Labour’s long list of challenges

Good morning. Victims of the UK’s infected blood could receive up to £2.7mn each, in what could cost upwards of £10bn to deliver a small measure of redress.

That the government gets on and announces the scheme has been one of the Labour party’s dearest wishes, both because the scandal is a serious injustice, but also because it is a £10bn headache for the opposition. Like the government, many of their spending plans are optimistic in the extreme.

Something that preoccupies Keir Starmer’s inner circle are other, similar unexploded devices buried in Whitehall. Our reporters have got hold of the full list that the opposition has devised of the various crises waiting for them if they win the next election. Some thoughts on that below.

Risky business

What’s in Sue Gray’s risk register? That has been the number one question for many in Labour since Katy Balls revealed in her Times column that Keir Starmer’s chief of staff had compiled a list of the biggest unexploded bombs waiting for a Labour government after the next election. Now Jim Pickard, Lucy Fisher and Anna Gross have the answer: they have got hold of the full extent of what one senior official has dubbed ‘Sue’s shit list’.

One reason why the contents of the risk register are such a big talking point in the Labour party is that essentially everyone in the party wants the shadow Treasury to pony up more money for their department. And one way they have been pitching for more money is by saying, in the words of one: “Look, I get that no one is going to vote for what we do, but if we don’t fix it, we aren’t going to get re-elected”.

The other reason is that quite possibly the Labour party’s biggest political project in the next parliament is going to be whether it can successfully blame the Conservative government for the various challenges it is likely to face, or if it will be swiftly overwhelmed and crushed by them. That partly explains why Rachel Reeves has started to use the word “inheritance” a lot, and why Starmer has talked about the Conservatives “salting the earth”.

Of course, it helps that the IMF is warning that Jeremy Hunt’s spending plans are unsustainable, that South West Water is facing a parasitic outbreak and that police chiefs are being told to make fewer arrests because of pressures on the criminal justice system.

That’s one reason why the Conservative party as a whole may be better served by Rishi Sunak going to the country as soon as possible.

Now try this

I finally got around to playing the excellent short video game Firewatch at the weekend. Set in 1989, it tells the story of Henry, a grieving widower (well, sort of) who takes a job as a fire lookout in a national park in Wyoming. A gripping tale involving hidden secrets, a mysterious fence and horrifying tragedy unfolds over about three to five hours. (It took me five hours, because I kept getting lost.)

Top stories today

• A numbers game | UK inflation fell to 2.3 per cent in April, down from March’s 3.2 per cent, but higher than predicted by the Bank of England and economists polled by Reuters. Falling energy prices helped bring April’s number closer to the BoE’s 2 per cent target.

• Pile it high | Britons will be encouraged to stockpile tinned food, batteries, and bottled water as part of a new government campaign aimed at preparing the public for emergencies.

• Here comes the rain again | A study has shown that heavy winter storms across the UK and Ireland, which caused devastating floods and led to nearly £1bn in revenue losses for farmers, were intensified by human-caused climate change that made October to March 20 per cent wetter.

Below is the Financial Times’ live-updating UK poll-of-polls, which combines voting intention surveys published by major British pollsters. Visit the FT poll-tracker page to discover our methodology and explore polling data by demographic including age, gender, region and more.

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