Like Trump and Israel, Farage is allowed to behave with impunity

Please continue to investigate the detailed facts about Nigel Farage activities and funding……democracy requires the detail to be in the public domain….

The UK's right wing press treat Farage as their darling because they are mostly owned by the very people backing Farage - the millionaires and billionaires. Johnson was the same and eventually his rogue personality and miss doings caught with him. He went too far. Farage's day of reckoning will come, let's hope it's before he completely trashes the country. Well done that Democrat for calling Farage out - I wish more would do it here.

Excellent article Martin. It is important to keep highlighting what most of the media choose to ignore. You provide the facts.

It's time to abolish second jobs.

I am not a person who has any qualifications to be taken any notice of but I am a voter who believes that his vote is important. I look at these two people and I see Angela Rayner as a committed politician who has made a mistake. I am sure that she is one of those rare politicians who are doing the job for the right reasons and she has taken advice from people realised too late that she has made an error of judgment and despite the fact that she has offered to repay the difference she had not thought of the consequences of her actions and has had to pay the penalty. Nigel Farage on the other hand appears to be a clever snake oil salesman who has learned how to make a lot of money out of a situation. I feel that sadly we need more politicians like Angela Rayner who are prepared to apologise and try and repair the damage and continue with conviction but the fact that they are basically decent people probably doesn’t equip them to compete with the conmen such as Mr Farage. We are living in sad times.

Clearly she is entitled to the money. Claiming money that you're entitled do in accordance with the rules is not greedy, it is precisely what it is there for. If your company didn't offer you good terms and conditions on leaving the company, that's a matter of your choice for working for that company. Always check your contract before you sign up and make sure you're happy with it.

Doesn't matter whether you resign or get sacked. She's served more than six months and as far as the report goes, she hasn't "seriously" breached the ministerial code, there's a threshold between breaching the ministerial code and seriously breaching the ministerial code. https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-9656/CBP-9656.pdf In short, she's fully entitled to the money as long as the Prime Minister says that she is. This policy was introduced by Margret Thatcher in 1988.

I disagree. I was living, back in the day, for ten years within sight of the 'bog-standard' comprehensive school which Rayner started to attend at the age of 11 around 1991, and within a couple of miles of the pretty grotty council estate where she grew up. So I know the area, and its people, pretty well. Indeed, I used to go into her school a couple of times each year to use my specialism to support one of the teachers there. I think that Rayner's amply demonstrated that she's an unusually sharp cookie, simply because no one with her background could have achieved what she's achieved if that were not the case. But in the context of her being 'a sharp cookie', there are nonetheless limits. Given her earlier career history, it's wholly unreasonable to suggest that she ought to have been on top of the details of the law which relates to trusts and stamp duty. That's a very specialist area, and however bright she might be, I think that she would certainly be ignorant about the specifics of what those regulations require. So I accept her plea when she asserts that she hadn't really grasped what was required of her. But that doesn't make her innocent of offence, given that she seems to have been advised, by the professionals whom she did consult, no less than three times that she ought to seek further specialist advice from experts in the law relating to stamp duty and trusts as to what her tax liability was likely to be. That, as she's admitted, she failed to do, and so I agree completely with the ethics advisor's opinion that her conduct failed to live up to the standards required of people in high positions in public life. So her resignation was the right and the honourable thing to do. However, I think that it's absolutely clear that her sin was one of omission rather than of commission.

The big difference here is that - even assuming she made a mistake - Rayner broke the rules. As much as I despise Farage, as I understand it he is exploiting a loophole (which shouldn't exist) and has not broken any rules. If there was any doubt that Rayner was on the fiddle, that must surely have evaporated when she was caught out lying about asking her conveyancing firm for advice: https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/conveyancing-firm-denies-giving-rayner-tax-advice/5124370.article I had high hopes for her at the outset; unlike many of her colleagues she at least talked the talk of a socialist. Sadly it's become apparent that she is simply Prescott to Starmer's considerably worse version of Blair. She's sat on her hands far too many times now while Starmer has carried out unforgivable acts to be regarded as anything other than a sell out. Power soon corrupted her, didn't it?

You know there's a difference between someone having been fined by HMRC and someone not even knowing they owed anything. As you ignored above, even the Telegraph’s weekly tax advice columnist didn’t know about this rule

Nasty piece of work!

Hats off to Jamie Raskin butwhy aren't our politicians giving Farage the same treatment? Is it a case of give him enough rope.Because given Farage's admission that he doesn't have any Reform talent to form a government and hopes to rely on tried and tested incompetent Tory MPs to bale him out doesn't bode well for the future of this country. Nadine Norris and the Insomniac FFS !

Let's be honest about the situation, Labour are in power and should be held to the highest standard, Nigel Farage is not and is within tax rules. Working as a freelance Farage correctly has set up a company, this is a standard practice for anyone in his position like it or not. Mr Shipton should take more time critiquing the government, not someone who as his company name states is a thorn in Labours side. I am a staunch Labour voter but am struggling to understand what it stands for anymore. This last year has been completely disastrous and Starmer needs to be held to account, do not deflect by attacking someone who will never be in power get on with reporting about the people who are making the shocking decisions.

As 'bent' as Johnson was unambiguously demonstrated to have been? Pull the other one!