Knife crime, army numbers, GDP growth and more: the Sunday politics shows, fact checked
It may be a bank holiday weekend, but politicians from different parties have been busy setting out their stalls on TV today, on the flagship Sunday politics shows.
On Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, asked about figures showing a 7% rise in knife crime in England and Wales in the year to December 2023, Conservative home secretary James Cleverly claimed if London were excluded “that figure would be down”.
But, even when excluding London, the Office for National Statistics figures do still show a (smaller) rise of 2.5%.
We’ve asked the Conservatives about Mr Cleverly’s comments and haven’t yet had a response—we’ll update this post when we get one. But we think it’s possible he was referring to figures for the year to September 2023, rather than the year to December 2023 (which is the period he was asked about).
That’s because Mr Cleverly also said knife crime was up 22% in London, which matches data for the year to September 2023 but not for the year to December 2023, when it rose by 20%. And in the year to September 2023, knife crime rose by 5% across England and Wales, but did fall by 0.5% excluding London.
Elsewhere in the interview Mr Cleverly claimed: “We took the decisions to come out of lockdown, which meant that our economy is growing faster than most of our international comparators.”
As we explained when we fact checked a similar claim last week, the latest quarterly figures do show the UK’s GDP growth was higher than most other G7 countries, but other measures paint a different picture. In particular, given Mr Cleverly appeared to link the UK’s growth to coming out of lockdown, it’s worth noting the UK economy has actually grown more slowly since immediately before the pandemic than most other G7 countries.
Also on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Labour shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves said “the tax burden is at a 70-year high”.
As we explained when Ms Reeves made a similar claim earlier this month, that was the case in 2022/23. The so-called ‘tax burden’—which refers to tax revenues as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP)—has since fallen slightly, but is forecast to rise over the next five years to a near-record level.
Meanwhile on Sky News, while discussing the Conservatives’ headline-grabbing plans for all 18-year olds to do a year of national service, the honorary president of Reform UK Nigel Farage claimed “the army has shrunk from 100,000 to 75,000 in 14 years”.
This actually slightly understates the fall in the size of the UK Army Regular Forces since 2010. The number of UK Army Regular Forces personnel (trained and untrained) fell from about 109,000 in 2010 to about 75,000 in 2023, though there are many different ways of counting serving personnel.