Fact check: Badenoch Budget claim, Spanish floods and altered King Charles video
Round up of fact checks from the last week compiled by Full Fact.
This roundup of claims has been compiled by Full Fact, the UK’s largest fact checking charity working to find, expose and counter the harms of bad information.
Badenoch’s Budget claim at PMQs
At Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, the new Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch criticised the government’s commitment to defence spending, claiming that Labour’s Autumn Budget “did not even mention defence”.
This is not correct. The Budget document mentioned “defence” on multiple occasions and has a section titled “Defence and intelligence” which runs to more than 250 words.
The chancellor Rachel Reeves also mentioned defence spending in her Budget speech last month.
Ms Reeves said she would “set a path to spending 2.5% of GDP on defence at a future fiscal event”—as Ms Badenoch pointed out at PMQs, Labour has yet to give a timescale for that commitment. And Ms Reeves’ Budget speech also referred to a £2.9 billion increase in the Ministry of Defence budget next year, which she said was to ensure the UK “comfortably exceeds our NATO commitments”.
MPs should correct false or misleading claims made in Parliament as soon as possible. We’ve contacted Ms Badenoch for comment.
Following PMQs, the Leader of the House of Commons Lucy Powell MP raised a point of order and invited Ms Badenoch to correct the record. She was informed by the Speaker of the House that, in raising the issue, she had effectively done so for the Leader of the Opposition.
Spanish floods
Posts on social media have falsely implied that a research project studying the upper layers of the Earth’s atmosphere caused the recent flooding in Spain.
Claims shared on X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook linked the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) in Gakona, Alaska with the floods, which have killed more than 200 people.
Several posts sharing footage of the floods used similar captions, saying: “Spain cancelled a weapons deal with Israel. HAARP weather weapon unleashed days after. Just a coincidence right?”
While it is true that Spain’s Interior Ministry recently said it was cancelling a contract to buy ammunition from an Israeli firm, this is unrelated to the recent floods and has nothing to do with HAARP.
Conspiracy theories about HAARP, which often accuse governments of using it to secretly alter the weather or cause natural disasters, have been circulating for more than a decade. But HAARP cannot control the weather.
HAARP is a high-frequency transmitter, which is used to study higher layers of the Earth’s atmosphere, the ionosphere and the thermosphere, starting at an altitude of around 60 km.
It is designed to transmit radio waves into the ionosphere to cause electrons to move in waves, to study how the ionosphere reacts to changing conditions.
The HAARP facility’s website explains that radio waves in the frequency ranges that HAARP transmits “are not absorbed in either the troposphere or the stratosphere”, which are the two levels of the atmosphere that produce Earth’s weather. “Since there is no interaction, there is no way to control the weather”, it says.
Dr Ciaran Beggan at the British Geological Survey also told Full Fact: “HAARP is just a radio transmitter in the same way as those for a radio or TV station or air traffic control or mobile phones. It cannot create rain as it transmits radio waves—in the same way that light does not create rain.”
Altered King Charles video
A video showing King Charles III unveiling a poster which labels Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “terrorist” is not genuine and uses edited footage.
The video, which has been circulating widely on social media, was shared several times on Facebook and YouTube with the caption: “*Europe declared Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu an international terrorist. A big poster of this was unveiled yesterday.”
Using reverse image search Full Fact found the original footage actually showed the King revealing his first official portrait since his coronation. It is unrelated to Mr Netanyahu or events in the Middle East.
The image of the poster with Mr Netanyahu’s picture has been edited on top of the King’s portrait, and it can be seen shifting slightly as the camera moves.
