She played by the rules. He played by the rules. So why does it matter?

When politics is about setting the rules and when politics is a moral and ethical pursuit, this Tory Government is left wanting.

It is clear that the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, and his wife, Akshata Murty, have taken advantage of tax avoidance schemes expanding their personal wealth while he’s raised taxes for everyone else, diminishing their income. We are subsidising his lifestyle. It matters.

This week social security payments, including pensions, have gone up at only half the rate of inflation, despite my protestations in Parliament. People can’t afford their rent, their heating, their fuel or their food, and yet the person who could make the difference, is protecting his own interests.

The sense of entitlement goes to the heart of this Government. He is not the only one. The Health Secretary too. How many more? The former Attorney General, former Environment Secretary, could not differentiate between their lucrative second earnings from Non-Doms and the revolving door of sleazy contracts, from their political duty.

It seems endemic in the upper tiers of Government, and the Prime Minister just turns a blind eye.

It isn’t just the way they run the nation’s finances to benefit theirs. Remember the parties? Don’t forget the parties. While we didn’t see ageing parents or visit hospitals or care homes, or spent months with very little contact with others, lonely and depressed, they were living it up at No.10. One rule for them, while everyone else suffered. There is form.

It is right that we feel angry. No-one likes being taken for a ride. We all are. Rather than just focusing on the disgraceful behaviours of the personal conduct of those in the top echelons of Government, I have been looking at the system they preside over and that Labour would change.

The extraction of assets for gain is everywhere we look. Public land sold into private hands for developers to landbank and then extract their wealth – Bootham Park Hospital, the Barbican site, will York Central be next?

Look at leaseholders paying extortionate amounts to management companies in virtually every modern housing scheme. Or private landlords extracting as much of your income as they can get away with, stopping you ever owning your own home, as they save up to buy their next.

As we seem to work longer and longer hours, many businesses are creaming off their wealth while skimming the wages of their employees. I have been supporting the workers at Valeo who have been taking industrial action, as they work for poverty wages and are having their conditions cut.

The company’s owner Bain Capital, a private equity firm, is extracting its wealth while shrinking the wages of its wealth makers, those factory workers now facing a cost-of-living crisis.

Should we be shocked? Such extraction from the Chancellor, developers and companies is in line with the imperial tradition of Great Britain, extracting goods, crops, minerals, wealth and people to build Victorian Britain. As we now shake our heads at the exploitation perpetrated against people and planet two centuries ago, it is no different from the conduct that we are seeing by senior Tory politicians today; extract and exploit to personally gain.

As support workers in one of York’s charities told me this week about their going to work during the pandemic - it was them who kept the country running. They are part of an army of essential workers getting little more than the minimum wage.

We clapped the essential workers – the nurses, the carers, the shop workers, the delivery drivers - as the essential workers who kept us fed and cared for. They are the ones struggling under this Chancellor as he has just raised taxes, disproportionately impacting on low wage earners.

Just stop and think. Who is exploiting you? Your boss, your landlord, the Chancellor for sure.

The antidote, radical redistribution. Close the Non Dom status. Bring pensions in line with the cost of living and other social security payments the same.

Homes built to give everyone a chance to secure housing. Work seeking more cooperative models with better wages and Government addressing the poverty wages of those essential workers.

The Chancellor should, but blind-sided by his own tax affairs, and ordering his own inquiry into his personal wealth, no doubt at taxpayers expense, he has failed to review the hardship his unfair tax rules has caused.

This is the difference your vote can make. Labour believes it should be used for the benefit of the many not for the few.

  • Rachael Maskell is the Labour MP for York Central