FACT CHECK Party or no party? Here’s what the rules said at the time
The Prime Minister this week admitted to having attended a drinks party in the garden of Number 10 Downing Street in May of 2020 (although said he believed it was a “work event”), when the country was in lockdown. So what did the rules in England say at the time?
The law said “no person may participate in a gathering in a public place of more than two people” - unless it was for one of a number of stated reasons. These included when the gathering was “essential for work purposes” or “all the persons in the gathering are members of the same household”.
However, the Downing Street garden is not a public space. For most of those allegedly attending, it may have been part of their workplace.
The workplace guidelines that applied in May 2020 do not say whether social gatherings between colleagues in the workplace were permitted, although they do advise that different teams should usually avoid mixing “as far as possible”.
The guidelines also say that meetings should usually be limited to “only absolutely necessary participants”. It also advised that these should be held outdoors or in well ventilated areas when possible. A separate document also said “workers should try to minimise all meetings and other gatherings in the workplace".
The government’s outdoor guidance on 20 May 2020 also said: “Businesses should also take reasonable steps to avoid people being gathered together.”
❌ Boris Johnson: “It is an astonishing fact that we have 420,000 more people in work now than before the pandemic began.”
This is not true. There are more payrolled employees, but the total number of people in paid work, including the self-employed, is below the level seen just prior to the pandemic. When you include all workers, the figure is about half a million lower.
🤔 Boris Johnson: “We have…the fastest growing economy in the G7.”
That’s true if you look at change over the most recent 12 months of data. If you look at growth over the last quarter of data (comparing the second and third quarters of 2021), the UK places fifth.
YouTube is allowing its platform to be weaponised by unscrupulous actors to manipulate and exploit others. The current measures are insufficient. That’s why we've signed a joint letter urging them to take effective action against bad information.
Internet companies have up until now been allowed to mark their own homework, choosing exactly how much information to share about the measures they have taken to protect users from bad information online, and the effectiveness of these measures - all of which has had to be taken on trust.
We’ve proposed four solutions to reduce the dissemination of disinformation and misinformation on YouTube.
The Guido Fawkes blog published an article claiming that the Scottish National Party used data on Covid prevalence that was “just not true”.
In fact, both sides correctly cited their chosen figures. The SNP used data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), while Guido used data from the government’s Covid dashboard.
The dashboard case figures are not a measure of “prevalence” (the share of people who have Covid at a given time). They are a measure of incidence (the number of new cases occurring at a given time). Whereas the ONS survey covers a representative sample of people in private households.
So it’s not right to say the SNP are wrong because the dashboard offers different evidence to the ONS survey. Guido Fawkes has amended its article and deleted its tweet about this - for which we are grateful.
