Yahoo News Tories Accused Of Squandering £130bn Of Taxpayer Money Since The Last General Election
The Conservatives have been accused of spending £130 billion of taxpayer funds wastefully since the last general election.
According to the Best for Britain’s Scandalous Spending Tracker – which monitors suspect government spending – the government has spent more £6 billion of that total in just the last two months.
The news, first reported by The Mirror, is yet another blow for Rishi Sunak because he has been at the top of government for the majority of last four years.
He served as chancellor between February 2020 and July 2022, and has been prime minister since October 2022 – amid a cost of living crisis, no less.
Some of this wasteful spending includes the £32,000 bill the taxpayer paid to cover the legal costs after the science secretary, Michelle Donelan, wrongly accused an academic of being a Hamas sympathiser.
Liz Truss racked up a £15,000 bill for food and alcohol on a single flight to Australia when she was foreign secretary.
The government also spent £33 million on delaying the general election by two months.
Brexit checks brought in at the end of April, meanwhile, cost £4.7 billion.
Best for Britain calculated that the Tories have wasted, on average, £26 billion per year since being re-elected in 2019.
That is 30 times the estimated cost of the Liberal Democrats’ proposal to increase GP appointments, said to cost £800 million per year, and more than the total cost of the Green Party’s plan to insulate 10 million homes, said to cost £25 billion per year.
All that wasted cash from the last few years is also enough money to carry out Keir Starmer’s six key pledges more than five times.
Chief executive of Best for Britain, Naomi Smith, and founder of tactical voting website, GetVoting.org, said: “Rishi Sunak has presided over years of delinquent government spending and while his reign of egregious waste may soon be over, we cannot risk the Tories getting their hands back in the public piggy bank in five years time.
“That’s why we’re asking people to vote tactically at the next election and get it right with GetVoting.org.”
A mega-poll from Electoral Calculus and Find Out Now for GB News and the Daily Mail suggested the Tories are on track for just 66 seats next month.
The same poll suggested Labour could win a staggering 493 seats, nearly 300 more than they won at the 2019 election.
