FACT CHECK Express overstates Brexit trade deal value, again
The Express has repeated a misleading claim about Britain’s trade deals, despite having already amended a previous article which made the same claim, after being approached by Full Fact.
The Express wrote: “Since Brexit, Britain has been able to strike new free trade deals with 70 countries worth over £760billion, according to the Government.”
As we previously reported, this figure refers to the total value of the trade in 2020 between the UK and countries with which it has a trade deal—not the additional value of the deals themselves, which will be much less.
Many of these essentially rolled over existing trade deals the UK had as a member of the EU.
The article also makes several other misleading claims about trade.
✔️ Boris Johnson: “We have more employees on the payroll than before the pandemic began.”
After three months of getting this wrong, the PM has finally cited this statistic correctly. There are more payrolled employees, but there aren’t more paid workers in total, as he has previously claimed. When you include the self-employed, there are about 600,000 fewer people in work than there were just before the pandemic.
🤔 Boris Johnson: “We have…the fastest growing economy in the G7.”
He’s said this two weeks in a row now. It depends on the period of time you’re looking at. It’s true if you look at change over the most recent 12 months of data. But the UK is fifth if you look at change over the last quarter. Over the course of the pandemic, the UK has the second worst growth in the G7.
🤔 Boris Johnson: “This country is now capable of producing 80% of our own PPE.”
This is based on a snapshot figure from almost a year ago and doesn’t include gloves, which make up around 45% of the UK’s PPE demand. The DHSC told us more up-to-date figures were not available.
We’re seeing more viral circulation of the myth that if you can’t speak on the phone, you can dial 55 during a 999 call to automatically dispatch the police to where you are. This isn’t accurate.
If you call 999 you’re initially put through to a BT operator—they will direct your call to the relevant emergency service.
Dialling 55 is likely to alert the operator that the caller needs to be put through to the police, as would doing something like tapping the handset to make a noise.
Dialling 55 doesn’t guarantee that the police will be dispatched to you. It only means you will be connected to a police call handler, who from there, will decide what action to take. Police call handlers are trained to get details from callers who cannot speak, and use methods like asking only yes or no questions.
Lord Sumption, a former Justice of the Supreme Court, wrote in the Telegraph on 8 January that the actions of the “Colston Four”, who pulled down a statue of 17th century slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol in June 2021, legally amounted to criminal damage.
What’s missing is that these actions only count as criminal damage if they were done “without lawful excuse”. The defendants argued that they did have a lawful excuse for what they did. That’s not mentioned anywhere else in the article, even though it strongly criticises the jury.
The jury in the case found the defendants not guilty and we cannot know why. Jurors are not allowed to discuss what happened in the jury room. But we do know exactly what questions they were told they had to answer.
