Chancellor Notes 1 'Deeply Irresponsible' Sign Tories 'Ran Away' From All Of UK's Crises

Rachel Reeves has spotted one sign which the chancellor claims proved the Tories “ran away” from the crises brewing across the country.

Speaking on her show, Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, the BBC presenter asked: “You and some other ministers have been suggesting since you arrived in power that things are worse than you knew from the outside.

“What is it that you have seen that has actually given you that belief, because most of the information is in the public domain?”

Reeves pointed to the country’s overcrowded prisons, saying they were “at crisis point” with almost “no places left”.

The chancellor said: “The previous government, rather than making the tough decisions, they simply ran away. They called an election to allow the next people to make those decisions.

“It makes me pretty angry that they’ve left the country in this sort of state.

“Whichever political party you’re in, you should try and pass on at the end of your time in office, a country and a society which is working better.

“This Conservative government did not do that.”

“Are you suggesting that they’ve deliberately called an election to cover up how bad things were on the inside?” Kuenssberg asked.

Reeves said: “I don’t think anyone on the outside understood the full extent of the challenge in our prisons.”

She also said the education secretary had the pay review body’s recommendations for pay on her desk, but “didn’t do anything about it”.

“They called an election. They didn’t make the tough decisions. They ran away from them,” Reeves claimed. “It’s now up to us to fix it and pick up the pieces.”

Alluding to the Tory claims that they had already fixed the economy during Sunak’s premiership, Reeves also said: “I really don’t buy this idea that we’ve been handed a golden inheritance.

“If the former prime minister and chancellor had thought things were so good, they would have allowed the election to take place in autumn.

“They called an election because they weren’t willing to make tough decisions and they just ran away.

“That is just deeply irresponsible, it now falls upon a new Labour government to tackle the challenges that we face as a country, as an economy.”

Ex-PM Rishi Sunak was not obliged to call the public to the polls until December 2024, as that would have been exactly five years since the last general election.

However, he initially refused to say when he would call it, only saying it would be “in the second half of 2024”.

This led many to assume it would be in the autumn. Instead, he called it in May, when it was announced that inflation fell to its lowest rate since 2021 at 2.3%.

This meant polling day fell on July 4, which is narrowly within the second half of the year.