Politics Live

Full Fact’s rolling blog of fact checks, commentary and analysis.

20 June 2024, 8.54pm

Posted on X

On #BBCQT John Swinney said measures the SNP took on child poverty are keeping “100,000 children out of poverty in Scotland today”.

Modelling estimates this many children will be kept out of relative poverty in 2024/25 by Scottish government policies generally. #GE24

Of this number, 60,000 are expected to be kept out of poverty specifically because of the Scottish Child Payment. We wrote more about this here ⬇️ #GE24
https://buff.ly/3xrhfnC

Honesty in public debate matters

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20 June 2024, 8.45pm

Posted on X

On #BBCQT Ed Davey said people have seen “huge tax rises under this government to record levels”.

The tax burden was at the highest level for 70 years in 2022/23. The average earner’s effective personal tax rate is the lowest since 1975, however. #GE24

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20 June 2024, 8.26pm

Posted on X

On #BBCQT, Lib Dem leader Ed Davey mentioned his party’s manifesto pledge to “recruit 8,000 more GPs”.

The manifesto didn’t say if those GPs would be fully qualified, however.

This is important because GP workforce stats can paint a very different picture depending on whether you count trainees.

The party has now told us that “at least 7,000” of the extra GPs would be fully qualified. #BBCQT #GE24 https://buff.ly/3zbXnpc

20 June 2024, 7.56pm

Question Time Leaders’ Special

We're watching the #BBCQT Leaders' Special tonight. 🍿

🔎 Follow us here on X for our live fact checks and analysis. And if you spot anything you think we should be checking out, please tag us and we’ll do our best to take a look. #GE24

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20 June 2024, 4.43pm

No evidence Rishi Sunak plans to pay people £75,000 to leave the UK

Thousands of people have shared TikTok videos suggesting Rishi Sunak has plans to pay people £75,000 to leave the UK. 

But there’s no such plan in the party’s manifesto, and the claim appears to have first been shared by a parody account. 

Read the full fact check here

20 June 2024, 4.34pm

The ‘tax burden’: explained

Over the course of the election campaign we’ve heard Labour repeatedly claim that under the Conservatives the so-called ‘tax burden’ has reached the highest level in 70 years, while the Conservatives have claimed to be cutting people’s taxes.

We’ve just published a new explainer which takes a detailed look at what’s happened to the tax burden in recent years, how it could be affected by Labour and Conservative proposals, and why a high tax burden doesn’t necessarily mean everyone is paying more tax.

20 June 2024, 4.09pm

Statistic about fall in violent crime does not include sexual offences

The Conservative party and the home secretary, James Cleverly, have shared an image on X (formerly Twitter) claiming violent crime is down by 44%.

But it’s worth noting that this figure does not include sexual offences.

The figure has been calculated by comparing the most recent Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) data with the year before the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition took office. 

This shows a decrease in the annual estimates of ‘violence incidents’—among people aged 16 and over—from about 1.8 million offences in March 2010 to 1 million in December 2023. This is a fall of 44%, in line with an overall decline from a peak in violence offences in 1995. 

The CSEW figures on violent crime come from a section of the survey involving an interview, and are estimates for offences including wounding, assault with minor injury and violence without injury. But sexual offences are covered by a self-completion part of the survey, rather than an interview, and so are reported separately from these violent crime figures. 

The prevalence of sexual assault (including attempts but excluding causing sexual activity without consent) among adults aged 16 to 59 was 2.1% in the year to March 2010 and 2.2% in the year to March 2020 (the latest comparable data). The prevalence of rape or penetration (including attempts) was 0.4% in the year to March 2010 and 0.5% in the year to March 2020.

More broadly, the ONS says the CSEW provides important information on longer-term crime trends, but advises it may not be the best measure of “higer-harm but less common types of violence, such as those involving a knife or sharp instrument (knife-enabled crime)”, which it says are better observed by police recorded crime. 

We’ve contacted the Conservatives about this and will update this blog if we receive a response.  

Honesty in public debate matters

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20 June 2024, 2.42pm

Neither the Conservatives nor Labour have earned voters’ trust so far

Both the Conservatives and Labour are misleading voters about the impact of each other’s policies in this election.

It is misleading to say without proper context and caveats, as the Conservatives often have, that a Labour government would mean “£2,000 in higher taxes for every working family”. This figure is unreliable and based on questionable assumptions, not an independent forecast worth taking seriously. 

Likewise, Labour is misleading people when it tells them—again and again, also without due caveats—that Conservative plans “will mean £4,800 more on your mortgage”. This figure is speculative and based on uncertain assumptions, so again talking like it’s reliable or definite misleads people.

No one knows exactly what will happen in the future. Taxes could indeed go up under Labour, or mortgages under the Conservatives. But as we and other fact checkers have shown, these figures are partisan attacks on a political enemy, not credible attempts to put a price on voters’ choices. 

It’s not only Full Fact and our supporters who think this kind of behaviour is unacceptable. The party leaders have said themselves that they need to earn people’s trust.

On becoming Prime Minister in 2022, Rishi Sunak said: “This government will have integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level. Trust is earned. And I will earn yours.”

In a speech at the start of this year, the Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said: “We have to bring the country together, have to earn trust as well as votes… And yet, trust in politics is now so low, so degraded, that nobody believes you can make a difference anymore.” The Labour party manifesto promises “the highest standards of integrity and honesty”.

We’ve not seen enough of this from either party so far. (We could make similar points about other parties, but we've chosen in this piece to focus on specific claims made by the two largest parties in the UK.)

Politicians should be truthful with voters because it is the right thing to do. 

But if they need more convincing, there is evidence that the people whose votes they are fighting for are also among the most likely to distrust them. 

A new Savanta poll commissioned by Full Fact shows that 78% of people who are unsure how to vote said they were not confident that the parties have run honest campaigns. 

This is an opportunity for politicians who are prepared to behave differently.

Mr Sunak and Mr Starmer are both quite right to say that trust must be earned—but just saying so isn’t good enough. They must prove they mean it in the final fortnight of the campaign.

20 June 2024, 2.37pm

Green Party corrects manifesto after Full Fact intervention

Following an intervention from Full Fact, the Green Party has corrected a claim in its manifesto about the number of people on NHS waiting lists. 

The ‘long version’ of the manifesto, published on the party’s website on 12 June, the day it was launched, stated: “The long-term under funding of the NHS has left nearly 8 million of us on hospital waiting lists.” 

But as we wrote last week, this is not what NHS England data shows. 

The latest referral to treatment (RTT) data when the manifesto was published showed that in March 2024 about 6.3 million people were waiting to begin about 7.5 million courses of treatment. (New data published since then shows that in April 2024 6.3 million people were waiting for about 7.6 million courses of treatment.) 

There are always more cases than people in the data, because some people are awaiting treatment for more than one thing.

We wrote to the Green Party about this, and following our intervention, a corrected version of the manifesto has been published on the party’s ‘manifesto downloads’ page, which reads: “The long-term under funding of the NHS has left 6.3 million of us on hospital waiting lists.”

According to internet archive the WayBack Machine, the corrected manifesto was posted at some point on 13 June. (It’s worth noting that the uncorrected version of the manifesto, though removed from the manifesto downloads page, still remains online and may be linked to from elsewhere.)

We are grateful to the Green Party for having made the correction.

The Green Party was one of four signatories to Full Fact’s leaders’ pledge, which asked politicians to commit to being honest and transparent in the general election. This also included a commitment to our manifesto standards which require parties to correct errors in their manifestos when they have been notified of such. Plaid Cymru, the Alliance Party and the SDLP were also signatories to the pledge.

Full Fact’s chief executive Chris Morris said: “Full Fact wants to increase trust in politics, not diminish it—but it's up to our politicians to lead by example and earn that trust. This correction from the Green Party is the sort of behaviour that we hope to see from all parties when they are notified of an inaccuracy.”

We continue to call on all parties, and whoever forms the next government, to show bold leadership by committing to honesty and accuracy in all party communications. 

20 June 2024, 11.56am

BBC Question Time Leaders’ Special

This evening the leaders of four political parties will be questioned by members of the public in a two-hour Question Time Leaders’ Special

The show will be hosted by Fiona Bruce and broadcast on BBC One and BBC iPlayer from 8pm.  

Each leader will face 30 minutes of questions from members of a live studio audience in York. The running order will be the Liberal Democrats’ Sir Ed Davey, the SNP’s John Swinney, Labour’s Keir Starmer and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak for the Conservatives. 

Full Fact’s fact checkers will be following the programme live, and scrutinising in real time the claims made by the politicians, highlighting statements that we think are wrong, misleading or need more context. 

You can follow our work on X (formerly Twitter) or here on Election Live throughout the show.

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