Politics Live

Over the last week, there’s been some speculation about whether Labour will raise employer National Insurance contributions (NICs) in its first Budget, later this month. 

At Prime Minister’s Questions on 9 October, Conservative party leader Rishi Sunak asked the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer if “when he promised not to raise income tax, national insurance or VAT, that commitment applies to both employer and employee national insurance contributions?”Mr Starmer said he wouldn’t be drawn on decisions to be included in the Budget, but added: “We made an absolute commitment to not raise tax on working people”. 

The phrase “National Insurance” appears once in Labour’s 2024 election manifesto.

It said: “We will ensure taxes on working people are kept as low as possible. Labour will not increase taxes on working people, which is why we will not increase National Insurance, the basic, higher, or additional rates of Income Tax, or VAT.” 

On Sky News’ Sunday Morning with Trevor Philips yesterday, business secretary Jonathan Reynolds was asked if the pledge applied to both employee and employer NICs. 

Mr Reynolds said: “You know that pledge was taxes on working people, so it was specifically in the manifesto a reference to employees, and to income tax and a whole range of commitments.” 

Some have interpreted this to mean that a rise in employer NICs has not been ruled out, or to be a comment on the “strategic ambiguity” of Labour’s manifesto commitment. 

Full Fact will be monitoring the upcoming Budget later this month, as well as tracking progress on the government’s manifesto commitments. 

In a video marking Labour’s first 100 days in office, the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said his government had “lifted the ban on onshore wind” and “secured a record number of clean energy projects”.

We’ve written about both these claims before.

Planning considerations relating to onshore wind development in England introduced under the Conservatives in 2015, which Labour has now reversed, were often described as a “de-facto ban”, due to a substantial decrease in applications for onshore wind sites.

But there was no formal ban as such on onshore wind farms.

And as we explained last month, while it is true that 131 new clean energy projects emerged from the latest renewables auction round in August, applications for this round were submitted in April 2024, while the Conservatives were in office, and the previous government also increased the maximum ‘strike price’ companies are allowed to charge. 

This means the new government cannot take full credit for the outcome, even though it did increase the auction’s overall budget, which likely affected the total number of projects.

During yesterday’s Prime Minister’s Questions, Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey asked about the status of British overseas territories. In response Sir Keir Starmer said: “My uncle nearly lost his life when his ship was torpedoed defending the Falklands” before confirming his intention the islands would remain British.

We have seen a number of social media users questioning the accuracy of this statement, with many pointing out that the only ship to be sunk by a torpedo during the 1982 conflict was the General Belgrano—an Argentine vessel targeted by the British submarine HMS Conqueror.

As Number 10 has since clarified and others have reported, Mr Starmer’s uncle was serving on HMS Antelope, which sank after being targeted by Argentine aircraft armed with bombs, not torpedoes. 

The ship was hit by two bombs which lodged themselves inside the vessel but did not initially detonate. Later that night, one of the bombs exploded during attempts to defuse it, and it was this blast that caused HMS Antelope to sink. 

We approached Number 10 for comment, and will update this blog if we receive a response.

The Home Office has today published data to support a claim made by the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer about immigration returns since Labour entered government, after Full Fact asked that it urgently do so.

Mr Starmer claimed that there had been a “23% increase” in returns of people without a right to be in the UK since Labour was elected, compared to the previous summer. As we wrote at the time, this claim was based on immigration returns data which had not yet been published.

Office for Statistics Regulation guidance states: “Where unpublished data are referred to unexpectedly, the information should be published as soon as possible after any statement has been made – ideally on the same day.”

We wrote to the Home Office on 27 September to ask that it publish this data without any further delay, explaining that, without this, neither we nor the public can verify the claims being made about the government’s record. We did not receive a response, and wrote about this issue again yesterday when similar figures were used by a Home Office spokesperson.

Earlier this week we asked the Home Office for a reply to our letter, which also asked the department to investigate how and why the Code of Practice for Statistics was not followed. On the day after the general election, we asked the Prime Minister to incorporate compulsory adherence to the Code of Practice for Statistics within the Ministerial Code, to help restore trust in politics.

The data published by the Home Office today shows that Mr Starmer was referring specifically to enforced returns between 5 July and 31 August, which were 23% higher than over the same period in 2023.

We wrote more about how immigration returns are categorised earlier this year (though some of the figures mentioned in that article may now be out of date).

In a comment published in the Daily Telegraph today a Home Office spokesperson said: “We have already begun delivering a major surge in immigration enforcement and returns activity to remove people with no right to be in the UK, with 3,000 people already being returned since the new government came into power.”

An anonymous Home Office source is also quoted in the online version of the article as saying: “Under our plans, over 20 per cent more people who have no right to be here are being removed from the country.”

We’ve contacted the Home Office to ask for the source of these figures, but they would appear to be based on as yet unpublished immigration returns data for the third quarter of 2024. The latest published data covers the period up to June 2024, before the current government came into office. 

This comes after we wrote to the Home Office last month about Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s use of unpublished immigration statistics in his Labour party conference speech. We’ve still not had a response to that letter.

As we said then, Office for Statistics Regulation guidance states: “Where unpublished data are referred to unexpectedly, the information should be published as soon as possible after any statement has been made – ideally on the same day.” 

This is important because, without this, neither we nor the public can verify the claims being made about the government’s record.

It’s been more than a week since the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, claimed in his conference speech that there’s been a “23% increase” in immigration returns compared with last summer, and as of today, 4 October, the government has still not published the data behind his claim.

As we explained at the time, Office for Statistics Regulation guidance states: “Where unpublished data are referred to unexpectedly, the information should be published as soon as possible after any statement has been made – ideally on the same day.” Without this, neither we nor the public can verify Mr Starmer’s statement.

We’ve written to the Home Office to ask that they publish this data without any further delay.

The Democratic and Republican vice presidential candidates Tim Walz and JD Vance went head-to-head last night in their only planned televised debate of the 2024 US election.

Mr Vance, who is a senator for Ohio and Mr Trump’s running mate, and Mr Walz, who is the current governor of Minnesota and standing alongside Kamala Harris, clashed on a range of issues including the economy, abortion, immigration and healthcare. 

We have not fact checked the debate directly—our politics team’s focus today is fact checking the speeches of the leadership hopefuls at the Conservative conference in Birmingham. 

But Full Fact’s AI tools have been supporting two International Fact-Checking Network-verified fact checking organisations in the US to analyse key claims made during the debate in even more detail.

They and a number of our other fact checking colleagues in America have ruled on what both candidates got right and wrong during the debate, which was hosted by the TV network CBS in New York.

Claims that came under scrutiny include Mr Walz talking about a a “registry of pregnancies” (see Politifact, FactCheck.org), a claim by Mr Vance about Iran receiving “unfrozen assets” (CBS, CNN) and a claim from Mr Vance about the number of “illegal aliens” who are in the US (CNN, BBC Verify).

Mr Walz also said during the debate that he “misspoke” when he previously said he’d been in Hong Kong in the spring of 1989 when protests turned into a massacre in China’s Tiananmen Square.

For more on the US election, see how we covered last month’s debate between the presidential candidates and a summary of some of the online misinformation we’ve seen.

Both images courtesy of Gage Skidmore

During a Q&A at his party’s conference earlier today, Conservative leadership candidate James Cleverly MP highlighted a specific statistic from the seven months he was “personally” responsible for dealing with migration as home secretary.

He said: “In that seven months I reduced net migration by… 300,000 people per year.”  

Earlier this year we fact checked a similar claim from Robert Jenrick MP—a former immigration minister, and now one of Mr Cleverly’s rivals for the Conservative leadership.

The 300,000 figure appears to refer to the previous government’s estimate of the expected impact of a series of immigration measures which were announced in December 2023 and came into effect at different points in early 2024. It estimated that had these measures been in place, together with restrictions on international students bringing dependants (announced prior to Mr Cleverly becoming home secretary), around 300,000 people who came to the UK in the year to September 2023 would not have been able to come.

But figures for net migration since these measures were introduced are yet to be published, so we don’t yet know the extent of their actual impact. The most recent data from the Office for National Statistics only goes up to December 2023.

While we can’t say exactly how net migration has changed since these measures were introduced, Home Office statistics do show that visa applications for many of the visa categories impacted by the changes decreased in the year to June 2024 compared with the previous year.

We’ve contacted Mr Cleverly for comment and will update this article if we receive a response.

A controversial claim from Conservative leadership candidate and former Cabinet minister Robert Jenrick MP about the UK’s special forces and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has been a key talking point at the Conservative party conference today.

In a campaign video released yesterday, Mr Jenrick said that “our special forces are killing rather than capturing terrorists because our lawyers tell us that if they’re caught the European Court will set them free”. 

It’s difficult for us to fact check many claims about national security because information is often classified, and Mr Jenrick hasn’t referenced any specific examples. We’ve asked Mr Jenrick for more information and will update this post if we receive a response. 

But asked about his claim on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning, Mr Jenrick pointed to an interview with former defence secretary Ben Wallace that was published in the Telegraph last year.

Mr Jenrick told the BBC: “The point I was making was one that our former defence secretary Ben Wallace has made, which is that our human rights apparatus including the ECHR is encroaching on the battlefield.” 

Mr Jenrick continued: “Of course I’m not going to elaborate on particular cases because these things … these cases are not things that any minister or former minister can speak about.”

In his 2023 Telegraph interview, Mr Wallace said: “When we have a threat to the UK, this lunacy of being unable to render people across borders or arrest people in countries whose police forces are unacceptable, means that we are more often than not forced into taking lethal action than actually raiding and detaining.”

He added: “Getting permission from the host government is one thing. Getting an ECHR detention pathway is another thing. Somalia may say you can blow up al-Shabab because they’re our enemy as well, but if we go in and they surrender, we get told their detention pathway isn’t compliant. It’s a ridiculous catch-22 position, which doesn’t reflect the threat.

“There are a number of individuals who pose an imminent threat to the UK, who I would prefer to have captured, rather than deal with by a strike.”

Other Conservative leadership candidates including Tom Tugendhat MP and James Cleverly MP have criticised Mr Jenrick’s comments today and said he should justify the claims.

The deputy director general of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) defence think tank, Malcolm Chalmers, told Times Radio: “It’s a very dangerous comment to make, unless he has concrete evidence that this is taking place … That’s the sort of allegation which, if not proven, could put our forces at risk.”

On Sunday former Prime Minister and outgoing Conservative party leader Rishi Sunak MP gave a short speech at the Conservative party conference in Birmingham. It featured a number of claims we’ve previously fact checked which would benefit from some additional context.

Mr Sunak claimed that his government left Labour “the fastest growing economy in the G7”. Similar claims from various Conservative politicians which we’ve written about previously appear to be based on the UK’s growth across the first half of 2024, which the Resolution Foundation has previously said was the highest in the G7. 

However the figures over a longer time period show a different picture. For example, in 2023, the UK saw the second lowest annual growth in the G7, ahead of Germany, and has also seen the second slowest growth since before the pandemic, also ahead of Germany.

(It’s also worth noting that earlier today, after Mr Sunak’s speech, the UK’s second quarter growth was revised down from 0.6% to 0.5%.)

Mr Sunak also claimed that the Conservatives in the last year delivered “a £900 tax cut for those in work”.

As we’ve explained a number of times, it’s true an average full-time worker (earning around £35,000) will save around £900 this financial year as a result of a combined four percentage point reduction in National Insurance contributions (NICs) implemented by the Conservative government. But not all workers will save that much, and once the impact of other tax changes is factored in, including ongoing freezes to the personal allowance and NICs threshold, the average worker’s overall tax savings are set to be lower.

Elsewhere in his speech the Leader of the Opposition claimed that “our children are now the best readers in the western world”. 

As we wrote during the election, this claim appears to be based on the results of the latest Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, which relates to primary school pupils in England. 

However it’s worth noting that according to a different measure, Programme for International Student (PISA) test results, 15-year-old pupils in Ireland, Canada and the US had a higher average reading score than those in England in 2022. 

Finally, the former PM claimed his party had “halved crime”. This is another familiar claim. It’s based on specific data from the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) which doesn't count fraud or computer misuse offences, so doesn't represent all crime.  

We’ll be monitoring other key speeches, including those of the four leadership candidates, throughout the Conservative party conference this week.