If you believe Britain’s commentariat, Labour’s new series of political ads, which make a variety of claims about Rishi Sunak, have polluted the nation’s politics. A consensus has emerged among them that they mark a ‘new low‘ in political debate, are undoubtedly ‘immoral‘ and could possibly encourage Q-Anon-like conspiracy theories. Even Labour front benchers Yvette Cooper and Lucy Powell seemed to want to distance themselves from the ads.
It is certainly true that the first of these ads was especially contentious. Asking if the reader thought adults convicted of assaulting children should go to prison, it claimed, juxtaposed next to a smiling Sunak, that the Prime Minister did not. The claim was based on a Ministry of Justice figure that showed that, since 2010, 4,500 such adults had not seen the inside of a jail. Sunak’s personal culpability for that number is problematic, especially as he wasn’t even an MP before 2015 and has never been responsible as a minister for the criminal justice system.
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