A quirk of the UK system is that the requirement to tell the truth in adverts does not apply to politicians. This is, in effect, a license to lie – or, at least, to stretch the truth until the elastic snaps. The Conservatives have given some examples in their first campaign video an indication. It shows the Union Flag flying upside down, often taken as a sign of distress. The gist is that Rishi Sunak ‘is making progress’ with his plan, but when it lists that progress it says much that is – how to say? – at variance with the actualité. All can be checked on The Spectator’s data hub, designed so anyone with a suspicion that they’re not being told the truth can easily check.
‘Taxes are being cut’, it says. Well, some taxes are (National Insurance) but other taxes are rising – what matters is the overall effect. The tax burden is rising to the highest level since the late 1940s. It’s extraordinary to even pretend to the contrary.
‘Waiting lists are falling, month-on-month’, it says. No they’re not: the last data fell only due to a technical glitch and my understanding is that ministers have been told they will rise for the next two months. Waiting lists may start to come down soon (an old Institute for Fiscal Studies projection is below) but overall the story is this:
‘...And mortgage rates are coming down’, it also says. They were once, but have been rising since February. Since then, a five-year fix has been steadily rising from 5.2 per cent to 5.5 per cent (at the last count) because the market has come to expect base rates being higher for longer. It’s just a falsehood to say ‘mortgages are coming down’ – present tense – when they are rising. A financial adviser would be breaking the law if they made such a claim in one of the heavily (and rightly) regulated documents. If it’s not OK to mislead borrowers in this way, how can it be OK to mislead voters?
And this comes after an advert the Tories have been running online falsely saying ‘small boats down 36%’.
In fact, small boat arrivals in the year to date are the highest on record:
The 36 per cent figure refers to 2023, where there was progress in the second half of the year. By cutting the verb and not giving a date (‘small boats down 36 per cent’), it chooses a long-passed time period and deliberately misleads. This data is updated daily so there is no honest reason to choose the time reference points they have. They could have chosen a 12-month rolling period and managed to point to a 27pc decline (last year's progress outweighing this year's lack of progress) so could have roughly the same figure with some claim to accuracy. But no, they went for the porkie.
By faking progress, the Tories conceal the fact that they have been making progress. Nigel Farage yesterday claimed that crime was out of control, for example. In fact, strip out fraud and there is less crime in Britain than perhaps any time in the history of our islands. But it seems the Tory election claims are chosen not by topics where they have something genuine to boast about but, instead, topics that focus groups say are important.
I take no pleasure at all from pointing this out: I'm not exactly gunning for Keir Starmer to win the election. So why the nit-picking? Because if journalists won't point out deceit, no one will. This is the basic duty of trade: if politicians mislead then journalists (of any political persuasion) will point it out.
Once, you could lie with figures safe in the knowledge that no broadcaster would really challenge and no newspaper would have space to publish graphs to expose deceit. The press would see it as small beer, nit-picking. But in the digital era can hyperlink to a source in a split second to point out when parties are making statements so wrong that they would be illegal in a document regulated by the London Stock Exchange or Financial Services Authority. Or, indeed, by IPSO, the press regulator.
The line between truth, exaggeration and deceit is now very well policed by agencies that the Tories rightly empowered when in office. Respecting that line – and the intelligence of their potential voters – ought to be a given for any party seeking to fight this campaign with decency.
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