Reform Political Advertising, the not for profit co-founded by Entropy’s Founder Alex Tait, has released its review of misleading ads in the local, mayoral, Scottish and Welsh parliamentary elections “There are lies, damned lies and statistics”.
Predictably they found widespread abuse across most of the main parties due to the lack of regulation for electoral advertising content. They highlighted some of the most notable examples of misleading ads in the review.
The UK public are as fed up as Reform Political Advertising are about this. Consistently in their YouGov research in 2018, 2019 and 2020 9/10 of the public have agreed that it is important “that political parties’ adverts do not make false or misleading claims.”
Download a copy of the report from the RPA website.
The video below gives a good overview of the issue.
About Reform Political Advertising.
Reform Political Advertising is a not for profit, politically neutral organisation campaigning for the modernisation of the rules for political advertising. A key aim for the campaign is the introduction of content regulation to prevent misleading claims.
They believe that the open and honest debate of issues facing the UK is fundamental to the functioning of democracy. However, our politics is suffering because of a refusal to reform political advertising.
In the absence of the content regulation they are advocating for the May 6th elections they launched a pledge for factual accuracy in electoral advertising that 6 London Mayor candidates and several national parties signed up to including The Liberal Democrats and The Green Party.
