Assessing the manifestos against our calls for change

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.