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25 October 2019 | Facts and news from Full Fact

FACT CHECK

The Brexit deal hasn't "passed Parliament"

Following Tuesday night’s parliamentary vote, the Conservative Party claimed repeatedly on both Facebook and Twitter that “Boris’s Brexit deal has passed Parliament”.

It hasn’t.

The House of Commons passed the Withdrawal Agreement Bill’s “second reading”. But this is just one early stage in the process of passing a Bill. It will then move onto “committee stage”, where MPs have the chance to examine the Bill in detail and add amendments to it.

It’s not helpful for the governing party to misrepresent the way legislation is passed in the UK, which is already a complex process that can be hard to follow, and risks unnecessary confusion among citizens.
This is wrong and unhelpful

 

UPDATE: Our fact check has since been featured on the front page of the Evening Standard.

 
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IMPACT

Layla Moran corrects claim about impact of Boris Johnson’s deal on the economy

Last week Liberal Democrat MPs including Layla Moran said that Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal would be as bad for the economy as the financial crash. This was based on a claim that it would lead to a 6.7% drop in GDP (that’s the total value of goods and services) and a 6.4% drop in real wages.

This is misleading. Government analysis said that the economy would still grow under the new deal—but that GDP would be up to 6.7% lower and real wages up to 6.4% lower after 15 years—than it would be if we remained in the EU. 

We pushed for a correction from the MPs who made this claim, and Ms Moran replied to us in this video:



We thank Ms Moran for her prompt and detailed response. It's important that public figures aim to get their facts right, and correct any mistakes they make.

We hope her colleagues Jo Swinson and Chuka Umunna will follow her example.  
Here's the original fact check

FACT CHECK

People’s Vote march attendance in the hundreds of thousands, not millions

Viral tweets have claimed that there were 2 to 2.2 million people on Saturday's People's Vote march, citing Sky News and German TV as sources.

There is no evidence of either Sky News or German TV reporting these figures. Experts in crowd science told us that the crowd was most likely in the low hundreds of thousands.

We fact checked similar claims after a People’s Vote march earlier this year.
 
Here's the headcount

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