty. In theory fuel duty is supposed to go up every year (the rates are set in cash terms, and to keep their value they have to go up in line with inflation), and the Treasury plans on the basis that it will go up every year. But for most of the last 20 years or so chancellor have frozen fuel duty rather than impose an increase on motorists.

Asked if her comments about not raising taxes covered fuel duty, Reeves said:

We’ve always supported the freezes in fuel duty these last few years. And we will set that out in a budget but our track record at the last budget [shows] we were calling for that freeze and we’re pleased that the government did that.

Asked if that meant that she would continue to freeze fuel duty, she said she would not write a budget now, but added: “We’ve always been clear we’ve not supported increases in fuel duty over the last few years and you can judge us on our record.”

Sam Coates from Sky News asked Reeves, when she said her plans did not require tax rises, whether that was a statement that would apply for a whole parliament. Reeves refused to say, and she would not go beyond just repeating the point about her plans not requiring tax rises. She said she would not write a budget now.

But she confirmed that Labour has committed to not putting up income tax or national insurance – implying that her comment about taxes in general not needing to go up was not such a cast-iron commitment.

And in an interview with Christopher Hope from GB News, asked if her pledges not to raise income tax, national insurance or corporation tax (a promise from February) would cover all five years of the next parliament, she said they would.

Back at the Q&A, Keir Starmer takes a question about freedom of movement.

Q: Will you do anything on freedom of movement for goods or people?

Starmer says there was freedom of movement when the UK was in the EU, but he says it is not coming back. There is no case for saying we should go back into the EU. The referendum settled that, he says.

But he says he can see why a firm like Airbus needs to be able to send workers to plants abroad. That is not freedom of movement; that is just work, he says. And he says he wants to make it easier for that to happen than it is now. He says the Brexit deal negotiated by Boris Johnson was a “botched job”. It can be improved.

Reeves says Labour wants a better deal with the EU on veterinary regulations.

And she says Labour wants to secure touring rights for artists within the EU, so musicins going on tour don’t need to deal with the current “prohibitive and bureaucratic” rules.

And she says the Brexit deal did little for the sevice sector. She suggests she would like to improve that.

Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, are taking part in a Q&A at an Airbus plan in Hertfordshire. Opening the session, Starmer makes a point of saying questioners are not being vetted and anyone can ask anything.

The first question comes from someone who says he has not voted Labour before. That’s allowed, Starmer says. The questioner asks if Labour will eliminate waste in government procurement.

Starmer says he thinks the government could do more to use procurement as a means of generating growth.

Reeves is speaking now. She says Labour has committed not to increase income tax or national insurance at all.

She says she is particulary angry about the money wasted on Covid contracts. She would appoint a commissioner to get every penny back where contracts were not fulfilled.

This is the second time a police inquiry into Labour launched at the behest of the Tories has gone nowhere.

In the so-called beergate affair, Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner were accused of breaking lockdown rules after Starmer was photographed drinking beer in an office with Labour staff when they had a takeaway meal while working late during the local election campaign in 2021. Starmer and Rayner said they would resign if they were found to have done anything wrong. An inquiry by Durham police concluded that they hadn’t.

The allegations received extensive coverage, particularly in the Daily Mail, and the Conservative MP Richard Holden was particularly prominent in demanding a full investigation. He was later promoted and appointed Conservative party chair.

James Daly, the current deputy chair, was instrumental in persuading Greater Manchester police to carry out a full inquiry into the various allegations about Rayner. These allegations, also reported endlessly by the Mail, were prompted by revelations about Rayner’s living arrangements when she bought her first house published in a biography by Lord Ashcroft, who is a former Tory deputy chair. When Greater Manchester police initially decided the complaints weren’t worth investigating, Daly complained.

The Tories pushed the the beergate story when Boris Johnson was under pressure over Partygate, and they clearly wanted to imply equivalance; that lockdown rules were being ignored by people from all parties.

But the police inquiry into Partygate did lead to action. Some 83 people were fined, including Boris Johnson, the then PM, and Rishi Sunak, the then chancellor.

Greater Manchester police has said that it is not taking any further action over allegations that Angela Rayner, the deputy Labour leader, broke the law after she bought a council home which she subsequently sold before becoming an MP.

Tories and Tory-supported papers suggested that she may have broken electoral law, by registering the wrong home as her main residence, as well as suggesting that she wrongly avoided paying capital gains tax when she sold the property. James Daly, the Tory deputy chair, complained to the police, and then insisted that they looked into it properly when they initially dismissed the allegations, even though in interviews he subsequently refused to say what he thought she had done wrong.

A spokesperson said:

Following allegations about Angela Rayner MP, Greater Manchester police has completed a thorough, carefully considered and proportionate investigation. We have concluded that no further police action will be taken.

The investigation originated from complaints made by Mr James Daly MP directly to GMP. Subsequent further contact with GMP by members of the public, and claims made by individuals featured in media reporting, indicated a strong public interest in the need for allegations to be investigated.

Matters involving council tax and personal tax do not fall into the jurisdiction of policing. GMP has liaised with Stockport council and information about our investigation has been shared with them. Details of our investigation have also been shared with His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC).