Dawn Butler MP accused Boris Johnson of lying yesterday, and was asked to leave the House of Commons.

We do not know if the PM was ‘lying’. But the majority of Mr Johnson’s claims that Ms Butler mentioned were either false or misleading.

Thread 👇

fullfact.org/news/dawn-butl…
Claim 1️⃣

Ms Butler is correct to say this claim is false.

The 73% figure describes growth since 1990, not since 2010. This means it covers a much longer period that also includes 13 years of Labour government.
Claim 2️⃣

Mr Johnson’s government has reintroduced a system in which all student nurses receive a non-repayable grant from the government, but it does not pay their tuition fees on their behalf, which was the system when the old bursary applied.
Claim 3️⃣

Many countries had launched apps that were operational when the PM was speaking.

However, at the time it was not yet clear whether any of their technological approaches were effective, or whether they’d been downloaded widely enough to reduce the spread of Covid.
Claim 4️⃣

This is a misleading way to measure it.

If you account for inflation, which is the fairest way to compare sums of money across time, then the ‘real terms’ value of the spending increase was £20.5 billion - which is not a record.
Claim 5️⃣

Vaccination is highly effective against the worst effects of Covid-19, but it is not perfectly effective.

It’s not right to say that the link has been completely “severed” between infection and serious disease or death, although it has certainly been severely weakened.
There are rules about "unparliamentary language".

And there is also the Ministerial Code.

Any Minister that has not given accurate or truthful information to Parliament is obliged to correct this at the earliest opportunity.

We look forward to hearing from the PM on 6 Sep.

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3 Dec 20
Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson claimed that, last week, Sir Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty presented cherry-picked figures from hospitals on course to run out of beds, despite falling or stable numbers of Covid patients in hospital.

The problem? They didn’t.

[Thread]👇
At the daily briefing on 26 November Sir Patrick and Professor Whitty made no mention of bed capacity at individual hospital trusts.

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1 Oct 19
On @bbcr4today this morning, Boris Johnson claimed that a Brexit extension would cost £1bn a month. This is not true.

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13 Sep 19
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fullfact.org/news/conservat…
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The ads make it appear that the BBC endorsed the £14bn figure, when in fact they criticised it. The BBC told us that the headline on the article has never changed and so has never referred to the £14 bn.
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12 Sep 19
A viral piece about the link between hedge funds, the Vote Leave campaign and Boris Johnson's leadership bid claims there was a large spike in "shorting" in the lead up to Boris Johnson becoming Conservative leader.

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fullfact.org/economy/short-…

[1/5]
We think Byline Times looked only at the number of active short positions, not all of them.

Shorting is where a fund borrows shares, sells them and hopes the share price falls so they can buy them back at a lower price, return them to the lender, and make a profit.

[2/5]
Because short positions are typically only active for a short period of time, you'd expect the positions active at any given time to be clustered in the recent past.

[3/5]
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25 Jun 19
You may have seen that £2.4 million from the Sovereign Grant was used to pay for renovations of Frogmore Cottage, the home of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.

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fullfact.org/economy/royal-…

[1/7]
The Queen receives three forms of income.

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[2/7]
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18 Feb 19
An election called tomorrow would be wide open to abuse—so we welcome the DCMS committee's calls for an overhaul of election and political advertising rules to make them fit for the digital age.

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The government should commit today to making these changes before the next election and start putting a timetable in place. [2/5]
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