It’s official: Sunak’s £2,000 claim is a lie

Treasury and statistics officials fact-checked the prime minister’s claim *before* he repeated it in ITV interview filmed on D-Day:

*The government’s statistics regulator, the Office for Statistics Regulation, has concluded its investigation into Rishi Sunak’s claim that “independent Treasury officials” provided costings showing that Labour’s spending plans would require a tax hike of more than £2,000 per household.*

*Hunt and Sunak have repeatedly presented the £2,000 figure as a tax hike, which most people would therefore understand to be an annual rise, but it is actually spread over four years.*

*The OSR took issue with this: a person who had not read more detailed documents relating to the claim “would have no way of knowing that this is an estimate summed together over four years”, it concluded, adding: “We warned against this practice a few days ago.”*

*The Conservatives began claiming that Labour’s spending plans imply a tax hike of £2,094 per household on 15 May, when Jeremy Hunt published a document entitled “Labour’s tax rises”.*

*The document repeatedly presents its claims as official statistics: “Almost every costing contained here has been conducted by HM Treasury,” it claims. It also declares that if Labour is elected, “these are the numbers officials will present them with”.*

 

*Robert Chote, chair of the UK Statistics Authority, wrote to all party leaders on Tuesday morning to remind them to use statistics appropriately. “In the case of the governing party,” he wrote, “it is also important that any public statements made during the pre-election period refer only to official statistics.”*

*In that evening’s debate, Sunak repeated his £2,000 claim 12 times, falsely presenting it to 4.8 million viewers as an official statistic.*

*But these claims were untrue. James Bowler, permanent secretary to the Treasury, wrote to shadow treasury minister Darren Jones on Monday confirming that Hunt’s document was not an official opposition costing, because it “includes costs beyond those provided by the civil service” and that the £2,000 claim “should not be presented as having been produced by the Civil Service”.*

*Some parts of the document can be said to be based on opposition costings, but the civil servants who wrote the costings documents qualified that their findings were “uncertain” and “driven by assumptions provided by special advisers” – who are appointed by the Conservative Party and cannot be considered impartial.*

same bloke who couldn’t be arsed to spend one day in Normandy. if he had one family member that was part of the war he would have acted differently

Like the 150 million per week for the nhs we are meant to believe happened, the damage is already done…Mordaunt repeating it yesterday and insisting it’s true despite repeatedly being called out for it.

It’s a strange era where the truth doesn’t matter over a slogan