For all Rishi Sunak’s claims to be a trustworthy prime minister, he is, in fact, in the mould of Boris Johnson. He has made misleading claims from the start of his premiership, and continues to do so. Take his first prime minister’s questions on 26 October last year. To murmurs of approval from Conservative MPs, he told Labour’s Richard Burgon: “We will always support our hardworking nurses.”
To drive home his support, Sunak added: “That is why, when I was chancellor, we reintroduced the nurses’ bursary.” This was a misleading claim, as the new prime minister would have been well aware. It is true that, as chancellor, Sunak offered a new educational grant of 5,000 a year (increasing to 8,000 in some cases) for all nursing students on courses from September 2020. However, this fell significantly short of the bursary system, which had earlier been scrapped by the Conservative government.
It then got worse. In the same PMQs, Sunak told MPs that there had been “a record number of new homes built in the last year”. This claim was false. As a report by the due diligence website Full Fact later concluded: “The most recent published data shows 173,520 new homes were completed in England in the year to June 2022, slightly down on the previous year.”
This false claim quickly became an important test for Sunak. His predecessor, Boris Johnson, made scores of such boasts, leaving them on the Hansard record even after they’d been exposed as false. Had Sunak corrected his relatively...
Park Filed Complaint Against President Lee Ahead of 2021 Election Jang Youngha Sentenced to One Year in Prison, Two Years Probation Confirmed The police have launched an investigation into Park Chu...