Left: Conservative Helen Whately criticised Labour for 174,000 young people unemployed under Labour, suggesting they have the policies to fix it Right: But under the Conservatives, there were 872,000 young people unemployed, because of Conservative policy My view: Helen Whately talks as though the Conservatives have just arrived to discover a problem somebody else created. They governed Britain for 14 years. They had 14 years to improve education, strengthen training and help young people into secure employment. Yet in the final full quarter before they left office, an estimated 872,000 young people were outside education, employment or training. Roughly one in eight. That is a record they must answer for. If their policies offer such convincing solutions now, why did their government leave so many young people without those opportunities? Whately cannot claim authority on fixing the problem while skipping over her party’s responsibility for tackling it when it actually held power. Fourteen years gave the Conservatives ample time to turn promises into results. Labour deserves scrutiny. But Conservative politicians demanding better outcomes should start by explaining their own failures. Losing an election does not wipe away 14 years in government—or turn the people who failed to solve a problem into credible experts on fixing it.

In 2016 the Conservative Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said, "The only country that would like us to leave the EU is Russia" In 2026 the former Head of MI6 Sir John Sawers said, "Russia was very keen that the Leave campaign should succeed and that Britain should leave the European Union. Because that would marginalise Britain as a global player and weaken Europe in general" "That's the strategic opportunity the Russians spotted, and the leaders of the Leave campaign fell into it" My view: The warning was there before the referendum: Moscow had a clear interest in Britain breaking with Europe. A decade later, a former head of MI6 has explained why — a divided Europe and a Britain pushed to the margins would serve Russia’s strategic interests. It does show that the Kremlin saw Brexit as an opportunity to weaken both Britain and the European Union, and was keen for Leave to win. The damage was predictable: less British influence in Europe, more friction between allies and a weaker collective response to Russian aggression. Brexit handed Moscow the kind of division it wanted. The leaders of Leave may have believed they were restoring Britain’s power. In reality, they pursued a course that played directly into Russia’s hands, and the country is still living with the consequences: weaker, worse off, with escalated societal tensions.