Good summary of things. My prediction is civil unrest followed by a steep decline, leading to more unrest. All that contributing to a very serious hardening of attitudes as people learn Labour, Conservative, Reform etc. all ultimately dance to the same tune. More immigration, more climate initiatives, more taxes, more decline. None of them are in a position to respond to voter concerns. We see this in most Western countries now. Germany and France are no better. Canada is becoming a basket case. Ireland is dying.
I do think people are now beginning to realize this will not end well. No one is coming to our rescue, least of all political parties.
Yes. France it seems has already collapsed. At least its government has, for many of the same reasons ours will, including of course, unsustainable debt.
There's an irony that government pretends to create growth from state spending (the absurd modern monetary theory nonsense) and thus thinks that massive taxation, to raise the money it wants to spend to create faux growth is fine.
It's as if the state were totally detatched from basic economics.
The less said about Torsten Bell demanding others pay high taxes while slapping his on expenses the better.
Great summary of the situation. The only area I might disagree is about the possible electoral situation - the rise of the "independents" (Islamist) group. There is already a small group of them and it seems likely they will grow, splitting from the Left and thus dooming Labour. In the process ridding us of such luminaries as Jess Phillips. What do you think?
Hi Pilgrim. Yes. You could well be right. The ‘independents’ have been emboldened by their successes last time. It was appalling to see how they treated Phillips. And it was appalling how she herself danced around the problem, blaming the abuse she received on non specific, general and anonymous ’men’.
It is not a small group. It is 85 percent or more of Muslims. They are quite open about it too. Leading Muslims warned Starmer the last election would be the last time Muslims backed Labour because they won't need them in future. I believe the goal is to import another 10-20m over the next five to ten years.
Naturally, things might become a little tense before any of that happens. But the chattering classes are in absolute denial about what is happening and what will become of them.
It’s quite hard to see the loonie left parties (Labour, LibDems, ScotNats, Greens) coalescing as they hate each other more passionately than anyone else. The ever louder voices of the RoP will surely sink the Labour Party as the Palestinian issue divides the activists and the funders into utterly opposed camps.
It’s also very hard to see a Reform Tory deal as no one under 80 will ever vote Tory again and Reform (at least currently) believe that they’ve got this. The main problem is that it’s incredibly hard to believe that Farridge will even attempt half of what’s necessary, let alone achieve it.
Considering the damage has been done over some 30 years, undoing it, even with the active support of the blob would take ten. As the blob will oppose Farage and Reform at every single step - and there's nothing he can do about it except reform it first, which would be done by... yes! The group being, err, reformed.
Reform are doomed. The Left have spent decades destroying this country. They're not going to permit some 'upstart populist' elected by the public to get in their way.
Heck, look at their spite over Brexit: massive uncontrolled immigration, crushing taxation, an abject refusal to leave the EU and chaining us further to it, demolition of public assets - the blob seems determined to force a dystopian future.
If they are turned off by Farridge, as many are, and are presented by every other party with differing shades of the same failed Establishment nonsense - ever-increasing State & taxes, uncontrolled immigration and high energy costs/deindustialization - they just won’t vote.
‘This advice gave rise to Ms Rayner's understanding - which I consider to have been held in good faith’.
The advice, from two firms of solicitors, was that she needed to take specialist tax advice. She decided not to follow that advice and then tried to pass the blame onto the lawyers who clearly had given her very sound advice.
If that provides an explanation of how Rayner reached her “understanding” of her tax position, and is an example of acting in good faith, I’d be very interested to know what Sir Laurie would consider to be bad faith conduct.
Thank you for sharing your nightmare vision of a possible future. If a Rayner / Phillipson reign of terror is to be our future perhaps I need to change my vehement opposition to the Assisted Dying Bill.
Yes Paul. I’m no Boris Johnson supporter. But can you imagine Sir Laurie would have been quite so accommodating if Johnson had committed a similar ‘error’?
My own cynical suspicion is that Rayner shopped around for the advice that gave her the answer she wanted.
The sensible option would have been to employ the lawyers who setup the trust for her disabled son, since they would have been fully conversant with her financial arrangements. Unfortunately for Rayner, this would mean she had no choice but to pay the higher rate of stamp duty.
So instead, Rayner instructed a separate firm of conveyancers, gave them only a partial account of her finances (presumably saying she had sold her share in the previous home, without disclosing that the sale was to her child's trust) and paying the lesser amount of tax -- while calculating that, if the story were ever to come out, then she could claim to have made an honest mistake.
This firm of conveyancers did, indeed, state that they did not give tax advice and this should be sought separately if in doubt. And that latter bland statement is what led to Rayner's downfall.
It's the same as finding that Labour were not anti-Semitic when they clearly were. Then finding that there was no two tier policing when there blatantly was.
They appoint who they want to find the answers they want. The committee members all get a gong and the trough overflows. That's what we have to stop. If they cannot waste our money, they are powerless.
“After all Cooper’s is one of the few faces in international politics which could give Ursula Von Der Leyen’s a run for its money, in a milk curdling contest.” 😆🤣🤣
Angela Rayner really should have come to me for advice.
Now I know little about stamp duty, but I've advised on tax for nigh on fifty years, so as soon as the papers said that Rayner had sold her share in the house in Ashton to a trust for a minor child, my tax advice alarm bells immediately went off.
is owned on behalf of children under the age of 18 (parents are treated as the owners even if the property is held through a trust and they are not the trustees)"
So I commented at length in the Daily Telegraph and, lo and behold, the end was nigh.
"Angela Rayner - my part in her downfall" will be a hit on Netflix at no date soon.
Whoever the two lawyers who advised her in writing were, I won't be looking to them for advice any time soon.
Rayner needed money for the deposit on Hove, so that's why she sold her remaining 25% of Ashton to her children's trust, plus, no doubt she thought, a nifty £40,000 stamp duty saving would come in handy. Unfortunately the deeming provision in paragraph 12 schedule 4ZA FA 2003 disagreed.
So she probably tried to "avoid" tax by selling one house before buying another, a bit like everyone else in the country, except they don't have a convenient trust with NHS compensation to sell to. And actually that's a far, far murkier zone than an oversight on stamp duty. I always thought parents were supposed to provide a home for their children, not sell it to a trust for one of them.
So Sir Laurie was right to say there was no attempt to avoid or evade tax. However, there was a failure to seek specialist advice, after being advised to do so by two people in writing.
Failure to pay the proper tax is normally a breach of the Ministerial code, and her failure to take advice when recommended to do so sealed her fate.
But, to quote those famous words, roughly anyway, "she'll be back."
Yes Jeremy. The question no one seems to be asking is whether inflating the value of her Manchester property in order to fund her Hove flat constituted any type of fraud. I don’t know. I am not accusing her of anything.
But when Donald Trump did something similar to secure a loan, everyone anxious to give Rayner a pass was going round screaming ‘convicted felon!!! ’.
Different legal systems I know. But it seems much the same to me.
The trust should have been protected by its trustees whose duty it was to consider whether a 50%, and then 75%, investment in this property was (a) a suitable investment for the trust to hold bearing in mind the needs of its beneficiary, (b) the amount paid represented a fair, arm’s length price and (c) that a fair rent was received from the Rayners for occupying and using the property which they no longer wholly owned.
If the trustees didn’t do this, they were negligent. If the trustees were the Rayners, which we don’t know but seems eminently likely in a case such as this, then there was a serious conflict of interest which they needed to manage. Trustees are not permitted to make profits from the trusts they are administering. Any such profits made in breach of trust must in law be repaid to the trust. In this instance, if the Rayners were the trustees, such profit would include any excess value they authorised as trustees to be paid to themselves and also and shortfall from the fair rent which should have been paid.
The trustee aspect of this hasn’t been much discussed, and in fairness we don’t know the identity of the trustees, but it opens up a whole new murky can of worms.
If there was any inflation in value, it was when the house was valued at £650,000 in 2023, when the Rayners each sold 25% of the property to the disabled child's trust.
For some reason it was accidentally valued at 75% of the value, but this was corrected in 2024.
Rayner then sold her remaining 25% to the trust in January 2025, for the same value as the 2023 value, £162,500 per quarter of the property. One has to ask why the trust would want another 25% (but not all) of the property whhen the value apparently hadn't gone up in two years.
Had she bought the Hove property in 2026, she'd have been fine, but she is like so many nowadays: instant gratification.
How could Laurie find there was no attempt to mislead when quite clearly Raynor sought to retain ownership by using her son's trust - which she is the executor (probably the wrong word) of, but legally divest herself of the property on paper, then use that money as a deposit?
She cheated, she got caught, they let her off.
The tangled knot of tax law is mind boggling - our tax code an utter abomination.
The Nightmare from Downing Street continues and I thought was beyond parody, until your wonderful analysis. If Phillipson becomes Deputy Leader, then the UK must brace itself for even more Marxist misery.
Thanks Andrew. Yes the lurch to the left seems inevitable. They will undoubtedly double down on all the idiocy which brought them, and us, to this point.
It’s not even ideological any more, by any rational metric, this government is an absolute disaster.
"Facing Badenoch over the Despatch Box must be like being beaten to death with a sock full of Angel Delight." That one competes quite well with Denis Healey's likening of a criticism by Sir Geoffrey Howe to "being savaged by a dead sheep". As for the term "fuckwittery" I am confident of its impending inclusion in the OED. Thus far it has only made it to Wiktionary!
Thanks LSO for another good read, a laff our loud. I, for one, as a former "working class lass", am not happy about being bracketed with this coarse and vulgar harridan, with her entitlement and her (former) smug presence on the Prime Ministerial bench, just waiting for 'her turn'. I'm not certain that she will return to any meaningful role, even with Unite pushing for it - although today's news that the truly ghastly Thornberry has the cheek to propose herself as Deputy PM makes you wonder if the Night of The Living Dead is truly coming to pass. And Philipson?? Good gawd..
My prediction is that we are in for a very bad 20-odd years in politics, however or whoever is in charge.
If Angela Rayner is the poster girl for the working class, I'm defecting to the aristocracy.
Our Ange seems to have got by on the coarse ' I'm Northern, I am...and I've had a tough life."
No qualification for high office.
Most of us raised on very little don't resort to cheating, lying, fiddling the books, deception...or gleefully admitting to doing a Sharon Stone in front of work colleagues.
I hope her political career sinks without trace. Who'd ever trust her again?
I don't know whether you saw the pathetic attempt by the Daily Mirror to suggest Farage had also avoided stamp duty, so had no right to criticise Rayner?
This nonsense is based on the fact that Farage had the temerity to call the Clacton house "my house," when it is owned by his girlfriend.
Somehow the Mirror thinks that this means Farage owns the house for stamp duty purposes. So when your children call the house they live in "my house," will HMRC be examining whether they can squeeze stamp duty out of them?
All Farage pointed out was that she had to go as Sir Laurie said she had broken the Ministerial code. Unless the Mirror knows something I don't, Farage is not in the Labour cabinet yet.
This was front page stuff. Talk about desperation. If Reform come to power, I hope he does a News of the World on the feeble rag.
Thanks for cheering us up, as always. The nightmare scenario is important - however painful - to concentrate minds on what could happen if the right, or rather sensible majority, divide their attention.
Could British politics possibly be more of a parody than you describe? Joking apart, what actually qualifies Rayner (or Lammy, or Milliband, or Uncle Tom Cobbley) to be a Minister apart from self-belief?
More likely the current government will implode in the next couple of years due to financially ruining the country, and we’ll be ruled by coalition governments from now on, a la Italy, with all the horse trading and stasis that involves. We’ll look back on the last First Past The Post government with nostalgia.
It's the absolute radio silence from Al beeb and the rest of the Left wing press that gets me most. Here's Raynor, proving Lefties are hypocrites to the core and there's the Left wing media, refusing to discuss Labour corruption and reinforcing the hypocrisy.
If this were a Tory or Reformer they'd never shut up.
The problem isn't corruption. That's expected. These peple are thieves, fools, liars and cheats. It's why they go in to politics, after all. No, for me, the problem is the hypocritical arrogance, the expectation they'll get away with it, the idea they are untouchable.
As you say though, Raynor will likely get bailed out by some union non-job. I doubt she personally holds the mortgage, likely funnelling it through tax vehicles.
Good summary of things. My prediction is civil unrest followed by a steep decline, leading to more unrest. All that contributing to a very serious hardening of attitudes as people learn Labour, Conservative, Reform etc. all ultimately dance to the same tune. More immigration, more climate initiatives, more taxes, more decline. None of them are in a position to respond to voter concerns. We see this in most Western countries now. Germany and France are no better. Canada is becoming a basket case. Ireland is dying.
I do think people are now beginning to realize this will not end well. No one is coming to our rescue, least of all political parties.
Yes. France it seems has already collapsed. At least its government has, for many of the same reasons ours will, including of course, unsustainable debt.
There's an irony that government pretends to create growth from state spending (the absurd modern monetary theory nonsense) and thus thinks that massive taxation, to raise the money it wants to spend to create faux growth is fine.
It's as if the state were totally detatched from basic economics.
The less said about Torsten Bell demanding others pay high taxes while slapping his on expenses the better.
Great summary of the situation. The only area I might disagree is about the possible electoral situation - the rise of the "independents" (Islamist) group. There is already a small group of them and it seems likely they will grow, splitting from the Left and thus dooming Labour. In the process ridding us of such luminaries as Jess Phillips. What do you think?
Hi Pilgrim. Yes. You could well be right. The ‘independents’ have been emboldened by their successes last time. It was appalling to see how they treated Phillips. And it was appalling how she herself danced around the problem, blaming the abuse she received on non specific, general and anonymous ’men’.
It is not a small group. It is 85 percent or more of Muslims. They are quite open about it too. Leading Muslims warned Starmer the last election would be the last time Muslims backed Labour because they won't need them in future. I believe the goal is to import another 10-20m over the next five to ten years.
Naturally, things might become a little tense before any of that happens. But the chattering classes are in absolute denial about what is happening and what will become of them.
Hoist by their own petard indeed!
More like beheaded by their charges. Utterly naive.
It’s quite hard to see the loonie left parties (Labour, LibDems, ScotNats, Greens) coalescing as they hate each other more passionately than anyone else. The ever louder voices of the RoP will surely sink the Labour Party as the Palestinian issue divides the activists and the funders into utterly opposed camps.
It’s also very hard to see a Reform Tory deal as no one under 80 will ever vote Tory again and Reform (at least currently) believe that they’ve got this. The main problem is that it’s incredibly hard to believe that Farridge will even attempt half of what’s necessary, let alone achieve it.
Considering the damage has been done over some 30 years, undoing it, even with the active support of the blob would take ten. As the blob will oppose Farage and Reform at every single step - and there's nothing he can do about it except reform it first, which would be done by... yes! The group being, err, reformed.
Reform are doomed. The Left have spent decades destroying this country. They're not going to permit some 'upstart populist' elected by the public to get in their way.
Heck, look at their spite over Brexit: massive uncontrolled immigration, crushing taxation, an abject refusal to leave the EU and chaining us further to it, demolition of public assets - the blob seems determined to force a dystopian future.
If they are turned off by Farridge, as many are, and are presented by every other party with differing shades of the same failed Establishment nonsense - ever-increasing State & taxes, uncontrolled immigration and high energy costs/deindustialization - they just won’t vote.
You can but hope. But what if the ‘independents’ rally behind Real Labour for the purposes of the next election?
‘This advice gave rise to Ms Rayner's understanding - which I consider to have been held in good faith’.
The advice, from two firms of solicitors, was that she needed to take specialist tax advice. She decided not to follow that advice and then tried to pass the blame onto the lawyers who clearly had given her very sound advice.
If that provides an explanation of how Rayner reached her “understanding” of her tax position, and is an example of acting in good faith, I’d be very interested to know what Sir Laurie would consider to be bad faith conduct.
Thank you for sharing your nightmare vision of a possible future. If a Rayner / Phillipson reign of terror is to be our future perhaps I need to change my vehement opposition to the Assisted Dying Bill.
Yes Paul. I’m no Boris Johnson supporter. But can you imagine Sir Laurie would have been quite so accommodating if Johnson had committed a similar ‘error’?
I’ll have to have a long hard think about that one and get back to you in a month after I’ve done my research…..
My own cynical suspicion is that Rayner shopped around for the advice that gave her the answer she wanted.
The sensible option would have been to employ the lawyers who setup the trust for her disabled son, since they would have been fully conversant with her financial arrangements. Unfortunately for Rayner, this would mean she had no choice but to pay the higher rate of stamp duty.
So instead, Rayner instructed a separate firm of conveyancers, gave them only a partial account of her finances (presumably saying she had sold her share in the previous home, without disclosing that the sale was to her child's trust) and paying the lesser amount of tax -- while calculating that, if the story were ever to come out, then she could claim to have made an honest mistake.
This firm of conveyancers did, indeed, state that they did not give tax advice and this should be sought separately if in doubt. And that latter bland statement is what led to Rayner's downfall.
It's the same as finding that Labour were not anti-Semitic when they clearly were. Then finding that there was no two tier policing when there blatantly was.
They appoint who they want to find the answers they want. The committee members all get a gong and the trough overflows. That's what we have to stop. If they cannot waste our money, they are powerless.
Me too!!
“After all Cooper’s is one of the few faces in international politics which could give Ursula Von Der Leyen’s a run for its money, in a milk curdling contest.” 😆🤣🤣
Thanks LSO, that made me howl! 😂 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
Ha thanks Ady. And thanks Les Dawson for letting me borrow your mother in law joke!!
Angela Rayner really should have come to me for advice.
Now I know little about stamp duty, but I've advised on tax for nigh on fifty years, so as soon as the papers said that Rayner had sold her share in the house in Ashton to a trust for a minor child, my tax advice alarm bells immediately went off.
A quick google search brought up the government publication at https://www.gov.uk/guidance/stamp-duty-land-tax-buying-an-additional-residential-property
and it says:
"Include any residential property that:
is owned on behalf of children under the age of 18 (parents are treated as the owners even if the property is held through a trust and they are not the trustees)"
So I commented at length in the Daily Telegraph and, lo and behold, the end was nigh.
"Angela Rayner - my part in her downfall" will be a hit on Netflix at no date soon.
Whoever the two lawyers who advised her in writing were, I won't be looking to them for advice any time soon.
Rayner needed money for the deposit on Hove, so that's why she sold her remaining 25% of Ashton to her children's trust, plus, no doubt she thought, a nifty £40,000 stamp duty saving would come in handy. Unfortunately the deeming provision in paragraph 12 schedule 4ZA FA 2003 disagreed.
So she probably tried to "avoid" tax by selling one house before buying another, a bit like everyone else in the country, except they don't have a convenient trust with NHS compensation to sell to. And actually that's a far, far murkier zone than an oversight on stamp duty. I always thought parents were supposed to provide a home for their children, not sell it to a trust for one of them.
So Sir Laurie was right to say there was no attempt to avoid or evade tax. However, there was a failure to seek specialist advice, after being advised to do so by two people in writing.
Failure to pay the proper tax is normally a breach of the Ministerial code, and her failure to take advice when recommended to do so sealed her fate.
But, to quote those famous words, roughly anyway, "she'll be back."
Yes Jeremy. The question no one seems to be asking is whether inflating the value of her Manchester property in order to fund her Hove flat constituted any type of fraud. I don’t know. I am not accusing her of anything.
But when Donald Trump did something similar to secure a loan, everyone anxious to give Rayner a pass was going round screaming ‘convicted felon!!! ’.
Different legal systems I know. But it seems much the same to me.
The trust should have been protected by its trustees whose duty it was to consider whether a 50%, and then 75%, investment in this property was (a) a suitable investment for the trust to hold bearing in mind the needs of its beneficiary, (b) the amount paid represented a fair, arm’s length price and (c) that a fair rent was received from the Rayners for occupying and using the property which they no longer wholly owned.
If the trustees didn’t do this, they were negligent. If the trustees were the Rayners, which we don’t know but seems eminently likely in a case such as this, then there was a serious conflict of interest which they needed to manage. Trustees are not permitted to make profits from the trusts they are administering. Any such profits made in breach of trust must in law be repaid to the trust. In this instance, if the Rayners were the trustees, such profit would include any excess value they authorised as trustees to be paid to themselves and also and shortfall from the fair rent which should have been paid.
The trustee aspect of this hasn’t been much discussed, and in fairness we don’t know the identity of the trustees, but it opens up a whole new murky can of worms.
If there was any inflation in value, it was when the house was valued at £650,000 in 2023, when the Rayners each sold 25% of the property to the disabled child's trust.
For some reason it was accidentally valued at 75% of the value, but this was corrected in 2024.
Rayner then sold her remaining 25% to the trust in January 2025, for the same value as the 2023 value, £162,500 per quarter of the property. One has to ask why the trust would want another 25% (but not all) of the property whhen the value apparently hadn't gone up in two years.
Had she bought the Hove property in 2026, she'd have been fine, but she is like so many nowadays: instant gratification.
How could Laurie find there was no attempt to mislead when quite clearly Raynor sought to retain ownership by using her son's trust - which she is the executor (probably the wrong word) of, but legally divest herself of the property on paper, then use that money as a deposit?
She cheated, she got caught, they let her off.
The tangled knot of tax law is mind boggling - our tax code an utter abomination.
The Nightmare from Downing Street continues and I thought was beyond parody, until your wonderful analysis. If Phillipson becomes Deputy Leader, then the UK must brace itself for even more Marxist misery.
Thanks Andrew. Yes the lurch to the left seems inevitable. They will undoubtedly double down on all the idiocy which brought them, and us, to this point.
It’s not even ideological any more, by any rational metric, this government is an absolute disaster.
Stevie Smith. Always a treat.
Thanks York. Yes poetry. I am a classy writer, right? 🤣
Absolutely. Bringing some much-needed sparkle to this dump.
🙏
That is a horror story!🙈
"Facing Badenoch over the Despatch Box must be like being beaten to death with a sock full of Angel Delight." That one competes quite well with Denis Healey's likening of a criticism by Sir Geoffrey Howe to "being savaged by a dead sheep". As for the term "fuckwittery" I am confident of its impending inclusion in the OED. Thus far it has only made it to Wiktionary!
Thanks LSO for another good read, a laff our loud. I, for one, as a former "working class lass", am not happy about being bracketed with this coarse and vulgar harridan, with her entitlement and her (former) smug presence on the Prime Ministerial bench, just waiting for 'her turn'. I'm not certain that she will return to any meaningful role, even with Unite pushing for it - although today's news that the truly ghastly Thornberry has the cheek to propose herself as Deputy PM makes you wonder if the Night of The Living Dead is truly coming to pass. And Philipson?? Good gawd..
My prediction is that we are in for a very bad 20-odd years in politics, however or whoever is in charge.
I share your reservations.
If Angela Rayner is the poster girl for the working class, I'm defecting to the aristocracy.
Our Ange seems to have got by on the coarse ' I'm Northern, I am...and I've had a tough life."
No qualification for high office.
Most of us raised on very little don't resort to cheating, lying, fiddling the books, deception...or gleefully admitting to doing a Sharon Stone in front of work colleagues.
I hope her political career sinks without trace. Who'd ever trust her again?
I don't know whether you saw the pathetic attempt by the Daily Mirror to suggest Farage had also avoided stamp duty, so had no right to criticise Rayner?
This nonsense is based on the fact that Farage had the temerity to call the Clacton house "my house," when it is owned by his girlfriend.
Somehow the Mirror thinks that this means Farage owns the house for stamp duty purposes. So when your children call the house they live in "my house," will HMRC be examining whether they can squeeze stamp duty out of them?
All Farage pointed out was that she had to go as Sir Laurie said she had broken the Ministerial code. Unless the Mirror knows something I don't, Farage is not in the Labour cabinet yet.
This was front page stuff. Talk about desperation. If Reform come to power, I hope he does a News of the World on the feeble rag.
Thanks for cheering us up, as always. The nightmare scenario is important - however painful - to concentrate minds on what could happen if the right, or rather sensible majority, divide their attention.
Always a treat to read your writing - thank you.
Could British politics possibly be more of a parody than you describe? Joking apart, what actually qualifies Rayner (or Lammy, or Milliband, or Uncle Tom Cobbley) to be a Minister apart from self-belief?
More likely the current government will implode in the next couple of years due to financially ruining the country, and we’ll be ruled by coalition governments from now on, a la Italy, with all the horse trading and stasis that involves. We’ll look back on the last First Past The Post government with nostalgia.
It's the absolute radio silence from Al beeb and the rest of the Left wing press that gets me most. Here's Raynor, proving Lefties are hypocrites to the core and there's the Left wing media, refusing to discuss Labour corruption and reinforcing the hypocrisy.
If this were a Tory or Reformer they'd never shut up.
The problem isn't corruption. That's expected. These peple are thieves, fools, liars and cheats. It's why they go in to politics, after all. No, for me, the problem is the hypocritical arrogance, the expectation they'll get away with it, the idea they are untouchable.
As you say though, Raynor will likely get bailed out by some union non-job. I doubt she personally holds the mortgage, likely funnelling it through tax vehicles.