The Guardian has been fact-checking claims made across the political spectrum as candidates fight for seats in the House of Commons. What was billed as the Brexit election has also become the trust election as the integrity of leaders of the key political parties has repeatedly come into question.
Amid fake fact-checking accounts and allegations of Russian disinformation, there have been some wild claims made by all the political parties, some regarding their own policies and others attacking those of their rivals. Here we take a look at some of the fact-checking highlights of the election campaign.
NHS
The health service has been a key battleground in this election, with all parties pledging more support for it. One of the most repeated pledges of the campaign has been the Conservatives’ promise of 40 new hospitals. The manifesto states that these are in addition to 20 hospital upgrades and will be built over the next 10 years.
In reality, the party has allocated £2.7bn so far to upgrade six hospitals, and no money is provided in the manifesto costings to do the rest of the work. Providing 40 new hospitals could cost up to £24bn, and there could be hurdles in the way including planning permission and a shortage of construction workers after Brexit.
Hand in hand with new hospitals comes the promise of 50,000 more nurses under the Tories. With this pledge, the devil is in the detail – the party is not planning to recruit that many new nurses, but rather 31,000, with the rest being existing staff who are persuaded not to leave. The manifesto does include money for “recruitment, training and retention”, but it is not explained how this will be allocated and the sum does not come close to paying for that many extra people.
Meanwhile, Labour has repeatedly warned that the NHS is on the table in trade talks between the UK and US, and it produced documents that it said proved its case. The documents confirmed that talks between the UK and US have covered the NHS, drug pricing and patents, the pharmaceutical industry and medical devices as part of wider discussions on trade. They did not reveal any decisions about what would be included in any deal.
Crime and security
When Boris Johnson became prime minister in July, one of his first pledges on the steps of 10 Downing Street was to boost police officer numbers by 20,000. In reality, this was more of a restoration than a boost, as a roughly equal figure had been cut by Johnson’s party over the past nine years.
Prior to the campaign, the Conservatives were accused of using populist crime policies as a cynical electioneering ploy, and the same charge could be laid against the “research” they pushed out late in the campaign claiming there would be 52 more murders and 146 more rapes a year under Labour. Aside from the fact that predicting the number of murders or rapes on such a detailed level is impossible, the method used to arrive at this figure was based on broad assumptions.
The Conservatives also tried to exploit immigration concerns, falsely claiming that Labour would extend free movement to the whole world, and then using spurious calculations to predict that this would lead to a surge in net migration, with 840,000 more people arriving each year than leaving under Labour. It is not Labour policy to extend free movement to the rest of the world, as made clear in the party’s manifesto.
Economy, tax and spending
The Conservatives and Labour have each promised to make people on the lowest incomes better off. Boris Johnson’s comment that his party would raise the national insurance threshold to £12,000 quickly turned out to be an aspiration rather than a promise; the Tory manifesto includes costings for increasing it only to £9,500 a year.
The Tories have focused on claims that voters will be worse off under Labour, putting a £2,400-a-person price tag on the party delivering its promises. The figure was first used before Labour launched its manifesto, so it was not based on the current raft of policies, but it has been restated since then.
Labour’s claim that every household will save £6,700 should it get into power was also found to be rocky. Some of the savings, for example those offered by free broadband, will not come into effect until 2030. But a Question Time audience member’s claim that Labour’s plans to increase income tax for people paid £80,000 or more affected far more than the top 5% of earners was just wrong.
Brexit
The Liberal Democrats want to stop it, Labour wants to negotiate a new deal and put it to the public in a second referendum with remain as an option, and the Tories want to “get Brexit done”.
But when and how the Conservatives could get it done is contentious. Johnson and his cabinet have repeatedly pledged to secure a trade deal by the end of 2020, which seems highly unlikely given the time constraints. Trade talks cannot legally begin until the UK leaves the EU, which is currently scheduled for 31 January. Because the scheduled transition period expires at the end of December 2020, this leaves just 11 months to negotiate the sort of deal with the EU that Canada took seven years to complete. Theresa May had originally envisaged talks taking two years. Experts say that on average it takes 48 months to negotiate any trade deal.
The Tory manifesto locks the party into refusing an extension to the transition period, which many have argued makes a no-deal scenario at the end of 2020 more likely.
On the other side of the argument, the Lib Dems pledged a £50bn remain bonus. This appears to be a fair estimate, backed up by independent economic forecasters, but it is highly dependent on assumptions and it risks misleading the public by adding together every year of higher tax receipts.
The fight for votes
The Lib Dems were accused of distributing “misleading and irresponsible” election leaflets that misrepresented newspaper reports as endorsements of the party. In one leaflet delivered to households in London, a partial headline about the party’s success in a byelection in Wales was attributed to the Guardian when the original author of the words was the Lib Dem leader, Jo Swinson.
Twitter accused the Conservatives of misleading the public after the party rebranded one of its accounts to make it look like a factchecking service during the ITV leaders’ debate. The Tories also set up a website purporting to showcase Labour’s manifesto but which instead attacks the party’s policies.
And at the very start of the campaign, the Labour frontbencher Keir Starmer accused the Conservatives of “an act of desperation that backfired” after the party doctored footage to apparently show Starmer unable to answer a question on Labour’s Brexit position.
