Rayner, 44, an outspoken MP with a friendly, direct and sometimes brutally honest style, is one of Labour’s strongest electoral assets in reaching ordinary voters. Political analysts say she appeals to sections of the public that new Prime Minister Keir Starmer may not be able to connect with.
Angela Rayner was appointed deputy prime minister and minister of state for housing and communities on Friday, two key roles in the new administration. In her victory speech in the early hours of Friday morning, following winning her seat in Ashton-under-Lyne near Manchester, she praised “the working class who are the foundation of this country” and said: “There is no greater honour than to serve you.”
While Britain’s top political roles have traditionally been controlled by the country’s elite, with many of its powerbrokers coming from the same private schools and universities, Ms Rayner has taken a less traditional route to the top.
She left school when she was pregnant at the age of sixteen, then worked in nursing homes for the elderly, then became a union representative at her workplace, and came into politics through the union movement, where she first rose through the ranks of the union, before being elected as the first female Member of Parliament for her constituency.
She held prominent political positions under former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, and is often associated with the more left-leaning wing of the party. In 2020 she was elected deputy leader of the Labour Party, and despite some initial tensions with Starmer, she has flourished in a rejuvenated and more centre-left Labour Party.
But she was regularly targeted by political opponents and the tabloid press, something that Sarah Childs, professor of politics and gender at the University of Edinburgh, said was certainly linked to her burgeoning political career.
“The fact that she doesn’t apologize for her actions, and that she can be sharp at times, doesn’t necessarily always make her act the way some people might want women to act in public life, and that creates a context where critics who want to take that particular way of behaving and turn it into a problem,” Ms Childs says.
In 2022, a British newspaper published a report based on a Conservative lawmaker’s claim that Rayner tried to distract Prime Minister Boris Johnson in Parliament by rearranging her legs, and compared her to Sherwin Stone in the movie “Basic Instinct.”
The article was met with widespread anger from other lawmakers in Parliament, with one saying: “The story is that misogyny is alive and well and stalking the corridors of the House of Commons.”
Some anti-Labour critics on social media have mocked Rayner’s strong northern accent, which is a clear sign of her Stockport upbringing but a point of pride for her.
“I speak as people do where I grew up,” Rainer wrote in a post on social media platform X last year. “I want people from backgrounds like mine who were told to ‘know your place’ to know that public life is their place, too.”
Source: RT
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2024-07-08 01:33:10
