It’s 4 July! How we’ll be fact checking the general election

It’s official—after months of speculation, we now know that the general election will be on 4 July.

The Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has just announced the date in a short, and rain-soaked, Downing Street speech—you can watch what he had to say here. Labour has released a video with a message from party leader Sir Keir Starmer, while other politicians including SNP leader John Swinney and Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey have also reacted to the news. 

General elections are a big deal at Full Fact, as this round-up of what we did last time around shows. And we’ve been gearing up to fact check the 2024 general election for some time—not least with the launch of this politics blog last autumn. We’ll be updating it much more regularly in the coming days and using it as a hub for much of our election content.

In recent weeks we’ve also published a number of pre-election explainers, covering topics such as the asylum backlog, NHS waiting lists and the size of the armed forces in-depth. We’ll be doing much more of this in the coming weeks.

As the campaign unfolds, we’ll be significantly increasing our politics coverage and fact checking key moments as they occur. We’ll be scrutinising party manifestos as they are published, and if there are TV debates between the party leaders, we’ll be ‘live fact checking’, with a team of fact checkers looking at claims in real time. And we’ll be keeping a close eye on claims made online, including political ads. 

We’d like your help to do this too. If you can afford to, then donating to our General Election Crowdfunder will help us fact check the election at a scale never seen before. And if you’ve spotted a claim you’d like us to look at, please do let us know. 

The next few weeks are going to be busy…