It’s not exactly a new political tactic – see the Conservatives’ ongoing claim Labour told them there was “no money left” when they took over in 2010 – but it is one they seem to be laying on rather thick so far.
Since getting the keys to No.10, the government has, almost without fail, blamed every major issue on the Tories.
In fact, Keir Starmer said on Thursday the last government “left us the worst inheritance since the Second World War”.
He added: “Every day we are finding more mess they’ve left for us to clear up.”
The prime minister also tried to buy his government some time, saying: “We’ve started the rebuilding but the problems that have been left to fester for years, cannot be fixed overnight.”
His health secretary, Wes Streeting, said their legacy was “shocking”.
Obviously the Conservatives have not taken to this lying down.
Tory leadership hopeful, Mel Stride, on Friday dismissed any such claims against his party, saying: “This is all pitch rolling, smoke and mirrors, to suggest that they’ve come in and it’s far, far worse than they ever could possibly have imagined. ”
So, just how bad is it? Let’s take a step-back from the political spin and a look at some of the cold, hard facts around some of Labour’s most eye-catching claims from recent weeks.
NHS
Streeting ordered an independent investigation into the state of the NHS a week after getting office.
On Friday, he revealed some of the early findings, all of which were pretty damning.
It found the Care Quality Commission, which is responsible for inspecting NHS hospitals, GP surgeries and care homes in England, is not fit for purpose.
Inspectors were found to be lacking experience, with some having never been in a hospital before or met a person with dementia.
Its inspections backlog is so large that a fifth of services had never been given a rating – and one NHS hospital has not had an inspection for a decade.
Meanwhile, the independent public spending watchdog, the National Audit Office (NAO) found the “scale of challenge facing the NHS today and foreseeable in the years ahead is unprecedented”.
It found a growing number of NHS bodies “have been unable to break even” with the amount of funding they’ve received, and the “pace of change” has been slow.
The authors of the NAO report said: “We are concerned that the NHS may be working at the limits of a system which might break before it is again able to provide patients with care that meets standards for timeliness and accessibility.”
It suggested policymakers must explain the potential mismatch between demand and funding, adding the NHS would need a larger budget or service levels would “deteriorate further”.
Economy
The full extent of the economic inheritance will be revealed in full by chancellor Rachel Reeves on Monday.
She is expected to reveal a “black hole” in the government finances worth tens of billions of pounds – possibly exceeding £20bn per year.
She already told the BBC last weekend: “I don’t think anyone realised quite how bad things were.”
While we wait for her report, the think tank, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, looked into the Tories’ economic legacy – and found it rather wanting.
It said the last 14 years have been “extraordinary” – with earnings growing at their slowest rate in more than 200 years, and interest rates at a historic low.
“The period from 2010 to 2019 saw the biggest and most sustained cuts to public spending since World War 2,” the report said, adding that this all benefited the older generations.
The last five years have been a particularly lethal combination, due to the uncertainty of Brexit, the Covid pandemic and borrowing “on a scale even greater than seen during the financial crisis”, all of which meant taxes rose by more during the last five years than in any parliament since at least 1945.
“The legacy for the next government will be a difficult one,” the IFS said. “Expected economic growth is slow.
“The fiscal policy responses to the three shocks of the financial crisis, Covid-19 and the cost of living crisis mean that public sector debt is high, and a combination of high interest rates and low growth means that even running a primary surplus will not be enough to get it on a downward trajectory.”
It also called out the repeatedly failed promises to raise fuel duties in line with inflation, which is “another unwanted legacy” for Labour.
It predicted that the future “looks harder” for the British economy compared to its other developed countries’ economies with low productivity and high inflation.
The IFS also noted that Labour’s note to the Tories from 2010 that “there is no money left” can be applied to the current government as it “remains true today”.
“The biggest and most sustained cuts to public spending since World War 2”
– Institute for Fiscal Studies
Prisons
The new justice secretary Shabana Mahmood said last week that the UK is facing “the imminent collapse of the criminal justice system”, which sounded liek “some dystopian film”.
She said: “This is the legacy of the last Conservative government. This is the legacy of the guilty men.”
And figures released by the Ministry of Justice on Thursday showed how deep the overcrowding prison crisis is.
There were 73,804 recorded self-harm incidents in the last year, and 28,292 violent assaults in prisons over the last 12 months.
Overcrowding in prisons increased for a third year in a row, meaning 23.6% of jails now have too many inmates.
Meanwhile, the performance of four in 10 prisons are either of concern or serious concern.
Prisons have been at 99% capacity since the start of 2023, meaning prisoners have struggled to get out of their cells much.
This is all increasing reoffending rates – and worsening the risk to the public.
Interestingly, even the former Tory justice secretary Alex Chalk has backed Mahmood’s plan to reduce some offenders′ sentences to ease the overcrowding.
HS2
The high speed rail project was partially cancelled by Rishi Sunak, who said it had become too expensive and promised to redirect its funding.
The NAO’s latest report found that the Tories spent £592m buying land and property along parts of the route which are no longer going ahead.
Construction costs have soared by £16.1bn just since 2020, too.
It will take three more years to cancel parts of the route at an additional cost of around £100m.
The trains, which will still run between Birmingham and Manchester, will also have less space than current services – a decline of up to 17%, NAO said.
According to the NAO, the government may need to decrease demand by “incentivising people to travel at different times or to not travel by rail”, although the spending watchdog warned that this this may constrain economic growth and increase environmental costs.
Alternatively, the government was advised to try “improving or adding infrastructure” – but that may be expensive and disruptive, too.
With the economy, the NHS, HS2 and the prison system all struggling, it seems Labour may have a point – they really did inherit quite the legacy.
But now they’re in power, they can only blame the Conservatives for so long until the public get bored. The real question now is, how will they fix it?
