Will BBC Verify call Labour out for their lies? Don’t hold your breath
In a blizzard of claim and counterclaim, thank goodness for brilliantly qualified, lavishly funded truth seekers. As voters try to make sense of a momentous Budget, where better to turn than BBC Verify, which employs some 60 specialist journalists to separate fact from fiction?
No privately funded UK media organisation can compete with these extraordinary resources, directed all day, every day, at establishing the facts about an impressive range of questions and controversies.
Want to know whether Hurricane Milton was “engineered”? BBC Verify is your go-to. It has examined the “basic ingredients of a hurricane” and spoken to a dizzying array of meteorologists and other experts to disprove a social media conspiracy about deliberate cloud seeding.
How about a nature reserve in the Philippines, which the BBC tells us has been “lauded by top climate activists and film stars,” but was hit by a “concerted disinformation attack?” A team of forensic journalists at BBC Verify spent ages poring over Facebook accounts to figure out who was behind claims of illegal logging and land grabbing on the site. There’s even something about witch-hunters in Nigeria.
But on today’s historic Budget? At the time of writing, absolutely nada post-Budget.
It is hard to imagine more fertile territory for forensic examination than Rachel Reeves’s historic statement. After all, her plans have sweeping implications for every business and every household – in other words, everyone who pays for the BBC.
Her £40 billion tax heist was announced with all sorts of murky justifications – providing BBC Verify’s experts with plenty to get stuck into. That infamous “£22bn black hole in the public finances” would be an obvious place to start.
Until now, the Treasury was unable to say precisely how she had reached that figure, prompting accusations that the figure was plucked from thin air. Finally, the Chancellor has published what she called a “line by line breakdown.” With its ample resources, BBC Verify should be crawling all of it. Yet the nation awaits.
No matter – at least there’s something on Democratic Vice Presidential Candidate Tim Walz’s military record!
If getting to the bottom of the alleged £22 billion black hole is too big an ask, perhaps they could look into something more general, like whether the Chancellor can justifiably claim to have kept Labour’s election promises, “no ifs or buts”? That should be easy. Run the red rule over the manifesto, and cross-check with the Budget’s announcements. A handful of reporters whizzing through the document and Reeves’s speech should do the trick. Yet so far BBC Verify has nothing to say.
Looking at the operation, what is striking is how heavily dominated it is by overseas controversies. Doubtless some BBC licence payers will be fascinated by an analysis of satellite images of newly laid tarmac on a key road to Gaza. Those with a very keen interest in the US election may also be interested in whether Kamala Harris’s “price gouging plan” will “really help US consumers.”
However, the Corporation appears to have forgotten one very important fact: its work is funded by British taxpayers.
Many would much rather hear what its finest investigative brains have to say about the impact of today’s announcements on British consumers.