This week it is the Conservative party's turn to hold their conference in Birmingham. This is their first conference since the General Election saw Labour returned to office.
The conference is set against the backdrop of a leadership election to replace Rishi Sunak who has resigned as leader of the party. There are four candidates currently in the running for leader: Robert Jenrick, Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat.
Polling by Full Fact and Savanta found that 59% of people who voted Conservative in 2019 don’t trust politicians to keep their promises, 10 points higher than the general public (49%).
We’ve already looked at two claims this week by Robert Jenrick and James Cleverly which you can read more about below.
The final two candidates will be decided by a ballot of Conservative MPs before facing a vote by party members. The winner will be announced on 2 November.
In a campaign video, Mr Jenrick said “our special forces are killing rather than capturing terrorists because our lawyers tell us that if they’re caught the European Court will set them free”.
It’s difficult for us to fact check many claims about national security because information is often classified, and Mr Jenrick hasn’t referenced any specific examples, but we’ve looked at this in more detail on our Politics blog.
The Democratic and Republican vice presidential candidates Tim Walz and JD Vance went head-to-head on 1 October in their only planned televised debate of the 2024 US election.
Mr Vance, who is a senator for Ohio and Donald Trump’s running mate, and Mr Walz, who is the current governor of Minnesota and standing alongside Kamala Harris, clashed on a range of issues including the economy, abortion, immigration and healthcare.
During a Q&A at his party’s conference, Conservative leadership candidate James Cleverly MP said: “In that seven months I reduced net migration by… 300,000 people per year.”
This appears to be based on an analysis done by the previous Conservative government looking at the impact of a series of measures to reduce immigration implemented in 2024 (one of which was announced before Mr Cleverly became Home Secretary).
It estimated that had these measures been in place, around 300,000 people who came to the UK in the year to September 2023 would not have been able to come. But we don’t have figures yet on exactly how measures introduced while Mr Cleverly was home secretary have actually impacted net migration.
