Earlier this year Conservative MPs started saying that welfare payments had just overtaken income tax receipts “for the first time ever”.
There’s no dispute that they got this wrong—in print, in the House of Commons, on social media, on the radio. The statistics regulator wrote to Kemi Badenoch about it in June, prompting a party spokesman to acknowledge the mistake and tell PA News the error would be corrected.
But… that hasn’t happened yet. We can see no corrections in the parliamentary record, or in the Conservatives’ Alternative King’s Speech (although one Conservative MP did find time to correct his blog).
So how long does it take the Conservatives to keep this promise to correct the record (so far)?
That’s long enough, surely. The Conservatives know that their claim is wrong, but they’ve not fixed it. Any party that wants voters’ trust should show that they deserve it by correcting the record when they make a mistake.
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