Politics Live

In a post shared on X (formerly Twitter) the Conservative party claimed: “Labour have said they wouldn't put up your taxes. But it's now becoming clear that they have every intention to put them up 👇”.

The post features a video of consumer financial journalist and broadcaster Martin Lewis speaking on Good Morning Britain (GMB) earlier today.

In the clip Mr Lewis says: “I had a conversation with a senior member of the Labour party, a private conversation, as I do with both parties. And the exact phrase they used with me is, when I asked about a particular policy, they said: ‘we’re not putting it in our manifesto because I can’t commit we’ll do it, but it is my aim we will do it over the next parliament’.”

The Conservatives appear to be using Mr Lewis’s comment to suggest that Labour intends to increase taxes beyond what has been set out in the party’s manifesto.

But, as Mr Lewis himself has pointed out, this takes his comments out of context.

Replying to the Conservatives’ post directly, Mr Lewis said on X: “NO WHERE in this comment do I talk about taxes. And the policy that I discussed (i will keep private as it was private) was NOT about taxes, or tax rises, it was about something that would be a positive change. [sic]”

Mr Lewis’s comments on GMB followed an interview with Labour’s shadow work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall, who, when asked whether she would rule out scrapping the 25% tax free allowance on pensions, said “we have set out all of our plans in the manifesto, there is nothing in our manifesto the requires us to make any other changes”.

Immediately after the comment clipped by the Conservatives Mr Lewis added: “what you heard there is ‘it’s not in our manifesto’, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t planned to be done.”

So while Mr Lewis did broadly question whether Labour, if elected, might look to introduce policies in the future that weren’t in the party’s manifesto, at no point does he specifically suggest Labour is planning to increase taxes in addition to what the party has already confirmed.

Mr Lewis did not offer any comment beyond what he said on social media. We’ve approached the Conservatives and the Labour party for comment and will update this post if we receive a response.

With just over a week until polling day, the major parties’ manifestos have all been published, and the team at Full Fact have been busy assessing them. While we have been fact checking each of the manifestos and looking at the extent to which they meet our manifesto standards, we have also been investigating whether any policy proposals align with our own calls for change. 

Our verdict is now in: there are positive signs in the manifestos, including a number of commitments to reform the parliamentary system and proposals to amend the Online Safety Act. A number of parties understand that urgent action is needed to tackle bad information and have proposed concrete changes that we think would be beneficial. 

However, there are some serious shortcomings. We are not confident that any of the major parties campaigning to become the next government have robust enough proposals to protect democracy, improve honesty and trust in politics, or tackle misinformation.

A short review of manifestos:

• Reforms to the parliamentary system, specifically to make the ministerial code statutory, feature in a number of the manifestos. With public trust in politics at a 40-year low, we would want to see parties prioritising legislative reform to fix this.
• Despite the Online Safety Act being mentioned in nearly all of the manifestos, none directly stated that tackling harmful misinformation would prompt them to legislate further.
• Only one of the seven manifestos we reviewed mentions media literacy. We are disappointed that this issue appears to be low on the parties’ radars. Good media literacy is needed to equip the public with skills to recognise bad information.

Read the full blog article and our verdict against each of our policy calls.

In an article for the Daily Express, economic secretary to the Treasury Bim Afolami claimed: “Since January we have cut the taxes of the average worker by £900”.

As we’ve said before, this figure is missing context because it doesn’t account for the effect of ongoing tax threshold freezes. Overall, the average worker will experience a much smaller tax cut this year. 

In January the main rate of employee National Insurance contributions (NICs) was reduced from 12% to 10%, before being further reduced to 8% in April.

The £900 figure refers to the amount an average full-time worker (earning around £35,000) will save in NICs this financial year as a result of this combined four percentage point reduction. But once the impact of other tax changes is factored in, overall tax savings are lower.

That’s because since 2021 the government has frozen income tax and NICs thresholds—so the taxable income of an average worker is higher than it would have been if these thresholds had risen in line with inflation (as was normal practice in the past).

The Institute for Fiscal Studies says that once all changes to NICs and income tax are taken into account, the average earner will save £340 in 2024/25 compared to what they would have paid otherwise.

Home secretary James Cleverly and his Labour party counterpart Yvette Cooper appeared on LBC earlier today, to take part in an immigration debate. 

While discussing which third countries a Labour government could cooperate with when it comes to migration, Mr Cleverly said a returns agreement with the EU “will inevitably mean the UK becomes a net recipient of illegal migrants, we estimate about 100,000”.

While there have been slight variations of this claim, we’ve written about this unreliable figure multiple times since we first heard it back in September. 

It’s based on a Conservative party estimate that makes several assumptions about what a future returns deal between the UK and the EU would look like. It assumes the UK would join the EU’s new migration scheme, which allows the distribution of people from member states with the largest number of arrivals or asylum applicants, to states that have fewer arrivals.

We can’t say for sure what might happen to migration under a future Labour government. But as we’ve said before, the figure of 100,000 is based on inaccurate assumptions about what the EU scheme involves. 

The University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory previously told us: “The claim that a returns deal with the EU would mean the UK accepting 100,000 asylum seekers from Europe is incorrect: there are no two ways about it.

“The EU does not have a policy of equalising the number of asylum applicants across countries, nor is it negotiating one. Even if it did, the number of asylum seekers the UK would receive would be much lower. 

“The 100,000 claim includes a mathematical error, because its authors have forgotten to include the asylum seekers the UK already receives.”

The calculation assumes that a quota system would relocate all asylum applicants arriving in the EU among member states, rather than a small proportion of them. Additionally, EU member states also do not have to accept migrants as part of this scheme—they can contribute financially instead. 

Ms Cooper also said Labour “won’t join the EU member states’ quota scheme”.

We’ve contacted Mr Cleverly, and will update this post if we receive a response.

A video shared by the Conservatives on X appears to show shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves pause for several seconds on BBC Breakfast as if she was struggling to respond after being asked about public spending under a future Labour government. 

It was posted with the caption: “Cat got your tongue, Rachel?”, and shared by several Conservative candidates.

But the full video of the interview shows there were technical issues on the line and Ms Reeves went on to respond to the question after the interviewer put it to her a second time. 

Read our full fact check here. 

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), an independent economics think tank, has criticised the Conservatives and Labour for failing to be honest with voters in their manifestos.

Launching its analysis of the parties’ promises, the Director of the IFS, Paul Johnson, said the raw facts about the public finances are “largely ignored” by both. He said they were “keeping entirely silent about their commitment to a £10 billion a year tax rise through a further three years of freezes to personal tax allowances and thresholds”.

Mr Johnson also cast doubt on the parties’ claims to have published “so-called ‘fully costed’ manifestos”.

We do not assess this point ourselves in our fact checks of all the main parties’ manifestos. 

But Labour’s does say “our plan for Britain is a fully costed, fully funded, credible plan”, while the Conservatives say “the measures in this manifesto are fully funded”.

Yet when asked whether this was true on the BBC’s Today programme this morning, Mr Johnson said: “No. I think it’s fair to say they’re not.”

Mr Johnson also criticised some of the other parties, for instance saying that proposals from Reform UK and the Green Party were “wholly unattainable [and help] to poison the entire political debate.” 

The front page of the Daily Mail today (24 June) features the headline “Ten days left to stop ‘disaster’ of a Starmer supermajority”.

The article previews a speech due to be made by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak today in which he was expected to warn against an “unchecked Labour government” and giving Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer a “blank cheque”.

But as we wrote last week, the term “supermajority” has no specific meaning in the UK parliamentary system.

The term has emerged as some opinion polls are projecting that Labour would win a substantial majority in the House of Commons, bigger than Labour’s win in 1997 under Tony Blair, when the party won a majority of 179.

The Institute for Government says, in parliamentary terms, the difference between an 80-seat majority (which the Conservative party won in the 2019 election) and a 200-seat majority is “not material”.

And the Electoral Reform Society says that a party with a majority of just one can legislate on anything it likes, as long as it can keep its back benchers “in line”, exactly the same as a party that wins a “supermajority”. 

Even foreign secretary David Cameron, Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton, said the term “doesn’t actually exist in the UK”, when asked about it in a Channel 4 interview.

The term may have gained traction in the UK because it is a genuine part of the US federal system. There, a supermajority is a qualified majority of two thirds.

The number of seats a party wins in a UK general election can however affect how many select committee chairs, and members, it holds. As the balance of committee membership is intended to reflect the balance of seats in the House of Commons, a government with a large majority would also expect to have a proportionate majority on select committees.

Winning fewer seats as an opposition party does come with a financial cost. 

‘Short Money’ is allocated to all opposition parties whose members have sworn the oath, and that secured either two seats, or one seat and more than 150,000 votes.

This money assists them in parliamentary business, and is usually spent on research support, assistance in the whips’ offices and staff for the leader. The formula to determine how much cash they get relies on the number of seats the party wins in a general election.

Talking about the “people that don’t have a right to be here” on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg [29:30] yesterday, Labour’s shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson said: “Returns have fallen through the floor.”

We’ve asked Ms Phillipson what she meant by this, because the actual number of returns—whether voluntary or enforced—has risen recently, albeit to a level that remains lower than it was in the early 2010s.  

As this chart shows, both voluntary and enforced returns have broadly risen since their lowest point around the first year of the pandemic.

These returns cover many different categories of people, most of whom were not seeking asylum.

It’s important to remember that the changing number of people returned doesn’t necessarily show us the proportion of people ineligible to be here who were removed. Nor does it tell us how many people were being deterred or prevented from illegally entering or remaining in the UK.