Has Labour really found a bigger financial mess than it expected?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9r329y9pqxo
by Aggressive_Plates
Has Labour really found a bigger financial mess than it expected?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9r329y9pqxo
by Aggressive_Plates
31 comments
They will have known alot of this. Christ its hardly a secret the country is in a mess. But they can act dumb and have a get out of jail free card of “sorry we didnt know it was this bad” when they break promises
“The overall figure of £38.5bn [in tax rises] which would apply over the next four years, has been disputed by Labour.
Mr Sarwar, during a campaign visit in Glasgow, described Mr Sunak’s comment as “absolute deliberate misinformation and a lie from a desperate prime minister”.
He added: “There will not be tax rises for working people.”
Really hope that is true.
Given the Tories spent 14 years blaming everything bad they did on “the last Labour government”, I’d say they are probably due the same treatment now the boot is on the other foot.
Is this blame game any good for the country? Absolutely not.
I don’t think it terribly implausible that you don’t understand the true situation until you get into office. You’ve got an idea, for sure, but until you get in there and get access to all the nitty gritty details it seems entirely plausible to me that you might not understand the true scale of it.
Labour are clearly buttering up the public for tax rises with their current rhetoric.
How that will go down with their newly “flipped” middle England voters who are feeling squeezed by the highest taxes since WW2, and who feel the relentless encroach of minimum wage as it approaches their perceived “middle class” salaries is up for debate.
I think Labour will need to tread very carefully over the next few months if they want to avoid the optics that they plan to dump the cost of fixing the economy on middle earners like they’ve often been accused of in the past.
I’m not particularly anti-Labour but they do need to recognise that a lot of their voters at the last election were temporary ones, and they’ll quickly turn on the Government if their own finances feel in any way threatened.
No wonder Rishi was certain Labour would need to raise taxes. He knew what was lurking in the loft.
No, they were well aware there was a black hole in the public finances. The Tories were also well aware of this.
Both major parties were engaged in a conspiracy of silence over this, and media didn’t really push on it either.
>Independent pay review bodies [have said teachers and nurses should get 5.5%](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4ng05555y4o) – more than most were expecting.
>The last government budgeted for a lower settlement of 2%, sources say, so to fund the much higher deal will cost billions of pounds. If a similar increase happens across the public sector, it would cost billions more.
>Labour has also claimed that [hundreds of millions were being spent on the Rwanda scheme](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1rw47l2xxgo) – a lot more than it realised.
>Although some of that money was pay for civil servants who would have been working for the department anyway, sources say a lot of it was operational costs which were only discovered once the new government went through the books.
>The Department of Health and Social Care has also warned of hospital building programmes in England costing a lot more than budgeted for.
>Sources have also said there are extra spending commitments announced after the Autumn Statement which need to be paid for. Expect to hear about “in-year pressures” – extra spending that needs to be allocated immediately.
18 years of very little growth are adding up. We have grown about 1.1% per annum vs the more usual 2.5%. This means our whole economy is about 30% smaller than it would have been. France and Germany are in a not too dissimilar boat.
Getting sustainable growth out of this mess is the only real option. Start with cutting regulations for housing and energy projects (NIMBY laws) then when growth turns up try to get people investing in capital goods and training to raise labour productivity
[https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/labourproductivity/timeseries/lzvb/prdy](https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/labourproductivity/timeseries/lzvb/prdy)
Can’t we hold the Tories criminally liable for their acts while in power? Ripping the country off like they did should see them doing time for a long time.
New governments generally get a pass for a few years however they cant do it forever.
Radio 4 this morning with (?) female Conservative person. On asking this question her only excuse was ‘ yes but 14 years ago Labour ran out of money too’ . After 14 years in government and weeks after being crushed in the election you have no excuse for record homelessness, child and adult poverty, while the wealthiest 5% have got richer. The shameful lies are obvious and depressing. What kind of awful obtuse shell do you have to be to continue this rhetoric.
It matters very little anyway, because they still need to do things they won’t in order to make the country a little fairer and reduce taxation. Close all but a couple of prisons and immediately free most prisoners, phase out the state pension, time limit unemployment benefits (maybe to a year?), and introduce fees into the nhs for missed appointments and elective procedures.
No – it’s spin because their spending plans can’t actually be paid for by growth which was always entirely obvious.
“Reeves admitted that – unlike previous incoming Chancellors – she would be unable to arrive at the Treasury and claim she had looked inside the books and realised things were worse than they looked from the outside, giving a flimsy excuse for immediate tax rises or spending cuts.
“We’ve got the OBR now” she noted referring to the fiscal watchdog’s detailed and public scrutiny of the public finances. “We know things are in a pretty bad state,” she said. “You don’t need to win an election to find that out”.“
They knew exactly what they were inheriting, all the big think tanks have been warning about this for years, the UK has high debt, low growth, high taxes, an ageing population, low investment etc – the OBR, ONS, HMT, all the big departments – all their predictions and accounts etc are all openly available and heavily analysed by the political parties
E.g. this BBC radio documentary from 2023 (worth listening to anyway)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001qmkb
No, public spending records are exactly that, public. This is all about the incoming tax theft about to be forced on us against our will and entirely against what Labour promised, not suggested, promised in their manifesto. Are we actually surprised we are still being lied to? We have no recourse for this. We were told this would not happen, they lied and we have to just accept it. Is that democracy?
Most likely they have but we all know they were going to say it regardless.
There’s simply no trustworthy people in government anymore
So the TBC are admitting that their bosses left a massive mess?
Well that’s progress .
Everything has been costed remember!
No this was all known to them last year!
& anyway all of this is because of the pandemic printing billions of pounds to fund furlough schemes & labour wanted more of it?
Well, considering Ed Milliband has said they will honour £11.6 billion in overseas climate aid and Starmer is promising £3 billion a year to Ukraine, they must reckon they can get the money from… somewhere.
I wonder how much cutting the state pension from well off boomers that don’t need it will save.
Of course not. All government spending records have always been made public so it’s only a bigger financial mess than Labour expected if they didn’t read the records coming in that the world and their dog already had access to.
Anyhow, cue the massive public spending cuts.
No. This was always the plan. The pretence. No one wanted to admit that taxes will go up spending will go down. Now they can play dumb and do it anyway. Fact is EVERY serious commentator said this would happen. Labour said it wouldn’t (ignore the lies the tories said we all knew that was nonsense) and now it will happen. Taxes up, spending down.
Gey ready for it cause its coming.
And with no opposition they won’t have any challenge.
The tories used Liam Byrne’s joke note as a justification for implementing Thatcher’s small government/low taxes philosophy by introducing the austerity program but by fucking up the low taxes and spending part.
For 14 years they kept telling us that being in government didn’t mean that it was their job to make sure the country ran well and quietly privatised public services wherever possible and put the burden of complying with regulations on business owners.
They ignored longstanding problems such as the Contaminated Blood Scandal, the Post Office manglement scandal, the RAAC problem, raw sewage in rivers, gas storage, the National Grid, councils going bankrupt and many others and these have all landed on Labour’s Ministerial desks and every department will have a big, long list of needs that they will all need to ask Rachel Reeves to write cheques for.
Brexit shrank the economy by 5%, and cost us a lot of good jobs. Jobs that paid taxes.
We got the small government, but we got really screwed on the taxes.
Id hope not if they were vaguely capable opposition who actually looked at stuff. Isnt most of the budget public – do they not get access to the reports from each department whilst opposition?
I mean the tories lied that Labour bankrupted the Uk. So it is pretty much you reap what you sow to the tories
£80 billion from covid unaccounted for, the £700 million Rwanda debacle, HS2, plus no doubt lots of other ‘get rich schemes’ to enrich the tories over the past 14 years, it’s no wonder the coffers are dry.
No different from when Blair went into no. 10 after the Major years and was presented with a sheet of paper that simply said, ‘There’s no money’
The bigger the mess the bigger the clean up effort required. Tax the rich and stop wasting time.
Seeing as the records are freely available for anyone to look up. No it’s a shit excuse. However the Tory’s did the self same thing, it was shit back then too.
I also hate the when they blame each other for global events like the 08 financial crash and covid
Considering the fact the last five years of government seemed to be mainly focussed on shovelling as much public money into the pockets of the tories and their cronies as possible, it wouldn’t be surprising really.
Not really, but any excuse to bring in tax rises for all
Tbh anyone who didn’t think the finance was going to be terrible was delusional, the amount of money borrowed by the government over the last few years was astronomical. Stuff like furlough was always going to cause a reckoning.