A quick update on what I’ve been doing with my life recently. I’m currently doing an internship with the good folks at Full Fact – an independent factchecking organisation who take newspaper headlines, political claims etc and, well, fact check them.
Here are a few of the articles I’ve done over the last few weeks:
- Are claims on the scale of media police investigations correct? – Trevor Kavanagh claimed that Operation Weeting and the related investigations into the media constituted “the biggest single police operation in the history of British policing”. Given the prominence of the Leveson Inquiry and the investigations, this was the most popular article I’ve done.
- Does the majority of the public oppose same-sex marriage? – Checking a claim made by the Coalition for Marriage campaign that most of the public were opposed to same-sex marriage.
- Would a “marriage tax break” benefit the poor more than raising the income tax threshold? – Turns out this depends on your definition of ‘more’, but it’s interesting to see what happens if we get too bogged-down with the term ‘progressive’
- Could the government refuse written consent for Network Rail bonuses? – Maria Eagle claimed that the Transport Secretary Justine Greening was able to block network rail bonuses – a claim the government disputes. Turns out a lot of it depends on legal interpretation.
There are of course, many more factchecks available on the Full Fact site, which (unsurprisingly) I very much recommend.
Nice work! I enjoyed the marriage article. It's funny how the former archbishop's campaign to block (perfectly reasonable to anyone who isn't a bigot) marriages was called “Coalition for Marriage”, when it's clearly anything but.
Is it undemocratic, you might ask, to pass progressive laws, even if the full weight of public opinion isn't behind them? I guess it is, in which case, we'd better get minorities a separate area of the bus to sit in. Nice one 'bish.